Evaluation Question 1:

Evaluation Question 1:

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

In order to convey how our media product, uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products myself and my partner decided to create a directors commentary. A directors commentary consists of a number of narrative interjections that feature over our final music video, which can be evidenced below:

The Director's Commentary:

Andrew Goodwin's Music Video Theory:
Similarly, Andrew Goodwin's 'Music Video Theory' has been highly influential on our music video, throughout the phases of pre-production, production and post-production and we have chosen to subvert and adhere to a number of his theorems within our final product.

Our final music promo adheres to Andrew Goodwin’s Music Video Theory throughout. Goodwin states that there should be a strong relationship between the lyrics and the matching visuals, something that we have clearly explored through our interpretation of the constant references to light.

When deducing the lyrics in our research stage, we decided to utilise a metaphorical interpretation of lyrics mentioning the concept of ‘light’, making the female protagonist ‘the light of our male protagonist’s life’ as she becomes his ‘new religion’. Therefore, on every mention of light, the viewer is shown a shot of the female surrounding by high-key lighting and wearing a bright yellow t-shirt within her costume, thus connoting upbeat and joyful feelings reminiscent of what is felt by the lead protagonist, which creates a direct amplified link between the lyrics and the visuals, which is drummed into the vision of the viewer.

More literally, on the lyric “waking me up in the morning” the male protagonist is shown in a close-up shot, to be waking up. The high-key natural lighting reflecting through the blinds portrays that it is morning, therefore adhering to Goodwin’s theory of visuals being a literal interpretation of surface level lyric meaning.

Goodwin also believed that it was of paramount importance for an artist to be featured in their own music video through the utilisation of performance aspects, which is another convention we have adhered to. However, in slight subversion to the theorem we decided to employ a 60:40 split between the narrative and performance segments within our music video. We felt this was appropriate after we conducted research on current Real Media Artefacts of the indie genre as despite the prevalence of solely performance based indie music videos available within the genre, indie bands that utilised clever narrative videos, that were comprised of universal themes to their target audience did very well in terms of audience reception. The utilisation of a performance aspect is highly prevalent in the indie genre as it represents the sheer passion the artist has for their music, and similarly, represents the energy and sheer buzz surrounding the band which entices viewers to purchase concert tickets, in order to see them perform live.

However, in sheer juxtaposition, we decided to completely challenge the typical inclusion of a voyeuristic view of the female body within music videos. As a female, I feel the objectification of women evident in music video’s is solely unnecessary and degrading therefore, I wanted to turn this concept of a passive female on its head. This notion of female empowerment is becoming increasingly ingrained into young female adult culture (as well as male culture), and therefore would relate to our target audience. In order to exemplify this, there are no ‘male gaze’ shots and the final shot we see of the girl is from a long-angle shot, evidencing the metaphorical and literal distance between the couple. She waves satirically at him and then disappears from the frame. It is inherently clear that she is not a passive female, and in subversion to perceived gender roles, she has ‘played’ the male protagonist throughout the music video, allowing him to appear like the damsel in distress.