Lauren's Evalution Q1 Script

Evaluation Question 1

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

Script for the Music Video

In this directors cut I will be discussing how our music video and media products develop and challenge the forms and conventions of real life media. We have chosen the song ‘War Paint’ by an unsigned artist called Fletcher. We decided that that the main theme of the song was about a girl’s confidence and that makeup makes a girl more confident.  This idea came about from the lyrics of the song, ‘watch me put my war paint on’. The artist is possibly suggesting the war paint is makeup. The theme of girl power is common convention in the charts at the moment with artists such as Little Mix releasing songs such as ‘Shout out to my ex’, which develops the themes of real music videos in the charts. To reinforce the message of war paint we also linked the lyrics to the visuals by buying aluminous face paint that the artist puts on during the music video.

An editing technique that is often a convention of current music videos is cutting to the beat. I believe we successfully showed this is in and section of the song where the pace of the music rises very quickly and the words, ‘you, you, you, you’ are repeated many times. In this particular section we decided to ask some of our peers if they would like to be used in the music video so that it was not just our artist and there was a wide variation of people. It is popular to use backing dancers or other people in many music videos such as Arianna Grande’s video ‘Side to Side’. It is also one of Goodwin’s rules to cut to the beat therefore it is used in many big star artists music videos.

The genre of our song is pop. This genre is the most common genre in the charts at the moment, for example in the Spotify top 50, Rockabye, a pop song,  has been number 1 for at least 3 weeks. We decided that the song would revolve around the theme of confidence and girl power. Songs about relationships are found to be the most popular narrative therefore we decided there would be an underlying theme of recovering after a breakup. We chose to create our music video theme around concept and performance. This allowed us to be creative with our editing techniques and locations. Our main locations were Waverley Abbey grounds and Fairlands forest as well as the green screen. We decided to use the Abbey castle ground because of the particular lyric, ‘this castle’s been surrounded’ therefore we are linking the lyrics to the visuals. We thought the forest would also be a pretty locations that would allow us to have a variety of shot types, for example crab shots through the leaves as well as establishing and tracking shots. It is a common convention of a pop music video to use a variety of different locations for example in the music video for Starving by Hailee Steinfield.

After researching a variety of pop genre music videos we wanted our artist to look dressed up so that attention was drawn to her. The outfits included a main colour of black in every outfit and other items such as silver trousers, doc martins. We also wanted to keep the artists look consistent therefore she always had the same hairstyle and reasonably similar makeup. This would particularly challenge the common conventions of a music video because an artist such as Lady Gaga who shares the same concept theme would have a variety of around 4 or 5 outfits that all have different colour schemes hair styles and makeup. This may be because big name stars have a very large budget where they are not limited to one style of costume.

For our Mis-en scene we also used the reoccurring theme of one main prop, a venetian mask. This prop was used to support the theme of a girl hiding herself when she isn’t wearing makeup which is a popular thing in today’s modern society therefore we thought it would sympathise with a modern audience of young girls. The song however also supports the message that its ok to wear makeup if it makes you feel confident. Having just one prop challenges the conventions of a common music video because the budget of music videos created by big recording agencies is usually quite large therefore they usually use many extreme and crazy props, for example in Lady Gaga’s bad romance she has lots of coffins that open up and let dancers out.

The mask was a symbolic code for confidence by putting on your makeup, or war paint you suddenly feel so much better in yourself. There are theorists such as Laura Mulvey that have theory’s such as ‘the male gaze’ which suggests that film represents women as passive objects of male desire and John Berger that said women are solely there for objectification of women within all platforms of media. Our song choice and music video go against these two theorists and present women in a confident way. This was also done by inviting our peers to join in with our music video as we had about 15 people put on the aluminous facepaint as we filmed them supporting our main theme of girl power.

As part of our course we also created a CD digi pack. I was put in charge of designing and creating the back cover of the CD that included the song list. I designed it to look fun and appealing for a younger audience therefore I had a silly photo booth style collage in the background which I edited in black and white. When discussing ideas with my group we decided that black and white would be a consistant theme on the front and the back of the digipack as well and the colour pink. To keep the colour scheme consistant I created a pink circle in the middle of the back cover however faded it out slightly so that you could still see the images in the back ground and the text written with the song list. We had a consistant font on the front and the back of the cover as well. I researched some pop album back covers and found that many had their song list in the center such as Ellie Gouldings album , Lights. This suggests that it is a common convention of a CD digipack. However to challenge this convention I decided to not have a distinctive list but space the songs all around the circle, one underneath the other so that it was till clear, and I kept the same font however changed the sizes.