Welcome to my blog

My name is Kristian Oevreeide and this year I worked in a group of 3 (Sophie, Bronwen) to complete our Media A2 coursework. I started creating the website and did research and planning for our digipak. Bronewn created the digipak and Sophie finished adding thing to the website. We all worked on merchandise for the website and Sophie and I edited the video. We all did some camera work and directing to create our music video for the song "Throne" by "Bring Me The Horizon".

SR: Final Cut

This is our final cut in which I have edited the last few details of the fast paced sequence. Since this was the only thing that was still missing, I tried out 4 different paces in Final Cut Pro, which you can see an explanation and a video on below 

The original pace of each take was only 0.4 milliseconds. When trying to play around with it a bit I had one sequence where the takes were 0.18 milliseconds, one sequence when the takes were 0.12 milliseconds, one sequence where the were 0.8 milliseconds and the original sequence with 0.4 milliseconds. Doing this I was able to compare each sequence and see which one was the best. I ended up with going for 12 milliseconds in the fast paced sequence. Below you can see the video of the different takes. 

Final website

Here is a link to our website:

http://bmthehorizon50.wixsite.com/website

Here is a video where we go through the different pages in our website.

Final Digipak

This is what our final digipak looks like:

Evaluation Question 1A - Conventions

1A "How do your product use or challenge conventions?"

When it comes to music videos there are many conventions. Some are there by accident such as the Male Gaze theory which was coined by Laura Mulvey, and then there are some which are done on purpose to attract the target audience or secondary audiences such as intertextuality. When deciding on convention in a music video it is important to consider Stuart Halls theory on audience which consists of the theory that what a produce sends out to the audience will be interperated differently by different social groups.

We did a lot of research on other music videos of both genre specific and just music videos in general to see what we needed and wanted to add in our video. Sophie talk more in detail about each theorist that I am discussing. A very important feature to take into consideration when making a music video is Andrew Goodwins theory of the links between lyrics and visuals. When creating the video we decided on having some links between visuals and lyrics. The most obvious one being when the singer says the word "Ocean" we see the singer fall in water.

We also included intertextuality in our video to attract the primary and secondary audience. One of the intertexualitys we have in our video is the color powder scene. The color powder scene was inspired by 30 Seconds to Mars - Up in the air where a group of people through color powder at each other.

Originally we had planed on doing a group shot of people throwing color powder but due to some issues it ended up only being used with the main singer. We also have intertextuality to Alt-Js video "Hunger of the Pine" and "Running by Naughty boy". For more on what intertextualitys we used click here.

In most music videos there is a narrative story which runs parallel to the performance. There are two types of narratives fragmented and linear. We decided to have a linear narrative as this was more conventional for the genre and we felt it fitted more with the songs. However at the end of our music video we created enigma at the end of our video. The end of our video is non-diegetic and it shows the main singer of the band listening to the song while the girl walks past. This creates enigma as the audience dont know if  this is the start of the relationship or if he just dream about it. It also creates the enigma which is if the main male protagonist is actually in the band or if he just imagined it as he was listening to the song.

When we started designing the digipak I got most the inspiration from the logo of the THATS THE SPIRIT album by Bring Me The Horizon. You can see the first plan here. The use of only a 2 sided digipak was inspired from many digipaks as its one of the most common but as a reference we used "The Resistance" by Muse as I had a physical copy of it.

We kept looking at other digipaks for ideas and thats when I was inspired by Kaleo A/B. You can read about what else inspired the hand print on our digipak here.

In our website we also did a lot of research to see what conventions where most common in websites, so for example the amount of link lists and what their layout was.

We desided to have 6 link lists including the Home button as the most common where 5 to 7 we also decided to use the word "merch" instead of merchandise or store as merch is shorter and therefor looks better on the site and it was more commonly used on websites with the same target audience such as Bullet for My Valentine. You can read what else we did here.

We focused a lot on creating merchandise for our website as it is one of the things that still create a high revenue for bands and artists unlike CDs. Thats why we decided to create different merch such as T-shirt, Dog tags, Snap back, baby clothes and more.

This is a list of where we got our inspiration:

INSTRUMENT LOCATED OUTSIDE

You Me At Six - Stay With Me

via GIPHY

Asking Alexandria - Here I Am

via GIPHY

Twenty One Pilots - Ride

via GIPHY

Our video

via GIPHY

COLOR POWDER

30 Seconds To Mars - Up in the Air

via GIPHY

Kesha - Take it Off

via GIPHY

Our video

via GIPHY

POOL SEQUENCE 

Panic At The Disco - This is Gospel 

via GIPHY

Naughty Boy ft. Beyonce - Runnin

via GIPHY

Our Video

via GIPHY

RUNNING SEQUENCE

Alt-J - Hunger of the Pine

via GIPHY

Our Video 

via GIPHY

FAST PACED SEQUENCE 

30 Seconds To mars  - Up In The Air

via GIPHY

Our video

via GIPHY

Evaluation Question 1B - Social Issues

Overall the evaluation question 1 is: "How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or issues?". However I have decided to split the question into 2 parts, because I thought it would give a better overview. Therefore part 1A will be: "How do your products use or challenge conventions?" and 1B will be: "How do your products represent social groups or issues?"

1B: "How do your products represent social groups or issues?" 

SR and KO
The main social groups in the media are: 

• Age 
• Gender 
• Sexuality 

These points we addressed in a Radio Interview, where Kristian is playing the interviewer and I am playing the director of the music video "Throne", Plastic Kid. Below the video you can also find the full script that I created of the radio interview. 



Radio Interview Script (SR): 


Interviewer: That was Bring Me The Horizon's new song Throne, check out their new music video on YouTube now. Today in the studio I'd like to welcome the director of the musc video for Throne, Plastic Kid. Welcome to our study! 

Plastic Kid: Hi

Interviewer: So let's talk a bit about your music video, I mean I absolutely loved it and I am also a huge fan of both alternative rock and metal core so this is just my type of music, but still I have several questions about the social groups and issues in this music video that I wanted to ask you about. 

Plastic Kid: Sure, go ahead. 

Interviewer: Well first I wanted to ask where you got your inspiration from? 

Plastic Kid: Well, I mean as Kristeva would argue you never really get an idea just like that, you are inspired by other music video's that you have seen before and directed before. So together with Sykes I checked out a lot of music videos and we based our ideas around some of them. 

Ofcourse we also wanted to create a link between visuals and lyrics, because that's what a music video is all about according to Goodwin you know? 

Interviewer: Yes, I have read a lot about those two theorists. And what is the song actually about then? 

Plastic Kid: Well it's about a guy who is drowning in his sorrows and doesn't know what to do with his life anymore after having lost his girlfriend, so we portrayed that through having Sykes underwater when he is singing "I was an ocean lost in the open" and him running through the woods. 

via GIPHY

Interviewer: Well seems to me as if you definitely got the preferred reading accross there, cause most of your fans wrote on YouTube that they could relate to this heartbreak. 
Moving on to the next question, why did you decide on only using male band members in your music video? Because there are other rock bands such as Paramore and Angel At My Table who have a female lead singer, so why not go for that? 

Plastic Kid: Well we are really just conforming to the stereotype that rock music is just for men,  it has become a norm to society due to the long history of bands such as AC/DC, Rolling Stones and Queen only consisting of males. Therefore we are only conforming to this stereotype, and ofcourse Bring Me The Horizon consists only of males, so some argue it would be odd to have a female lip syncing with a male voice as voiceover such as in the fan made music video for Sail by Awolnation. 

Interviewer: Yes that does make sense, but staying focuse on the female side of things, why would you only have one female in your music video and not more like in the video from Fall Out Boy for their song "My songs know what you did in the dark". Then it could also be more appealing to a male audience or not? 

Plastic Kid: Well yeah it would be more appealing to a male audience, but I mean males already listen quite a lot to our music in general. They are our target audience because they are just generally more interested in rock than women. I mean Bring me the Horizon have featured on the cover of AP (Alternative Press) many times and they have also been on the cover of Rock Sound a few times.  Rock Sounds average readers are aged 15-24 and around 72% or so of their audience are males. So males generally already listen to our music and follow us. 

 


Interviewer: Yes, but why would more females then be interested in this video by just having one female instead of two? 

Plastic Kid: In most music videos where there is more than one female, they are the dancers or just there to make the singer and male protagonist look good. This is the case of the song from Fall Out Boy. It is easy to assume that a feminist would not like to see an objectified female in the music video showing cleavage and being the female that the male breaks up with and being the stereotype of the female cooking. Therefore, we did the exact opposite, we have the female breaking up with the guy, the guy cooking and the female burning the pictures and wearing a bit more appropriate clothing, not showing as much cleavage. And it turns out we were right, we found a bigger female audience being attracted to this video.

Interviewer: I noticed that even though you didn't have the female objectified there were still a few elements of male gaze in the music video, would you like to comment on that? 

Plastic Kid: Yes, I mean Mulvey would argue that several videos have male gaze. One of the main reasons for this is of course to attract a male audience. Mulvey argues that the woman is objectified through clothing and make-up and of course the editing that is used when showing the woman on screen. So as mentioned,  we wanted to try and appeal to a bigger female audience with this video, hence we focused less on having females in our music video. However, our female protagonist is still wearing make-up, has the typical long hair and is skinny and good looking, therefore there still is that little element of male gaze. 

Interviewer: Are there ways through cinematography that you specifically showed that the female had more power in this video? 

Plastic Kid: If I have to think about one scene it would be when she slaps him, this is really when she is the more dominating figure, and I decided to emphasise on this by adding a key frame that then zooms in on the moment she slaps him. Also, our female actor played it out really well so the moment after the slap she had a very powerful look on her face, which I had asked her to do so that the audience would be left there thinking "Woah". 

Interviewer: Well that was a very detailed answer, thank you for that. In a bunch of music videos you can see that there are the typical stereotypes or counter stereotypes, which ones did you include in Throne? 

Plastic Kid: Well as mentioned we have the counter stereotype of the male cooking instead of the female, because we wanted to challenge the common stereotype and make our video a bit more interesting and our female audience actually noticed it and liked the fact that the male was cooking, because it was breaking the stereotype so through this we attracted a female audience.

Evaluation Question 2 - Branding

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of "branding"? 

Evaluation question 2 from KristianO97

In this powerpoint I talk about the things we did to keep a strong brand and grow the brand image of our band.