Question 1 Media Evaluation

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

For my media coursework this year I had to make a music video, CD cover and an advert for this CD cover to be put into a magazine. For this task I did this for Bon Iver's cover of The Park which was originally done by Feist. You could call this genre of music, Folk an

d as a genre most of the music videos created for this genre is very slow paced and because of this I tried to imitate that sort of music video.

For the main video I took most of my ideas from Ed Sheeran's 'A team' because I thought it did show real meaning about people who fall on hard times. I also took ideas from Chase and Status - Time (ft Delilah) because it had a meaning to the story which was domestic abuse and I wanted my video to be about homelessness.

I did also copy a few shots from these videos such as the bench scene from 'A team' and you can see the similarities.

Because the song has a very slow pace to it I thought that the editing I used was appropriate as there were not as many cuts and each scene lasted around 5 seconds or so. I thought this went well with the music and it showed as the majority of people I asked about the audio and video link said they went well together.

I also did it for another reason as most other Bon Iver music videos are very slow paced and editing is matched up because of this.
For example here is Bon Iver's song Holocene.



This official Bon Iver music video shows how the editing is much slower to give a more calm effect which is what I wanted to reproduce. I also used quite a lot of fades in between scenes to give a better effect of loneliness and time showing that being homeless isn't an easy choice but sometimes its the only choice that some people have.
In this sense I tried to appeal to the audiences emotions.

Compared to different genres such as hip hop and pop where the idea of making music videos is to sell the artist, with folk there is much more focus on the music rather than the artist so that's why there is no real definite mention of the artist apart from in the things where it is needed most such as the CD cover and Advert.


I looked at quite a lot of examples before making my final choice of song. This is the mind map I had that shows most of my first ideas that I had thought of.
As you can see I first had the choice of three different genres of music, these being Folk, Pop and Rock but I decided that Folk would be the best one to do as the genre has plenty of variety and so I could choose a song that had a good rhythm so that it would go well with the idea I had for the video.
In terms of my CD cover, I wanted to make something that showed the aspects of my video. I included photos of places that I had filmed, for example a train station and iconic views from London. This challenged other conventional media types as I hadn't seen any other idea like it on CD covers that I had researched.
Although I did find a CD cover which you could make a link between the music video and cover art. This was the Feel Good Inc single by Gorillaz.
(Picture from Vblurpage.com)



The main idea that I picked was the collage idea which I took from James Blunt's 'All the lost souls' (Picture from Wikipedia) as that was set out very nicely to make the artists face out of lots of other peoples faces. I didn't do this but I developed it so that it gives the audience a clear link between the music video and Cd cover.

Last year I had to make a music magazine which had to include a front cover, contents page and double page spread. I enjoyed this task but didn't really like using the programs I was told to. For that coursework I had to use InDesign and Photoshop to do all the editing on my music magazine. Even though I managed to get the hang of those programs last year, I was pleased to be able to use programs that I was comfortable with this project and I do think it paid off as I created the three media texts to the standard I wanted.