Evaluation Question 1

By Will Yeates

1) A shot that shows the links between lyrics and/or music and visuals.

As the title of our song was “Keep on walking” we decided that the theme of our video should be of the camera following someone on a journey. This idea for the video made it particularly easy to create a shot showing a link between the lyric and the visual, as the lyric “I keep on walking”, is continuous throughout the song and we had several shots of our artist walking on his journey. We can see examples of our inspiration for this idea of showing the visuals in the lyrics through the original video by passenger, where he is shooting in a similar camera angle, where he walks while singing about walking on a journey. This link between lyric and visual from Passenger himself was our reasoning for using a similar style of camera shot and theme for our video.

2) A shot that typifies the way a record company would want their artist to be represented.

Our artist is fairly folky/country genre, as such he is naturally going to dress in a similar way, a way in which he would match his genre. A record company producing the album of a folky artist will obviously want him to appear in a way that will match him to his product, you can see our artist has his guitar, bandanna and light colored clothing. These were all typical aspects of a fairly folky country artist. We took examples from artist presentation from other folky artists like Passenger and Of Monsters and Men. However we did also look at folky artists who did not necessarily follow the conventions of regular folky artists. When we looked at James Blunt in “Bonfire Heart” we noticed considerable differences in appearance while still maintaining a folky sound.

3) A shot that illustrates how your video uses music genre.

For our video we noticed that in many videos of similar genre there was the recurring theme of a performer playing a guitar. We saw this in many of the Passenger videos, our main source of information. As well as in other artist such as Frank Turner and George Ezra. By keeping this one simple factor of our video it helps to associate our star image as a folky genre thus making it easier for him to be found by our target audience.

4) A shot that shows an intertextual reference.

Throughout our project we consistently used our artist’s face as the main inspiration for our piece, thus conforming to Michael Shore’s idea of star imagery. We believed this consistent use of star imagery would make our brand easier to recognise and as such our target audience would be able to identify us faster and as such download our song more.

5) A shot that demonstrates your use of camera.

We chose to deliberately film our entire narrative side of our video through the selfie stick style shot. We chose this style as we had seen several versions of the idea such as Passenger’s original idea and Duke Dumont’s, where the video was shot entirely through point of view. By choosing to shoot our narrative in this way we felt it allowed our audience to connect more with the piece and as such feel like they were part of the video therefore making the video more real for them.

6) A shot that demonstrates your use of lighting.

We mostly used natural light in our video to keep with the reality type feeling. We felt that if we had overly done lighting effects it would take away from our attempt at making the video as realistic as possible, as close to the audience feeling they are actually in the video as we could. This theme we found was consistent in other videos such as in Kiesza’s video for “Hide away” were natural lighting is consistently used throughout the video.

7) A shot that demonstrates your use of Mise-en-scene.

To fully create our Mise-en-scene we chose to consistently show our artist performing in various natural areas, such as forests and fields. We hoped that our use of Mise-en-scene in these areas would further help us to fit into the folky natural genre of music we were hoping to achieve from our video. When we looked at other videos for inspiration in our mise-en-scene we found that nature was a common theme in our genre of music.

8) 2 shots we you feel demonstrate you have watched other music videos.

Our first shot shows a clip from the middle of our video in which our whole group is speaking and an argument breaks out. We felt that this use of genuine action combined with the musical clips would lighten the tone of our video. This is an idea we came across while watching Tenacious D’s video for tribute, while they are not directly similar to our artist in genre we felt their comedic take on videos was well received and felt that aspects of comedy in our video would also be well received.

Our second show we also used as a comedic aspect as it shows our artist leaving a portable toilet, suggesting either a hectic shooting schedule or perhaps that he is attempting to hide from the camera crew, either way we felt the comedic aspect of this scene would make our video more enjoyable. We noted that many videos attempt to use comedy to make their videos more appealing such as Bowling for Soup’s video for “The B***h song”, where the band is in prison and conforming to several prison stereotypes but in a comical way, thus making the video more enjoyable to watch and the target audience more likely to keep replaying the song.