Evaluation Question 1

Q1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MUSIC PROMOTIONAL PACKAGE USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE THE FORMS

AND CONVENTIONS OF EXISTING MUSIC VIDEO/ PROMO PACKAGES?

By Holly Faupel

EFFECTSIn the music video for Bring Me To Life, we see Amy Lee singing outside. To emphasise the location, the producer clearly used a fan or some type of special effect to make it seem like it was windier than it actually was.

On the right, we can see Lauren standing on the bridge. We were lucky with the weather because it was already windy that day, however we chose to add to this by using the effect on Final Cut Pro that makes it look like it’s raining.

COSTUME

Amy Lee, lead singer of Evanescence.

Lauren, our Amy Lee!

As Evanescence is a gothic band, we would expect them to wear clothing that is black in colour and covers a large area of he body to add mystery. Black connotes depression and gloom, which relates to their song ‘Bring Me To Life’. On the left you can see Amy Lee, the lead singer in a plain black dress. We decided to represent the depressing connotations of the song through narrative as well as artist focus. Lauren plays Amy Lee in our music video, she is the ‘artist’ and wears black also to emphasise the gothic genre of the song.

NARRATIVEThere are two parts to our music video, the artist focussed lip synching that features Lauren and the narrative, which features me! Our narrative provides the story of a young girl with depression. In this particular scene (below, right) my character has a bad dream and struggles to sleep, similar to a part in Evanescence’s music video for ‘Bring Me To Life’ (below, left). We chose to use this convention to help the viewer understand the symptoms of depression.

NARRATIVEAs part of the dream, we represented my character with depressing thought processes. One of the shots of her dream is seen below, right wear we filmed a hand-held, blurred shot of the train track expressing suicidal thoughts through the eyes of our character. Similarly, in Evanescence’s ‘dream scene’ they also add the blur effect on Amy Lee as a sign that it is not a representation of reality.

NARRATIVEAs well as ‘Bring Me To Life’ I also got some inspiration from Evanescence’s music video ‘Good Enough’. This song also has a gothic genre and is quite dark. They use a diary in the music video (below, left) to express the feelings of Amy Lee’s character and to portray her feelings of loneliness. I used a diary in our music video (below, right) for the same reason; showing the viewers that my character writes in a diary to emphasise how alone she feels.

NARRATIVEFor our last scene I looked into music videos of a gothic genre that dealt with death. I came across the video ‘Bury Me Alive’ by We are the Fallen, this particular screenshot (below, left) was want I wanted our final scene to look like, however we didn’t have the budget or time to film a coffin being descended into the ground. Instead, we decided to use our local church graveyard and film there because it had connotations of death. We blurred our final shot (below, right) to add to the continuity of the dream.

CONCLUSION

It is hard to say whether our music video conforms or subverses the forms and conventions of existing music videos, simply because we used the expected formula to make a gothic genre music video but we hadn’t got the budget or time to create something as good as We are the Fallen or Evanescence’s videos for instance. Although, saying that we did use Final Cut Pro, an editing software that is of industry standard which provided us with settings and effects that people high up in the music video industry would use in their media products.