EVALUATION QUESTION 1In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In my video I included different theories such as Todorovs theory of Equilibrium and Disequilibrium. IN which we showed the transcendence of our assumed protagonist, the female with red hair; who is undergoing extreme substance use. We felt that this structure would be effective and relevant as it would keep things simple, and allow the audience to follow our already complex plot and narrative (which is open for interpretation). A music video that conveys this structure rather well (Where there is no positive resolve) is in the music video “Embryo” by Dir En Grey, which ends up with the child’s mother being killed (or so the narrative suggests).

Here is an illustration of the structure of our music video. It shows the red head to be going about her crazy substance use, and as the video progresses we see this become more violent, which relates the fast paced music to the fast paced editing style. The more racy the video becomes, the more the character loses control and we wanted to convey this form of “Insanity” by having a strong correlation between the editing and the music video, which in turn made our structure more successful as it projected the narrative and message across; the difficulties of extreme drug use.

Although we had a heavy emphasis on the narrative and wanted our viewers to take a message away from the music video, we did stick to one of Goodwin’s conventions through the use of performance aspects. This creates a nice blend between the performing artist, creating band identity, and the narrative which is related to the music being played by said Artist. This helps keeps audiences interested and gives them a pleasant mix between the two.

We placed our artists in a variety of environments, ranging from a desolate wasteland, to a skate park. These gloomy and somewhat urban landscapes really emphasize the grungy appearance of which the band is going for, which blends nicely with the costuming and image of the band. An example of this is the dead grass in the first environment, which is certainly conveyed through the hues on video, which blends nicely with the bleak and dark colours used by the band. This is rather conventional and common within Heavy Metal music videos, and more conventional with Eroge Kei, a subform of Visual Kei, the Japanese metal style we tried to emulate.

As you can see in this shot, which is the beginning of the music we have blended a performance scene within the narrative to give the lyrics a sense of flow and relevance with the narrative shots. The use of this is extremely effective as it makes great clarity to the audience who band is, and the identity they are trying to conceive. This is important for the band, as it creates band identity and gives them significance and presence in the real world, promoting themselves in a sense.

This is very similar to a lot of Visual Kei artists who are actually performance heavy when referring to music video structure, as within the Visual Kei scene, it’s all about creating identity and appearance and in turn advertises them to the specific audience. An example of this Kerbera, who are a Swedish Visual Kei band who do include a narrative, but focus heavily on band image.

Another convetion that we tried to develop in our music video was linking the lyrics to the onscreen narrative. Although we did this subtly, to avoid cheesiness found in older music videos. We did this by focusing on the performance aspect, making the artist reflect the messages the lyrics have through the appearance, which was mostly gloomy and of course, we did this by placing a relevant narrative, the decadence of drug use.

The title of our song that we are using for the music video is titled “Tertius Bestia” and it was composed/performed by Swedish Heavy Metal band BatAAr. Although the title has no direct link to the narrative or the band identity, it does have an impact on the lyrics and speaks about the third beast, which is a biblical reference. After researching this we wanted to have an indirect reference of the third beast being the drugs that are possessing our intoxicated red head “possession” being the subliminal message. We have a section where the chorus screams “Tertius Bestia” and for a moment the shot focus’s on the artist, but then straight onto the indulgence of drugs showing this message of possession. This happens again for the second chorus, however the content is much more extreme and the intoxication appears to be more violent.

We linked the lyrics to the video by including the artists that perform them. We did this by adding the band in a variety of shots, with many extreme close ups and mid-shots to capture the entirety of the band with each section of the song having relevance to each band member playing on the screen. This is very common and conventional of music videos in general do this, especially when tying lyrics to the music video.

Another convention and technique we have used when developing our Music Video which were clearly apparent with existing media texts was the use of editing in relation to the rhythm and the beat of the song. Like I mentioned in terms of structure, an example of this is when the shots became more fast paced to have a coherent relationship with the fast paced music which builds up in speed progressively, and the editing style has to fit to that. Another example of this is when the music video leads up to the chorus and the song is speeding up creating an intense build up, and the shots are cut up into tiny sections flowing one after another showing that the editing style certainly reflects the genre of the music.

Another example of this is when the video slows down and the shots become slower, and allow the audience to collect their thoughts on what has been conveyed to them. This sense of speed up and slow down puts the audience off their feet and thus messes with their expectation of a coherent sense of editing. We did this to emphasize the convention-breakage of which Visual Kei endorses. We wanted our music video to also fit the image our band was going for, and that was to break out of already existing conventions and create a new form of style, and thus by using an unusual editing style (which remains relevant to the song itself) it allows us to reflect that style. The more hectic parts of the narrative follow o the more violent tone of the song, and the video is cut up in really small parts for this.

We also used our two lesser tasks to show the Visual Kei conventions by doing different techniques through Photoshop. We had to portray our band identity through a digipack (Also the album context, which was Tertius Bestia) and our poster which primarily promoted the band.

We used the conventions of putting a heavy focus on the narrative protagonist on the poster, as it reflects the album as well and demonstrates a clear relationship between a poster promoting a band with an already existing product. Although not all bands do this, and they put themselves in the foreground to amass the most attention. The use of already existing tracks within the poster is very appealing as it tells the audience that they are a lot of compositions made by this artist, which is appealing to the customers.

By using predominantly black colours, it helps our band create a theme and identity not only for the Album being advertised but the theme for Band Identity, which is dark and sinister. The striking red on her hair is purposely conflicted with the dark colours, thus creating this radical contrast, however the red colour brings negative connotations (Which in turn relate to the gloomy connotations and suggestions the blacks have) suggesting blood, jealousy and innocence.

As a group we had mixed feelings for the font as there were a lot of fonts we liked, that really brought out the band theme and ideas, however we settled with this somewhat Traditional and Gothic font as it looked very grungy, whilst keeping some kind of traditional form giving those themes of Goth which are quickly related to the Rock Genre movement. The big swirls in the letters show some form of handwritten effect, but the degraded look makes it appear old, abandoned and somewhat sinister of which we wanted our band to look like.

The use of this image, and the other poster motifs between each of our texts, such as the Music Video, the poster and Digipak creates a relationship and in turn creates some band synergy as everything accumulates to a successful release of an array of products. This is a method used in many other artists products.

A current motif is already recognizable with the typography seen on the front cover of the Digipak and the poster we also created. This is to develop a band identity as we want this font to have a relationship with our identity, and to our targeted audience hopefully they’ll see the font related to use. We have done this through the use of motif and keeping ideas throughout our ancillary texts.

We used a variety of images, some which are taken from the Music Video and some we took solely for the Digipak. For example, on the back cover we have our character eating some wild berries and this is seen with our music video. This creates a relationship between the Digipak and the Music Video. This is a common convention found within Digipaks or any Album set, is the use of shots from existing texts to display a relationship.

We kept the overall theme about Tertius Bestia (The story within our music vide) and it was the most important aspect of the Digipak, as it clarifies what our Digipak is about and who it is aimed for. The band recognize the band on the back, thus the album is more likely to sell due to the relevance of the digipak plus the content appealing to the fans.

The mixture of images between the band the character follow the conventions of Digipak development. It suggests to the audience who the target audience is, which is Visual Kei fans who regard the band members just as important as the theme the band members are trying to create (In this case, the story of the music video which implements the red haired character) and this gives a more personal feeling between the band the audience.

We wanted the front cover to be absent, not making it overly complex and keeping it simple as we wanted the few visuals to strike out to our audience. The simplicity of the front can offer this effect to our audience as we have previously researched in other Album Covers, for example in the cover “Dahlia” by X-Japan, it is just a line of text and a still image of one of the band members yet the impact is great because it remains simple in it’s design.