Our music video is for the song Shoppers Paradise by the band Carter USM. It is based in a shopping centre but it also has a parallel meaning to the ‘real world’. We chose the song because it is upbeat and has fun lyrics, also everybody can associate to the title because everyone goes shopping. The title ‘Shoppers Paradise’ makes everyone think of a fun shopping day out. This makes it all the more surprising when our shots have different meaning to the first assumption of the audience, and makes the audience want to carry on watching the music video to see what interesting things happen next.
The text is about life and how we deal with it, our lyrics relate to what happens in life as a metaphor to what the world is really like. When you hear the lyrics in our song and see our interpretation of them in the music video it makes you think about what the hidden meaning behind the lyrics and what the are actually meaning, for example when hearing the lyrics ‘going up for the final comedown’ the immediate thought is that you are literally going up the escalator in the shopping centre, ready to come brack down for ‘all the things you missed’. But the underlying perhaps more true meaning of this lyric is that you are going up on drugs and then you have the ‘final comedown’.
The genre of the song is alternative. You know this because it is up beat and the lyrics are quick and controversial. We have made the genre clear by linking the shots with the lyrics and also making our edits fast. The audience would be able to tell this in the first few shots of the video because the song is fun from the beginning, and in our shots we have used bright lighting to keep the colours bold. Our opening shots also keep the audience interested by following the man into the shop, these make you want to watch on.
Our music video has the conventions of other real media products by having people miming the lyrics. We have also made our shot more aesthetically pleasing by keeping the colours bright and only including what we need in the shots. We have used lots of different types of shots within the music video such and different angles, close ups, mid shots and long shots. We have also used cinematography in our music video so that it keeps the audience interested rather than just looking at the same types of shots. I think that the camera movement in you shots is curtail to our music video because of the fast track this makes the shots more exciting. This is something that we wanted to make sure we do when we did the textual analysis of the other music videos. Like the other real media products of the music videos that we looked at, we have kept a main character throughout the video so that the audience sees a familiar face. We also kept our video to one main location (the shopping centre) so that it is not confusing for the audience having many different locations. The shots that we have developed to have the parallel meanings are filmed out side of the shopping centre in the ‘real world’ to enhance there separate meanings. Although our music video is not narrative based we have followed other music video conventions by making it performance based.
We have used a variety of languages to make sure the audience are constantly interested but different shots that we show. We have constructed are music video so that the different style of shots that we have all flow well and link in with one another so that the audience does not lose interest. Another way we have decided to keep the audience interested is by surprising them with some of out ironic shots. We filmed the same shots from different angles with different movement so that we had a variety, therefore we could then pick the best one to keep the text flowing smoothly.
In the opening few shots of our music video the audiences learns that we are in a shopping centre on an average day. The first of our contrasting shots goes with the lyrics ‘haberdashery, needles’ but it is not that obvious there are buttons as there would be in a haberdashery but we have mixed them in with syringes needles rather that sewing needles to put across a more aggressive view of the lyrics although to listen to it seems like a exciting happy song.
Our print work of the digipac and the magazine advert link really well with the music video because we have kept the random, exciting theme in the project. We were inspired for our music video album cover by researching others. We had the idea of the bags on peoples head because it is humorous but also when you go to the shopping centre there are many people you don’t know, so there are just a lot of blanc faces. Both our print pieces are colourful to attract the eye and make them stand out and take a second look, this is like our video because you want to keep watching because of the exciting quick shots.
We have asked some of our friends, family and other students what they thought of our music video and the response we mainly got was that the quick shots and edits look really effective and exciting but it would be nice to add more edits to the longer shot nearer to the beginning so it is more jumpy. Most people we asked said that their favourite part of the video was either the sylvanian family cinematography or the shot of the hands taking the sweets.
We have used different new media technologies in the construction of our music video, such as the internet. We have uploaded our video to facebook to get feedback from our friends on facebook. This has been very useful to see what works well and to have different opinions on our video. We have also used the internet to research other music videos for inspiration and to learn more about the conventions of a music video. We can use blog spot for feedback from other media students and vice versa. This means we can also learn from other media students making music videos. Other new media technologies that we have used are a new HD video camera to get good quality shots, which we backed up on an external hard drive. We then edited our shots using iMovie HD 6 on a new Mac Book. We also used a digital SLR camera to take still photographs for research and to add into the actual music video. We edited these photos how we wanted them using Adobe Photoshop CS4. We also used Photoshop to create out digipac and the poster.
Overall we are pleased with the final out come of our music video. If we were to do it again then we would add more edits and quick shots. We are also very pleased with the digipac and the poster, which we think all links well together. We have reached our aim of creating a quick, snappy, interesting, colourful and exciting music video that also meets our target audience of 18+.