JJ - Evaluation of Music Video

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


Jamie T is a indy/rock artist, many videos from this genre have many performance based shots, of the lead singer and the musicians playing. Therefore when planning our video we decided that it was neccesary for our video to include our main character singing and playing the guitar. However if we look at popular indy rock videos we can also see a narrative, usually a love story of some sort. So we included refrences to a love story but only small shots to create a narrative fuzz.
We have used close up shots of our main character singing and playing guitar. In his previous videos he references to alcohol, girls and drugs. Therefore our videos conforms to these conventions, when planning and story boarding our idea we thought that we needed to show Jamie T going down hill using alcohol as a catalyst. This allows the audience to relate to the star, this was also done through the fact that he appears a lot in the video. This also references the genre of the song.

This is a relation to the music and visuals aswell as lip syncing the words with the stars mouth movements. Our stopmotion matches the beat of the song.We matched the guitar playing with the guitar on the song because our main character was able to play the song. The song describes his fall and rise in the music industry and his career as a musician, so we screend the depressive and lonely bits in black and white and the shots that he is sucessful again in full colour. The dissolves use show the narrative as smooth transitions howeever in the drinking scenes they are left out this adds impact to the song.

We therefore included strong conventional mise-en-scene from this genre such as a indy dress style we used Jamie T's previous videos to create his appearance. When creating props we made they were appropiate for each shot, we created a messy look and feel to the video which conformed to the indy scene. There are references to british teen television shows such as Skins in the drinking scenes.

This shot shows the intertexuality of the popular British TV series Skins.

Our main artist performs in a first person mode of address in the performance shots when singing at the camera, this breaks fourth wall. This allows a strong relationship between the audience and the performer. We also use the notion of looking with the use of mirrors in the house shots.

The heavy drinking is typical of male singers, and also stereotypical of how most rock stars deal with the stress of being famous and stardom. This also links to most of the shots the lead singer being alone showing him as a lonesome person, dealing with the downfall of his music alone. This creates a image and back story of the main character that the audience of the genre will be able to relate to. The house also represents his social classs and status, showing that he is a suburbian but not someone from the lower classes. The guitar is iconic of Jamie T, therefore we have used closeups of him playing the gutiar, as well as the guitars shown in the print media.
The use of binary oppositions is apparent throughout the video, we have showed Jamies rise and fall, from his rough days going and busking trying to live on whatever he can make that way to a admired singer and successful performer.

These shots are examples of binorary oppsitions in our video.

In the print media we included semiotics, such as the front cover ofs picture of an alley way, this conotates that the artist is a suburban musician and this is typical of the genre and the artist. The guitars on the front cover are in full colour this signifies that this is a rock artist, he plays the guitar as well as showing this iconic guitar symbol, however this conotates that the guitar brings colour to Jamies life.