Evaluation: Question 1

Our music video does a number of different things to both conform and separate itself from normal music videos. Perhaps the most obvious is our inclusion of a proper narrative and actual story, which surprisingly is uncommon of Rap videos. For example it is very commonplace in today’s music industry for rap videos to contain scantily clad women with them promoting the overall Star image of the rapper by having iconographic flash cars, clothes and jewelry. These then of a sort suggest the idea that success is defined by the material objects one possesses. Because of our reluctance to follow these rules it could be said that our video hails back to the early videos of the past with Madonna’s material girl in particular containing a strong narrative based on a Music mogul being attracted to Madonna.

This therefore means our video strays away from conventional videos which we have purposely done to portray another view of what music videos can be like with them showing abstractions such as anger and hate. Our video also shows issues that are present in today’s society such as bullying. This therefore links in with the song, which in itself contains dark themes and a strong narrative. Ours does not follow the lyrics exactly but does have a strong link in the form of a stalker as the song goes on, gradually becoming more angry and obsessed.

However that is not to say that our video strays away from established conventions completely, in fact it is often the opposite, for example our video contains numerous uses of elliptical editing and montages to provide a logical storyline that can be explained and does not contain any plot holes. Although it is worth noting that our use of Theo singing a Chorus that is made by a women is not typical of music videos and was a factor we took into consideration. However as it is was unreliable to get a girl to do the video due to timings we decided the most efficient way to shoot the video was to use people from our groups, which we think was fairly effective.

Another Convention we decided to use were filters for certain scenes to show there was a flashback occurring, which in essence helped us to manipulate the narrative. Filters are quite commonplace in music videos to show things are not what they seem or provide a stylistic feature, an example could be in The Games Dreams video, which uses filters to create a atmospheric and serious tone, filters in the video also serve another purpose to show the differences between the story line and the parts in which The Game is Performing to the lyrics.

Another important convention of music videos is the use of lightning to provoke certain emotions towards the audience, for example low key lighting creates a dangerous atmosphere; for example Lady Gaga’s video uses low key lighting towards the beginning to create a mysterious feeling with the audience being unsure about what is about to occur. We have employed a similar technique in the beginning of ours, which once again proves that while we do distance ourselves from some conventions, others we decided to stick to in order to keep the quality of our video up.