In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The song we chose to do (McFly) is quite hard to attribute a genre too, but could be put under Avant-Garde Metal, although the band themselves (Pinkly Smooth) are a Heavy Metal band.
Avant-Garde Metal is a subgenre of metal which is highly experimental which uses unconventional and unusual sounds, instruments and vocal techniques.
As such, when we created our music video we wanted it to have an unusual feel as well as being experimental and trying a project, that could potentially go very wrong. Luckily, it didn't.
We set our music video to the lyrics of the song, taking inspiration from the words "Father" and "Wolf" which gave us the idea of Little Red Riding Hood.
Although we knew a childrens story wouldn't completely match the tone of the music and unusual vocal style, so we had to make our project seem a bit darker than a usual fairytale and get a performer who could live up to the rough vocal style.
We used certain conventions with the lighting, e.g. we kept everything dark and moody to add to the atmosphere we wanted to create, and we used a performance alongside a narrative, which is often seen in Rock and Metal videos.
How effective is the combination of the product and the ancillary texts (Magazine Advert and Digipak)?
The Digipak and Magazine Advert uses is quite experimental due to it's colouring and styling which also conforms to the type of music video we created. The combination of the three items is interesting as they vary quite a lot in style. Our music video is very dark and moody whereas our Digipak and Magazine Advert are very colourful and almost Victorian in style, because of the font and background style. We chose this because it was quirky and Avant-Garde itself.
What have you learnt from the audience feedback?
From the audience feedback we have learnt that though we created a good and very interesting music video, the plot of the story was lost on some of the audience.
This is quite disappointing, as we tried to create markers and hold the story together through the use of titles at the beginning of the piece introducing the characters and photographs later on when the line "I'm still your father, child" is introduced to reinforce the relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and the Woodcutter.
Although we did learn from the audience who watched our music video that they thought the story of Red Riding Hood was a good contextual choice and that it did indeed conform to the genre of music. They also believed our piece was very professionally done, as well as performed convincingly and edited well.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
Blogger, search engines, photoshop, final cut express, HD camera.
