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, A2 Media Student.

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

2. EFFECTS
In 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.

3. COSTUME
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.
Amy Lee, lead singer of
Evanescence.
Lauren, our Amy Lee!

4. NARRATIVE
There 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.

5. NARRATIVE
As 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.

6. NARRATIVE
As 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.

7. NARRATIVE
For 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.

8. 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.