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

2. When I listened to the music track
and very much thought of the lyric
and images that went along with the
lyrics. These lyrics listed are very
easy to picture. ‘Great clouds roll
over the hills’, you can imagine clouds
rolling over the hills. ‘But if you close
your eyes’, I think of a man walking
around with his eyes shut. ‘In the city
that we love’ I picture a guy walking
around his city with his arms out
looking happy and smiley.

3. We felt that many current music videos are very colourful, focusing on a
variety of costumes and locations. We gave thought to these conventions
of the genre when choosing our locations. The graffiti wall was selected
in part to tie in with the lyrics as well as to reflect the urban feel we
wanted to represent. The bright, vibrant colours also reflected the mood
or the artist/song. This fits in with Barthes ideas of images reinforcing
cultural myths - in this case the images we used in our video were meant
to reinforce the cultural myth of vibrant, urban youth, enjoying life,
exploring the city (hence the multiple locations used in the pop promo).
Richard Dyer did a lot of work on the ‘pop star’ as a construct. This idea
also influenced our work as our singer was very much constructed to fit
the image we desired. We wanted an artist that seemed to be in it for
his love of the music, rather than ‘the bling’. This was reflected through
his costumes; the first was the more urban, made up of a plain purple
hoodie and jeans - no logos, no jewellery, no grillz, no big watch, his
second costume was a dark grey suit, showing that he can dress to
impress, without needing to accessorise. We specifically chose a guy
whose appearance wouldn’t distract from the music, going against Dyer’s
idea that the star dominates the narrative more than the lyrics.

4. Another of Barthes theories that we made use of is that of
Semiotics. In one way, the graffiti wall that our artist sings in
front of is just a wall (the sign) but it also signifies, as the lyrics
suggest, the potential for disaster (“and the walls keep tumbling
down”).
EA Kaplan believes that a frequent return to the singer’s face in a
pop video is a key anchoring technique, keeping the audience
grounded in what they are experiencing. In our video we utilised
this idea through the editing of a variety of medium close-ups.
Our singer appears continuously in the video and this links to our
idea of it being ‘all about the music’ and gimmick-free. The
original singer of this song was also the song’s writer and it was
important to us to recreate the same closeness between the artist
and the song with our artist.

5. We specifically set out to make a video that would appeal to both
genders. It feels like the majority of pop videos out there today are
highly sexualised, glorifying (or even exploiting) the female form. This
was not our intention. We purposefully went against Laura Mulvey’s
theories of scopophilia, where films create images of women for the
gratification of men, but did not want to fall into the trap of sexualising
our artist either. We felt it was important to go against the norms of the
genre and produce a ‘PG’ video that could be enjoyed by both men and
women and boys and girls - people that can look up to Bastille and see
him as a role model in an industry that is lacking in them. This was
part of our ‘preferred reading’ of the media text (Stuart Hall) and we
feel from our post production audience research that this was
successful.
Andrew Goodwin pinpoints various elements that he believes are typical
to a music video. We did foreground the singer’s face as, as previously
mentioned, we wanted to emphasise his relationship with the song. We
also used the lyrics as visual clues, reflected in some of the video
imagery, such as the graffiti covered walls. We also used some quick
cuts giving a montage effect, as inspired by the Russian film maker
Sergei Eisenstein.