Evaluation..

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

My inspiration for creating this music video, came from the simplicity and effectivness of several acoustic artists performing in their own music videos. I had to research several music videos in order to find a song and video that I found appealing and do-able and most of all, entertaining for the audience.
Because I live in Jersey, I am surrounded by various fields and countryside backgrounds, therefore I felt it to be appropriate that I chose a song that was quite mellow and relaxed, as it would make it ideal for filming and there are several good locations to film a relaxed acoustic song. After several weeks of choosing what song to create my music video too, I stumbled across the American Folk/Acousitc solo artist Joshua Radin, who I have been a huge fan of for a very long time. The title of his song 'Brand New Day' immiediatly appealed to me, as I had an idea of what my video was going to consist of before I had even started filming.
I used some of his ideas in order to make my music video seem and look as professional as I possibly could. One of these examples was the constant use of different camera angles, emphasizing the emotion within the song, brought out by the use of different camera angles. I watched the music video for Brand New Day at least thirty times in order to truly capture the esscence of the meaning behind the music video. I found that each shot in his video held a different reason as to why he chose to do that shot, it was to highlight many important ideas, whether it be highlighting a sense of location, expression on a character's face, what as going on in the background, focusing on certain props, close-ups on the guitar and him singing the song itself.

All of these small editing techniques and camera angles added up to create a truly brilliant music video and this was the main reason for me to chose this video, as I found it very appealing with a wide target audience, it was simple yet effective to film, I already had a very good idea of the locations I would be filming in and I enjoyed the actual song, which meant I wouldn't get bored of it, or give up on it half way through the filming process.

I encountered some problems whilst filming this music video, one of which being a friend of mine running over the newly bough tri-pod with a 500lb tractor, this set back one day of filming as the tri-pod got demolished in the process. One of the main problems, apart from the tractor, was the weather. In order for my video to look professional, it had to look as if I had filmed it all on one day, however this is almost impossible to do, therefore I had to film on days where it was not raining, and the weather was suitable to the mood and genre of the music video I originally chose. Luckily I was able to film almost all of my footage within a week where the weather was quite continous, although there was a few weeks where we encountered snow, which really set back the filmiong process.

I feel as though I have followed the traditional codes and conventions of similar media texts, as my research proves this. Looking at several music videos helped me to decidde what genre I would eventually choose to film.