I was influenced by several different texts. One of the main videos I took influence from was by the same band (City and Colour.) I chose to incorporate aspects of this video in my work because it's obviously the same genre of music and I wanted to achieve a similar style, if I achieved a similar style I knew I would have worked well with my video to make it appropriate for the genre.
These pictures show similarities between my video and the video by City and Colour. I think this shows that I have worked to the style of the genre well. I found the City and Colour video very inspiring as it gave me a clear idea of what direction I needed to take my work in and gave me ideas for different shots that would be effective in my video.
I also took inspiration from Coldplay's 'The scientist' video, I thought that the reverse filming was a very visually interesting effect and I wanted to try and use that in my work. However i expanded on the original idea of reverse filming and added a ghosting effect, I feel that this makes the overall appearance work better with my song choice.
I feel my audience research directly affected the direct I chose to take with my video, in my first focus group I played them the song and asked them to give me idea of what images they thought would work well with the music, This is the response I got, it can also be found in the original post:
Q: this is the song i have chosen to use for my music video, do you like it? What images come into your head when you listen to it?
A: I really like this song, I think it's a great choice to make a video out of and I think there's a lot you could do that would work really well with the music.
A: I think it's a great song, the kind of images I think of when I see it are black and white and quite sad, I could imagine someone walking around as a ghost, not realising they were dead.
A: I definitely get a sad feeling from it, I think a ghost or something similar would be a really good idea, he could go up to people but they wouldn't be able to see him.
Q: This is a moodboard I have created based on the style of the song I have chosen for my music video, do you think it is a good representation of you and the kind of things that you like?
A: I think it has a very individual and unique style, I think that represents me well as I try to be individual as well. I think that most of the things that I like are on there and it has captured the general idea of my style very well.
A: I think the images are very visually interesting and eye catching, I definitely think it's a good representation of the genre of the music and the people who follow it.
Q: What technical effects do you think would work well in this video?
A: I think if you were going to use the idea of a ghost then you should make the rest of the people around him seem strange; maybe you could speed them up or slow the down or make them blurry?
A: Or maybe you could make them black and white and have the person playing the ghost in colour?
Q: What kind of locations do you think would work well for this video?
A: You could do something different to normal indie music video, so you could film somewhere other than in the countryside.
A: I think you should have some bits where the person is all on there own, some where lonely and sad looking.
I took these general ideas and created a more specific story line which I then used to create a storyboard and shot list. The main points I took from this feedback was the idea of the main character being a ghost and not being able to interact with people around him. I also used the idea of making some of the scenes black and white as I feel this adds to the sad, dark feel and fits well into the indie genre. I also used the idea of adding ghosting effects to make things seem more surreal and confusing.
I think my media product is different to real projects is some ways; although a lot of indie music videos are low budget they still have professionals and more advanced equipment than I had access to, so in that respect I think it is easy to tell that my video is very low budget where as professional videos look slightly more clean than mine. However I that this can be seen to work in my favour as the low budget look does work for the style of song I chose. I feel that I have made some creative differences as well, for example it is very common for indie music videos to be set in the countryside, in fields or woods etc but I chose to film my video in the middle of a town, I thought that this would make an interesting and unusual contrast, which would make my video stand out from the crowd and be more memorable.
I feel that I tried as best I could to make my post original, although it is obviously difficult to be entirely original. One of the main points, which I have already mentioned, is that I set my video in the town instead of the countryside, this makes in unusual and memorable. I also think that by combining different effects, e.g. the ghosting and reverse filming I have made my text slightly more original.
I feel that the majority of my work, both my video and digipack are quite redundant, the images, text and music all connote the same kind of messages and are all very typical ideas and styles of the indie genre. In some ways I am happy about this because I was aiming to work quite tightly within the genre but in some way I would have liked to have been able to add a bit of entropy into my work to make it slightly more interesting. I think overall the effect of using redundancy in my work means that it is more likely to appeal to my specific target audience because it is very similar to what they would expect from album artwork and music videos, but I think that because it is so stereotypically indie and doesn't have a sense of entropy it will be less likely to appeal to a wider audience.
Although I generally stuck to the conventions of my chosen genre, there were a few aspect that I felt challenged the conventions. These were not too major and the main one was the difference in location, from what I gathered from my audience feedback they still clearly recognised it as to be in the indie genre and the only comment made on location was that perhaps there could have been more variety.
Although I generally followed the conventions of my genre I tried to make some challenging aspects as to prevent it from being dull, uninteresting and generic. I feel that I managed to achieve this slightly with the change in location but I also think I relied too much on the effects to make it unusual and perhaps should have focused more on the storyline. Although I had no negative feedback from the audience regarding this matter I would personally have liked to have challenged the conventions of the genre a little more than I did.
Steve Neale's theory of audiences and genre's states that 'audiences take pleasure from genre because of instances of repetition and difference'. I feel that this influenced me to work quite strictly within the genre but to had some minor changes. I feel that I limited my creativity to what would work for my target audience but added in a few things that may be less typical.
Nicholas Abercrombie states that 'producers set out to exploit genre conventions... It... makes sound economic sense. Sets, properties and costumes can be used over and over again. Teams of stars, writers, directors and technicians can be built up, giving economies of scale'. I feel that this is a very valid point as sticking within a genre structures what you can and can't achieve with your work. I think that it made it a lot easier for me to create what I did by sticking to a specific genre as it meant that I was trying to please people with very similar tastes so I did not have to accommodate for too much individual difference.
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