Evaluation question one:In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

ia In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


Our media product, Muse-Feeling Good is classed under the alternative rock genre. This particular genre tends to focus on the artist's image, so therefore in a video it is usually performance based, and on any album artwork (digipaks) images of the artist or a motif/symbol that is attributed to them will be used. This is a convention we decided to keep, as it is very simple to do so. We also felt that the music video looked a lot better, and made more sense if we had a performance aspect to it.
We chose to use a mixture of light and dark colours within the video, which can be seen quite commonly throughout the alternative rock genre, although there seems to be a lot of darker colours used in the rock genre.
We followed one main convention in including a high speed montage of a 'room trashing'. This section of the video only lasts for about 10 seconds, and uses a lot of the same footage in short jump cuts. This is used very commonly. The speed of editing in this point of the video helps to build up the atmosphere, as the song reaches a climax, and our character is shown venting his fury. We feel this is a form of a graphic match, once again following a convention.

We decided that we would break convention here, and used a lot of bright colours throughout the video. We believe that these bright colours corresponded well with the song, as the imagery used in the lyrics give very positive pictures EG "Birds flying high" "Fish in the sea" "New life". Our video features a lot of close up shots, and there are quite a few canted shots as well. We make good use of our environment in our locations, such as using the doors of an elevator for a creative shot. We also included a lot of medium and long shots to add variety to the video.

In a lot of rock videos, lot of creative shots and special effects can be seen, therefore, experimenting with effects could be considered a convention of the genre.As the group and I like to try new shots, and be as creative as we can, we stuck to this convention and tried different visual effects to help enhance our video.
One such effect was reversing some footage, which made it look like my suit jacket was magically flying onto my body. A second effect involved the use of the chroma key feature, where we were able to grey out all colours except for one, such as a green or a blue.

Digipaks in the rock genre are often related to the video or artist is a direct way. We chose a dark background with a neon text effect as our house style, which is meant to be used as a signifier of fun and feeling goo (neon lights are commonly associated and used with clubs and bars).
The dark background relates directly to the plot of the video, as the character is supposedly feeling depressed, and darker colours are associated with these feelings. This could perhaps challenge the convention of digipaks in the rock genre as we do not feature any photos of the artist/band. We felt that photos of the band would not work well with the dark background and neon text aesthetically, and therefore we decided to leave them out.

Our advert uses the same style of a neon text over the dark backdrop. This both challenges and uses advert conventions. It uses the conventions as most combinations of digipak and advert will often use a similar house style, and will feature many elements that are the same (in this case we used the dark background and neon writing to create and maintain a house style throughout both of the products).
However once again we challenged the convention of using photos of the band in the video, as once again we did not think this would work very well aesthetically.

Please see our directors commentary below for in depth analysis of our music video.

Sticking to the storyboards(ish)

At the start of our process, we lovingly created a long series of extremely creative storyboards, that outlined every shot in our video.
he initial plan was to have the main character standing on a roof, before he awakens in a smoky room, gets dressed, and goes on a long walk, on what looks like a happy and good day for him, however it is revealed the place he has been walking to is the rooftop, presumably to jump off.

We stuck to these story very vaguely, even though we always had them with us when filming. It is due to feedback given, change of ideas, and opportunities that ended with us changing most of the video, although we feel that the story worked out anyway.

Directors commentary script

Introduction- Welcome to our Director’s commentary, we are Bradley, Ryan, Connor, Jacob.

In the opening sequence we immediately put the audience in the action by showing a clip of the apparent ending, this creates atmosphere, which is amplified by the mise-en-scene, with dark clouds and the urban setting.

This is immediately contradicted by transitioning with bright colours of the rising sun, followed by naturalistic shots involving the main character.

We continue the naturalistic shots placing the audience with the main character using lens flares and natural lighting to improve the realism as well as establish a setting. The initial lip-synching begins still including the main character and some aspects of a natural environment.

Jacob: The variety of lighting displayed on the shots with the contradictor shots to produce contrast and immerse the audience within the world, the chroma keyer was also relative to our digipacks and relating back to our advertising. The lens flares and ECU’S help to draw in the audience with the conceptual based elements.

Ryan: We first start to see the main character signing letters and conversing with a boss figure, we have done this to give the connotations of being fired from his job and a more natural progression when linking it with performance based shots. We also decided to use a variety of natural and abstract shots with varying location environments such as rivers changing into shots of London, we also included Jump cuts to progress the story quickly and yet keeping the audience immersed within the narrative.

Bradley: Here we decided to include a variety of colour effects on the shots to improve their power over the audience as well as fitting in the performance based shots to the song with the megaphone section being sung in an untraditional manner with shadows and blur effects to give a different style to the shots. However we continue to progress the main characters story still included within performance and making the music video slightly conceptual based, the high angled shots of the main character help to make him seem vulnerable, this combined with the singer being shown in an exciting way to showcase the singer such as a producer would.

Connor Part 2: The idea behind these shots was to increase the tension with the audience by increasing the speed and abstract style of the shots as the music video progresses towards the climax. These shots offer the audience with more entertainment and excitement with the reversed shot creating confusing followed by the 5-millisecond shots of scenery and walking to make them more interesting and creates interest in the storyline.

The colour effects are repeated with the sky made to stand out followed by the close-up with good framing and is different to all the shots produced before to help build up to the climax.

Ryan Part 2: We begin to include time-lapses to give the connotations of the world changing around the main character and giving the connotations of this frustrating him, this is a good early hint towards the following shots of the release of anger with shots lasting less than 1 second to show all of the action in a quick pace with an overlay of the shots to give the blue effect. This sequence of shots was a good genre signifier due the action, which is directed towards the rock genre however the abstract nature of the shots signify the indie genre.

Finishing of the music video returning to the beginning of the music video gives the audience more of a build up of tension and finding out the true reasons behind standing on the rooftop, with the colour transition of the same colour of the sun and faded effects to make the audience interested in the story without being bored.

Behind the scenes 2

Here's the second part of our behind the scene footage! ENJOY

Behind the scenes footage 1

In this video, we have compiled a selection of footage of our group out and about, filming for our video, the video is 5-10 minutes long, and covers roughly 2-3 weeks of filming sessions.

Final Final Digipak

This our FINAL digipak, given a new face after receiving very helpful feedback.
As you can see, we still make use of the neon font, however we have established the neon text on  dark background as our house style!

Digipak analysis

Pane one: The first pane of our digipak is very simple in design. We used a very dark purple for the background, which was used to emphasise the colour of the text. The text itself is similar to the rest of our digipak, with the letters overlaying each other very slightly. There is also a faint lens flare over the letters.

When we designed the first pane of the digipak, we tried to keep the storyline of the video in mind. The dark background is used to suggest that the character is depressed, however it is juxtaposed with the brightness and suggested optimism of the bright font.

This first pane also keeps in with line with the advert, which uses a very similar style, which we believe to be easily recognisable.

Pane two: The second pane does not keep in touch with the style of the neon style font, however we chose to follow a different style. We have placed our lead singer in front of a brick wall, and by creating a work path in photoshop, wrote text following the outline of his head. The text is used to promote the product, as the is simple but very effective.

We believe it is important to put a face to the brand name 'Esum', and this keeps in touch with digipak conventions as more often than not, the artist will appear on their products.

Pane three: We used a photo that we took during the filming process as the backdrop for our CD case. The audience can create parralels between the music video itself and this pane, as this particular shot was used in the video.

Pane four: We decided to use the brick walls as a motif for our digipak. We found a stock photo that was the sharp corner of a brick wall, and then based 2 columns of writing on each side of the corner. Both sides of the brick wall vary in darkness, and we chose to colour the font corresponding to the shade of darkness (dark= white font, and vice versa). We believe this has created an interesting visual effect, and boosts the overall look of the pane.