Evaluation Q1

Space Elevator Promo – Evaluation

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

Our most recent project was the development and production of a music promo with the addition of two ancillary tasks, which were also promotional materials: a magazine advertisement and digipak. We chose an unsigned band and chose one of their songs to base our project around. We selected one of the band’s songs and produced a music promo for it with the addition of a magazine article promoting the release of the single along with a digipak.

The purpose of the music promo, digipak and magazine advertisement is to promote the artist according to the target market. In the real world the aim of these promotional materials is to give the artist a degree of exposure beyond concerts. To be successful they must to convey to the target market the style and attitude of the artists in a clear and concise manner. A music promo helps to illustrate some of the personality and genre of the artist thus appealing to the target market of their genre. A promo also allows record companies to promote new artists using an alternative method through the internet and music channels  rather than just getting their tracks airtime on radio stations.

    

I think the images above illustrate how album art can be used as a form of advertisement. They contain striking images and which helps to draw the audience’s attention. Also the art can be seen as a representation of the artists themselves and therefore will help to appeal to the target market before the audience has even heard the music itself. We chose to further this idea by producing more abstract art for our digipak as it fitted with the genre and is an eye catching style of art.

 Nirvana 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is a conventional rock music video as it is largely performance based and stylised to its genre through its use of mise en scene.

The purpose of a music promo is to give a large audience the opportunity to experience an artist in a more personal manner for the majority of people who haven’t seen the artist live whether they have taken a conventional or unorthodox approach by either remaining within the conventions of the applied genre or breaking these expectations, which usually reflects on the artists themselves.

A wide variety of shots are typically used in a music promo, close ups of instruments are shown to give the impression of performance as well as displaying a degree of skill of artist. It also helps to demonstrate the artists individual style of performance. Music promos also tend to use a range of close ups, long shots, establishing shots and mid shots to show either the performer or the narrative, there is no one style of shot that is often seen as any can be used to make an effective promo and often the style of shots used reflect the style or genre of the music.

This Wordle shows some of the conventions typically associated with the indie genre:

Typically indie promos display a lot of energy through the style of editing and mise-en-scene. The editing is most effective when cut to the beat of the song. It also helps if any narrative element of the video fits with the structure of the song to create a well-rounded video which would also help to maintain the audience’s intrest. A whole variety of shots and cuts are used depending on the genre however the majority are simply straight cuts as these are the easiest to sync with the beat of the track. In general the only sound heard would be the given track, however in some music promos, some of the digetic sound from the narrative can be heard to create an atmosphere and ad to the narrative. This usually takes place at the beginning of the video. Close are often the most predominant shots as they maintain the focus on the performer. This is important as a music promo gives the viewer a means of being close to the performer, which they may not get from going to see them live and also creates a sense of intimacy and privilege. The mise-en-scene in most music promos varies dependant on the type of genre and location of the video. For an indie promo the setting for performance is typically a 'practice room' which adds a sense of realism and again gives the audience a sense of privilege and going 'behind the scenes' this is epitomised in the screen shots below.

                                                                         Close Up

The close up emphasises a specific element of the song for example the kick drum would be in sync with the track during this particular shot to draw the audiences attention to it.

Mid Shot

 The mid shot helps to illustrate performance as well as including the artist. This shot is used regularly for performance.

                             

Long Shot

 In this particular shot the long shot is used to show the whole band in one shot which helps the audience to get an idea of the location and the band performing as one.

The narrative of promos varies a lot depending on the genre of the track and the subject of the lyrics, most tend to be descriptive narratives to help illustrate the ideas of the lyrics. However some promos focus entirely on the performance aspect of the promo where as most switch between narrative and performance. There are three different types of narrative: illustration, in which the narrative is take solely from the lyrics in the track, amplification, in which one key idea or theme is taken from the lyrics and then used to create the narrative and disjuncture, which takes a more abstract approach and bares no immediate relevance to the lyrics.  

Coldplay 'The Scientist'

 This video is an example of amplification as it takes the lyric, 'back to the start' and uses this idea throughout. The video is edited so it is done entirely in reverse and the lead singer ends up back in time just before a car crash.

Depending on the type genre of music and the ideals the artist is trying to convey will affect the style of promo produced. Therefore a number of different elements of mise-en-scene, shot types and editing techniques may be used specific to genre, to create the overriding effect that the artist wants. 

Oasis 'Cigarettes And Alcohol'

Firstly this video is shot in black and white to give it the appearance of being 'vintage'. It also contains frequent appearances of both cigarettes and alcohol being consumed. Additionally it contains a multiple close up shots of performance to illustrate the energetic atmosphere of one of their gigs. All of these elements combined show the effect that the genre has in creating an overall style for a promo as this video clearly shows the 'rock & roll' lifestyle.

Tame Impala – Lucidity

'Lucidity' by Tame Impala is a video that defies and subverts all established conventions of a music video as the only performance aspect of the video is at the very beginning from an aerial perspective. The shot depicts the band playing in a desert around 500 kilometres from Melbourne, Australia.

The band took a leap of faith in using a series of experiments involving attaching a camera to a weather balloon to capture all that developed beneath it and sending it into space.

The bands genre is somewhat psychedelic the use of space imagery and orbiting the earth is fairly fitting for the genre as the psychedelic genre has used such imagery since its early development either visually or through its lyrics.

This was inspirational in creating our own music video as it breaks boundaries of conventional music videos and has a creative dimension to it. this is because it simply uses one shot for the entirety of the video and performance is only present very briefly.

'Monster' The Automatic

This video for The Automatic ‘Monster’ was inspirational to our music video as it takes a lighthearted approach to the subject that it amplifies from the lyrics and it has the effect of being a low budget humour production. It could also fit into the genre of indie and therefore would appeal to our target market.

We decided try and emulate this and take a reasonably conventional approach to our promo by amplifying the idea of a ‘space elevator’ and tried to create a half and half split of performance and narrative. As seen in the majority of indie/rock promos, we showed the full band playing appropriate instruments for the track (guitar, bass, drums, vocals) This helped to create a sense of energy, live performance and authenticity to the video.

We tried to maintain fast paced editing throughout the video in order to reflect the nature of the track, which also helped us to include a variety of different shots. This will help to ensure the audience doesn’t loose interest in the video.

We used a variety of different shots ranging from extreme closes ups, to long shots and high to low angle, for our performance to create the effect of a tightly executed performance.

We used two different locations for our promo, one being an everyday setting (supermarket) to help create the sense of the normal being subverted into the abnormal. The second being an outside location however the lighting masks the location itself which helps to maintain focus on the performance. We also included the Morris Minor in order to add an original element to the performance.

We used the Morris Minor as the back drop for our performance as we wanted to break the convention of just using a practice room as we tried this previously with little success. I think the fact the surrounding area was dark and the performance was well lit made these shots effective.

The other location we used was the local supermarket. We used this for our narrative because we wanted to amplify the idea of a space elevator and what it could achieve. This then led us to attempt to turn the normal into the abnormal by posing as spacemen exploring somewhere entirely normal but viewing it as something Alien.

We also made sure to pick appropriate outfits and instruments for the indie genre as indie/rock bands don’t typically aim for a stylised look, as it tends to be a gimmick or distraction from the music.