In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?Our video of In the Morning by the Coral is unusual for a mainstream music video, but seems inkeeping with the theme of the Coral, an independent band. The videos for songs by the Coral are unusual in comparison to that of other mainstream artists, which has given us more room to add different ideas that do not necessarily fit in with certain codes and conventions that you may expect in the video of a band such as the Foo Fighters.
All of the Coral's videos vary considerably, which meant that we wanted to create a video that would capture this same individualism so present in videos by the Coral. In our performance, we did this by having a stereotypically dressed front man for our band, and the additions of a bear and a tambourine player to add a unique feel to the video. The addition of a bear is not that disimilar to The Coral's Dreaming of You video, in which a bear dances around in the background, whilst the band are in a narrow room, and on the beach.
Our video follows a linear narrative, as our star goes about his day. It begins with him waking up, and ends later in the day after his journey into town, and back to the bus stop to go home. This follows a key convention of many music videos. Although we do not actually have a live band performing, we do still have the aspect of a group performance, through the dancing at the end, and the bear and busker playing instruments throughout their appearances.
The key concept for our video is a man going about his day, and reapeatedly being joined by strange characters such as the bear. This is not disimilar to the themes and concepts used in videos by the Coral, who have a bear keep appearing behind them in their Dreaming of You video. Our theme is underlying throughout the video, again inkeeping with the stereotype.
Our video also features a relationship between the lyrics of the song and the visuals. When the lyrics, went to the shop are sung, our character enters a shop, and as made plans to be leaving is heard, our character opens the shop door and walks out. We also show an image of the bear in a telephone box, just as the lyrics about writing on a red telephone box.
Another key element of music videos we have also featured is the use of close-ups of our star, especially at the beginning of the video when he is waking up. These are often used at the request of record labels in other music videos, so we did this in order to follow this convention.
For our video, we have tried to use a variety of shots in order to have a more interesting video. During the beginning of the video, we have used a number of close-ups on our lead's face, and have used more long shots towards the end of the video, especially when the group are dancing in the museum gardens. This is farly in keeping with traditional conventions. There are a number of long shots, such as on the beach at the end in the Dreaming of You video, and more close up shots when a band member sings.
For our editing, we have used a number of jump cuts in order to make it fit with the music, and also as we feel it is more fitting for the cuts. However, in the videos by The Coral that we have watched, there are not many jump cuts at all, so this is not a traditional convention of their videos. However, we chose to challenge this convention, as we felt that it enhanced our video.
Our mise-en-scene however, seems quite fitting for the video. For the majority of the song, our character strolls through the streets of York, except for at the beginning when he is inside the house. This casual setting that we have used reflects the Coral's background from Liverpool. When they cycle to the beach in Dreaming of You, it is simply down everyday streets, similar to the ones that we have filmed on. Our character is also dressed in a fairly traditional manner, that is representative of the indie genre.
For our video, we used one sound effect, that of an alarm that we downloaded in order to add it to the video, because we could not hear any background sounds in our video. The rest of the Coral's videos feature music for the entirety, so there are not any sound effects like this, but sounds like this are used over other music videos, so it is not a complete contradiction of conventions.
For our digipak and advert, we have also followed some of the traditional codes and conventions. We have used a number of different images for our digipak, all of which were edited in order to make them look more like a real digipak would. We followed most of the conventions with our digipak, by adding titles, credits, record label information, copyright logos, and CD and DVD logos. We also used the same font as the Coral use on their albums, downloaded from dafont.com. This allowed for our digipak to look as realistic as possible. For our advert, we used a single photo, also featured on our digipak. We continued the theme used on the digipak for our advert, which we felt followed the conventions of typical adverts and digipaks.
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