Evaluation

1. ( i)  In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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1. The lyrics from the chorus read “If you’re going to walk on water make sure you wear your comfortable shoes.” This shot from the video shows a clear representation of a woman on water. As these lyrics are repeated throughout the song, links to water scenes are also repeated throughout the video, including a swan in the river as well as ripples in the water all used to recreate these lyrics. The shot shown here takes place with the lyrics “on the back of a raindrop,” as she continues to fly out of the water, you see droplets of the water forming back into the river. This could be seen to represent a raindrop which shows another clear link to the lyrics of the song.
2. The genre of the song is a very typical ‘Indie’ or ‘Alternative’ scene. Therefore the stereotypical dress sense of an Indie singer or group would not be following the mainstream fashion. He is shown to be wearing a shirt and jeans as opposed to tracksuit bottoms or a t-shirt which is often quite a mainstream style of dressing. His facial expression is quite somber which matches the mood of the song, if he was smiling and cheerful then it would contradict the message of leaving and sadness shown through the female characters actions. 
3. Most songs of this genre are often somber and relatively mellow, therefore we tried to represent this through costume, lighting and mise-en-scene. Nature is key in our music video and therefore mainly being set in the woods allowed us to convey it. The lighting in the shot is dim and the further vignette editing which darkens the edges depicts a mellow mood. 
4. This shot shows the girl jumping in reverse over a log. It was initially filmed normally (forward) yet it was edited to be in reverse. This idea came from the video of “The Scientist” by Coldplay where the whole music video is in reverse as well. 
5. This part of the video shows the girl lying on the floor, with the camera rotating around her at floor level. The whole video shows a variety of camera angles, however this one I believe is quite interesting, due to the constant movement of the camera whilst changing from a down shot to a slight upshot of her.
6. As mentioned before, the lighting in the video is relatively dim altered slightly by the vignette editing and the low saturation. This shot clearly shows it as the trees are blocking some of the natural light which could represent a mellow mood. 
7. The mise-en-scene throughout the video is set in the woods and river. This shot effectively shows a combination of the two elements. Due to the mood of the song, linking to misery and heartbreak, as well as many reference in the lyrics to nature and water, we believed the river and woods were effective places to set the music video.
8. After watching the music video of “Nothing” from The Script, we used the idea of a girl floating in the water. She is wearing a long floaty dress to try and get the impression of the dress floating in the river. Another video which involves a girl floating in water is Dido’s “Don’t Leave Home” which also shows her falling into the sea as well.
9. Coldplay’s music video “The Scientist” if very influential upon our video. The long shot of the girl running into the woods was taken from their idea as well the initial idea of the video being in reverse. However, we did not include lip-syncing in our video for several reasons. One being, it did not fit properly with our expectations of an Indie music video. Secondly, the protagonist in the video is a girl and the song is sung by a male. Thirdly, the technicality of someone lip-syncing in reverse would have been very difficult to reconstruct and would not have worked effectively.