Evaluation Question 1 Final

January 25, 2018

Evaluation Question 1: In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products.

By following the conventions and codes of indie and indie pop videos, Ceri and I have worked to create a video that fits into the indie pop genre. Throughout this process we have mostly chosen to follow the conventions of the genre, rather than challenge, as we feel this helps to make our music video more professional and genuine.

Evaluation Question 1 Inspiration from Steph2000

As we planned to use a female singer within our music video, yet still wanted to use the song “Take Me To Church” that was originally performed by the Irish male solo artist of Hoizer Ceri and I found a female cover of the song. We chose to use the cover by Sofia Karlburg, who as a developing artist has a small respectable reputation that we found to be a good fit for video. We developed and used media products to create our female solo artist. As we have not seen many music videos where the entire video is completely dancers we did not want to challenge this so we followed conventions by including our artist in our video thus continuing to create a performance video. To do this we mixed having solo shots of the artist (0.12, 0.27, 0.49, 1.29, 1.50, 2.15, 2.43) solo shots of the dancers(0.14. 0.37, 1.02, 1.33, 2.20, 3.15) and shots where both performers appear together (1.14 and 2.27).

Single shot of our artist without dancers, in GIF format.

Single shots of our dancers, without our artist in GIF format.

Shots of both our artist and performers together, conforming to typical conventions. Made in GIF format.

The use of the stained glass window projected onto the back wall works to Andrew Goodwin’s features of music videos. This is amplification as this links some of the lyrics such as “take me to church” (1.02 1.17, 2.08, 2.24, 3.40) “the giggle at a funeral” (0.07), “Every Sunday’s getting more bleak”(0.21), and “my Church offers no absolutes” (0.31) all which connote a church, to a church theme through the use of the stain glass window motif. This can also be an intertextual reference as a stained glass window is a common representation and symbol of a church; intertextual references are is also a Goodwin feature of music videos. As shown in the GIF's below, the shots during these lyrics all feature the stained glass window meeting Goodwin's features.

We have also followed Goodwin’s conventions by representing our artist through direct address towards the camera (0.14, 0.30, 0.52, 1.39, 1.57, 2.07, 2.43, 3.06, 3.51) and therefore our audience. By demonstrating our artist as strongly looking at the camera in many shots most which are close up and sometimes mixed with tracking and panning shots, therefore connecting and building up her relationship with the audience we are following the conventions of Goodwin. We used many close up shots to complete this, rarely using shots any wider than a mid shot. This can also be seen to be meeting the conventions of Laura Mulvey's female gaze theory-that empathis is placed on the looks and beauty of the female.While we have not created our video and used a female solo artist solely for male enjoyment, the long lingering shots on our female performer can be seen as following Mulvey's theory.

Examples of these shots can be seen below through the format of GIFs.