Evaluation Question One:

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

The song we chose to use for our music video falls into the musical genre of "acoustic". This means that all instruments used in the recording of the song are acoustic. For Joshua Radin's song 'Winter' the only instruments used were guitar and vocals, making it fall into the genre of acoustic music. This meant we were unable to produce a fast paced performance video as it clearly would not fit with the tempo of the song. After hours of research, we were able to find ideas that we liked and were able to interpret into our own video.

We also looked at the lyrics of the song and noticed that they resembled a man's thoughts who had lost someone close to him, this allowed us to further our ideas as we knew what we wanted our audience to feel when they listened to the song and saw our video. Here are some of the lyrics that denoted to us the sad feel of the song:

"Your name is the splinter inside me while I wait

And I remember the sound of your November downtown

And I remember the truth

A warm December with you but I don't have to make this mistake

And I don't have to stay this way

If only I would wake."

Using words such as "remember" made it easy for us to analyse and work out the meaning behind the artists words.

After much discussion, we decided that the best storyline for us, would be to have a boy reliving memories from a happier time when he was with his girlfriend. This storyline is similar to "Dreamboy" by Don Broco. Unfortunately, the video does not reflect the image we are going for, and we decided not to take ideas from this, showing how our music video challenges forms and conventions of real media products.

As much as we hoped it would, our music video did not come together straight away, with no inspiration, and we had to find ideas from somewhere... After hours and hours and hours and hours (you get the idea) of looking at and watching YouTube videos, we found a few transitions and effects that could be used in our video. For example, the faded edge around the video when in a memory came from Ellie Goulding's version of "Your Song". The tempo to this track is very slow and relaxing, a lot like the song we would be using in our video. Ellie's video was a great help when it came to inspiration as it offered us many ideas.

Below is an image of a faded shot from Ellie Goulding's video, and an image of our video with the similar effect:

This effect enabled us to portray the feel of a memory. It showed that the boy in the video missed his girlfriend and constantly thinks back to better times. Although the effect we used is similar to current day videos, it also challenges them, by showing happier times and memories, the video is able to challenge other videos that show sadder times. A prime example of this is Jason Derulo's song "What if". This video shows how he could have saved his girlfriends life by rewinding time and not speaking to her for the first time, This video shows happier memories, but the video is always tainted with the sense that he will lose her, or will forget the memory. Our video continues to challenge this, as the audience is unaware of the outcome of the video. Does he find his girlfriend again? Or is she lost for ever?