In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I would say one of our main influences to our cinematography,was from Madonna's music video for her song 'Hung up' and Run DMC's video for 'It's like that'.
One of the themes that runs through our video is that of dance and movement,whether it be the belly dancer, the street dancer in the tunnel or the lines of the graffiti artists spray can. We tried hard to replicate the feeling of 'fluidity' that is in the above music videos and apply it to our own set pieces. Shot types and angles were very important in capturing the feeling of movement so we analysed these videos alot.
For example in this shot we felt that the movement and rhythm of the hands was an important part of the shot so we felt a mid shot was best here. Like Madonna's video, the mise en scene here was very delicate because we had to keep our dancers head just in the shot. Composition was just as important as shot type.
In Madonna's video, the shots and sequencing never gets stale. This is because of the large variety of shot types and angles that are used and are constantly varied. The pacing of the shots are also key and by this I mean how the shots are edited to the beat and the order in which they appear in. Alot of these ideas came through in our shots,we aimed to vary the shots of our dancer alot and used a very fast paced editing style. I don't think there are any shots that really hang for too long and this is thanks to the editing and combining long shots with close ups and mid shots. For example we go from a mid shot of the dancers hands and head as he moves to the beat, then we cut to a long shot,then we go to a mid shot of just the legs and feet. The spirit of the video and genre of music can be compared to that of an electric current,which is why I think the high-low, in and out style of editing and cinematography works well here. There are certainly visual links between the two videos.
We drew quite alot of ideas from Run DMC's video when it came to how we wanted to portray our own street dancer. However, whereas 'It's like that' focused on a group of dancers, we decided to only focus on one.This was for practical reasons of course,but it was also to give more of a context to the dancer. The background was very important in the shots of our dancer because the graffiti linked itself to the rest of the video and made it clear to the audience that we were going for an urban feel with the video, just like the abandoned factory/warehouse linked with the themes of Run DMC's song.
Regarding my ancillary products, I think they are relatively conventional.
I didn't try to challenge conventions of the genre but at the same time I attempted to make a digipak that was different from the average electronic genre digipak. I decided to combine photos and text in a stylistic way,cutting them up and making sure the composition and colour fitted the promotional package well.
Referring back to Andrew Goodwins theory,I think our video falls under the 'amplification' category. I think this suited our song because the themes running through it were not really scripted.Instead we needed to make sure the themes were amplified.
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