Finished Production

Q1 In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We found this shot the most effective shot in creating response from the audience as it outlines the narrative of the video and typifies the relationship the feud.  This is similar to many leading promotional videos from global institutions, however a narrative such as this being portrayed in a video is more frequent in songs not in the techno genre, such as love songs and ballads. In showing the narrative of the song we have challenged classic conventions of our genre. Shot 2 also connotes the same character representations as the previous one, again challenging the genre conventions.

The colour in this shot is a subtle vertical intertextual reference to the blue skinned characters in the movie phenominon that was Avatar, in a pastiche style as defined by post-modernist theorist Fredric Jameson. This development of the fantasy genre worked well in creating a stylized effect for our final product, although retaining independent imagery which would be recognizable in the ancillary task, and thus to the general public. These particular shots are in indexical visual sign which automatically make the audience correspond the text with Avatar, and transfer their cultural knowledge of the film’s success to the music video with positive connotations.

From our initial planning and research we made sure to include a direct intertextual shot from Eminem’s ‘Stan’, a video which we previously had analysed in terms of semiotics. This shows a development of a real media product into our own work, and plays with the idea of converging two genres with we are both fans of.

The split screening/paneling technique used in these two shots rresemble Example’s ‘Love Kickstarts’ promotional music video. Evidently we have again crossed over this technique to another genre. Another subtle intertextual reference keeps the audience stimulated, and comforts them with the notion of familiarity. Although the two shots are visually similar in style, they hold two very different representations. The top one connotes sorrow, whereas in the shot below we endeavored to simulate a club-like atmosphere with lighting effects. This challenged our technical ability but was successful in merging the narrative and performance sections of our video.

We have seen fading shots and the use of opacity levels in our inspirational videos, which we researched at the beginning stages of the projects, and attempted to replicate these techniques. Rihanna videos often use this effect, and we also used it heavily, in specific areas where we wanted to portray the two sides of one character’s personality.

The mirroring effect here was also a technique we used a fair bit, and again to pastiche Rihanna’s “Rudeboy’ music video as well as make intertextual references to the inspirational video used within our research and planning stages of the project.

The smoking shots were inspired by a shot from the introductory sequence from ‘True Blood’. The homagistic style of vertical intertextuality is not directly replicating signs from the text but has taken inspiration from it, including the muted colours as shows in the narrative portrayal in our music video.

We used a modern typeface, this we thought would be better suited to the modern genre and appropriate to our youthful target audience.

We found this an occurring theme throughout the promotional music video, and felt that it was appropriate in order to create a successful, professionally finished product. From researching into existing CD covers and promotional posters we knew exactly what our target audience would expect to see from a techno music track, and tried to mimic this as closely as possible.