A2 ADVANCED PORTFOLIO: Laura Mossendew

Question 1 – In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Finished music video: Vox Populi - 30 Seconds To Mars

30 Seconds To Mars - This Is War (Official Music Video)

Nickelback - Far Away (Official Music Video)

TRIAD

We also used the triad symbol in our digipak, web page and music video because it is the symbol that 30 Seconds to Mars use to represent their band and is often used in their music videos, tours, merchandise, Album covers and website. Therefore we decided that the triad should appear in all of our media products.

The red circles highlight both a Triad and glyphics that appear in 30 Seconds to Mars own video - "This is War".

These screen grabs (below) are of some of the clips in our music video where we used the triad symbol to help tell the story of unity within war and link to the 30 Seconds to Mars fan base, the 'Echelon'.

We decided that a tattoo and triad necklace would be a subtle way to encorporate the triad symbol into our music video, without it becoming the main focus of the video, just as 30 Seconds to Mars do themselves.

QUOTES

Quote from our music video

Below is a screen grab of a quote at the start of music video 'This is War' by 30STM 'War will end us'. 30 Seconds to Mars often start or end their music videos with a powerful quote to evoke emotion in the audience (e.g. Beautiful Lie)

Quote from 'This is War'

Link to A Beautiful Lie Music Video

Quote from 'A Beautiful Lie'

The Echelon

The Echelon are 30 Seconds To Mars' fans and are often featured in their music videos (as pictured in 'Kings & Queens') as people either in the background or playing an active role in the music video like in 'Closer to the edge' where the entire video is about the fans who go to their live shows. We decided that we should include the echelon in our video so we gathered a group of our friends to lip sync

some of the performance parts of the song at the start.

Narrative
In 30STM music videos there is always some form of narrative, sometimes based on reality like in music video 'This is War' and sometimes completely random conceptual ideas, like in 'Hurricane'. However, some of their music videos are a mixture of both 'This is War' starts off with three soldiers in an armored vehicle on patrol when they are attacked. Rather than being attacked by people the soldiers are attacked by flying and floating cars, tanks and weapons, combining reality and conceptual ideas into one video whilst at the same time also delivering a performance lip syncing to the song. The narrative always conveys a powerful message in 30STM music videos and we wanted to try and do the same by telling a war story and the pain that follows when a soldier dies, not only for the family he leaves behind but also his comrades.

The reality side of the video was the story told about the soldier who died and the people he left behind in pain and grief, whilst also delivering a slightly conceptual element to the video when Cathy (his girlfriend) appears in the video dressed as a soldier in camouflage clothes and face paint when Sam gets shot and is hallucinating.

I wouldn't say that we challenged the conventions of music videos or this genre of music as 30STM music videos often have a similar feel to them as there is narrative & performance in all of their videos. We thought that choosing a 6minute long song to make a video for was a big enough challenge in the time that we had so sticking to the conventions of 30 Seconds to Mars music videos was what we decided to do and because we all like their music videos so much we wanted to try and create a music video in the style that Bartholemew Cubbins (Jared Leto's director name) does.

Question 2 – How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We used a variety of techniques to link our CD cover and website to our music video. All of our media products are focused around soldiers and war so linking them together provided consistency for our band, 30 Seconds to Mars image. When we filmed the soldier scenes for our music video we took lots of photographs of them running around and posing from different angles and distances to use on both our web page and digipak. This meant that the boys would look the same on the video and on our other media products we did this so that the boys would be in their camouflage costume for the photos that we needed helping to link our three media products together.

Our digipak, web page and music video all have the purpose of trying to sell the song, 'Vox Populi' and the album it is on, 'This is War'. The album title suggests that the album has something to do with war so we felt that having the theme of our music video as war and the loss felt by many that war brings with it was appropriate for our song choice and would fit with the bands image. The band are well known for being a close knit team and working together, sharing many of the same views on life and the vision of what they want their music to achieve. This is similar to soldiers who have to work as a team to achieve tasks successfully.

THIS IS WAR - Album Cover

The colours that we used in our music video help to add emotion and feeling to the video, for example; white text on black background for our quotes at the start and end of our music video. Black has connotations of death and scary thing, war causes the death of lots of soldiers and civilians and is a scary thought to many, therefore we decided that having a black background on our web page helped to link the music video and web page together. We also used a black background on the inside cover of our digipak with a photograph of a soldier pointing his gun directly into the camera.

Before starting to create our website we spent a long time researching band websites, not only 30 Seconds To Mars website but others such as; Panic! at The Disco, We The Kings and My Chemical Romance. From this research we found the things that most websites include; large photograph at top of website with band name, social networking feeds (twitter), links to social network pages, merchandise, news, photographs, music videos etc. Link to website research. We tried to add all of the features present on real band websites to our own.

After conducting lots of research into 30 Seconds to Mars album covers and the things that they, and similar bands like 'Panic! At The Disco' put on theres we took inspiration from them to help design our own. All of 30STM's album covers have meaning behind them, for example 'This is War' has a Tiger on the front. The tiger is the symbol of the Samurai's who were known for being great warriors and stand for courage and change, both of these things can be related to war as the soldiers need courage to fight for change. The album cover has meaning behind it so we felt that our digipak should also have meaning to it.

Our Finished Album cover.

We chose to have a cloud of dust and dirt as the background for our album cover as we wanted to give the illusion of an explosion with silhouettes of the soldiers underneath showing how they move at every opportunity, even in dangerous situations like when an explosion has just occurred. The photograph below was partly the inspiration for our album cover as it shows the silhouettes of soldiers against the dusty desert. We thought that this was a very powerful image as it shows how hard the soldiers work in difficult conditions. Therefore we thought that creating an image like this to go on our cd cover would help provide a message whilst relating to other other media products to help promote and sell the song to its target audience.

The inside cover of our digipak was inspired by a clip from music video 'This is War' where Jared Leto, the lead singer of the band is dressed as a soldier and pointing a gun directly into the camera lens, we all really like this shot so decided to use our main soldier, Sam to recreate this shot and use editing software to create the marks around the photograph to help it look more like the one we screen grabbed from the video.

Question 3 – What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Below are six of the 'Music video focus group feedback questionnaires' that we asked people in our class to fill in to give their honest opinion after watching our music video.

Overall we feel that the response that we got from our classmates was a positive one, however they did raise some issues over the lip syncing in our video where we had to use slow motion to slow down our lead singers mouth as when lip syncing the movement of his lips was too quick for the song, meaning that some of our lip syncing in the music video is slightly out of time with the song. 'Performance bit slightly out of sync and doesn't quite fit rest of the video'
Another issue that was raised was that the narrative slightly over-powered the performance side of our video, with several people suggesting that they would have liked to have seen more of the band actual performing the song and a little less detail in the narrative side of the video. 'maybe a tad more lip syncing as it could be over-run by narrative.'
It was also mentioned on two of the forms that our actors looks slightly nervous/ uncomfortable, 'The singer at the beginning looked uncomfortable'. However, this is the first time any of the actors that we chose had done anything like this and we didn't have many people to choose from who were willing to be in our music video and we are very happy with the performances that all the boys gave us, both the soldiers and the band told us that they enjoyed doing it and we eager to see the finished video.
I agree with the feedback that our audience gave us, we had to work with what we had so some bits weren't quite how we would have liked, for example out of sync lip syncing and not enough performance shots but i'm pleased with how the video turned out overall.

One thing in our video that we had to change was the flashbacks as when we asked our friends to watch the video they didn't quite understand the flashbacks as they were spread randomly throughout the video and there were lots of them, so we cut down on the number of flashbacks and made them black and white to make it clearer to the audience what the clips were.
However, some of the views that we were given in feedback sheets may be biased as some of the people who filled out the sheets in class are our friends so they may have been kinder and more positive about our video than they would have been if they didn't know us.

From the focus group feedback questionnaire I created a word collage on www.wordle.net to show the most commonly occurring words and responses from our class mates - shown how often these words were used by the size that they appear on the collage. E.g. 'professional', 'narrative' and 'song' reoccur frequently.

Due to the restrictions involving replica guns in the UK we had to be very careful when filming the narrative for our music video. There was a risk of us being seen by members of the public and them thinking that we were messing around with real guns. Unfortunately the only way that we could get around this problem was to film on private land owned by a friend of ours, although members of the public still passed through the area whilst we were filming. To get around the problems of filming with replica guns we had to make do with children's toy guns from 'PoundWorld' which were green and blue, obviously not ideal but it's all we could use. However we did have one more realistic gun from GimmieGizmo (£4.99) however we could not afford to buy enough of these guns for each of our actors so we only had one which the main soldier (Sam) who dies in the narrative used. This gun was bright orange when we purchased it, however, Sarah painted it black with acrylic paints to make it look more realistic but left the orange tip on the end of the gun so that it was clear that it was in fact a toy gun that would not pose any threat or danger to members of the public. We also stopped filming and placed the guns on the floor whenever a member of the public passed through and explained to them what we were doing so that they were not concerned. All of the people we spoke to seemed to be very happy with what we were doing and didn't have a problem with it.