Jake Hardwick Evaluation Questions

Jake Hardwick

Evaluation Questions:

Question One:

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

 Our media product tends to be seen conventional to the genre it is classified as. Therefore we had followed the opinions and ideals of Andrew Goodwin whom identifies key features that categorize a music video. We had the visuals of a band therefore making it a performance video following the visual style of similar musicians and bands keeping true to the genres style and iconography, though knitted in the threads of the video we had a story sub-plot that amplified the relationship between the video, lyrics and music.  

 Here you can see how we kept the genre loyal portrayal of the band, with our performers to the left and the band who is the actually responsible for the song we chose on the right.
 

 The sub-plot I mentioned is an example of intertextuality to a urban and internet mythological creature known as "The Slenderman" or just "Slender". He was created at the Something Awful Forums: "http://forums.somethingawful.com/" It is said to be seen as wearing a black suit, it appears very thin and able to extend his limbs and torso to paranormal lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, he is also able to create tendrils from his fingers and back that he uses to walk on. Not much is known, as no specific information has been found about origins, but his objective and habitat are made very clear. It has the need to kidnap children, and is seen right before the disappearance of a child or multiple children. In our case we contradicted the ideal that "The Slenderman" is some awful hellish hunter of innocent children and as seen in the last shot of our music video media production is a misunderstood simple creature who only searches the world looking to find love.

As well as taking influence from the original mythology we took ideas and interpretations from the massively popular indie game title "Slender" designed to scare the player through the use of sound and a creepy looking over your shoulder atmospheric feel. The player plays in first person really making you feel like it is you in the dark forest being hunted down by "The Slenderman". This game has taken off and became instantly vastly popular as it is said to be one of the simplest but scariest games of all time. The simple objective of the game is to go around collecting "Slender notes" that are basically scraps of paper with scrawling on them depicting "The Slenderman" and they also have writing with creepy or almost psychotic phrases on them. Going back to Andrew Goodwin we took on the idea of using these notes/pages in our video containing lyrics from the song in the style of the "Slender" notes, this becomes a link between the visuals and the lyrics. These scenes are also shot in a 1st person perspective like the game adding a sense of voyeurism as you are seeing through the eyes of the individual who is experiencing this in our video.

As you can see bellow the direct intertextuality we used between the game and our video. A still from our music video on the left and a print screen from the game on the right.

The subplot also carried through into the editing of the video. In the game when "The Slenderman" draws close to you, your vision becomes static like and the intensity of the static changes with the distance between the player and "The Slenderman", so we took this into consideration and we used the same effect on the relevant subplot clips as seen by the examples bellow, again our video on the left and game on the right. 

 

The static for the game is influenced by a Youtube fake documentary series called "Marble Hornets" on "The Slenderman" where the camera would be effected by glitches and static when it draws close. The series can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/marblehornets

The Mise-en-scene of our video the game and the documentary series all are in a wooded or quiet area at night setting the mood and tone.

It has been awhile since I mentioned the Performance aspect of the production so I am going to go mention that for awhile. The bands performance is seen as standard from Goodwin's perspective with close ups on the instruments and medium shots of the band, it is seen as standard all par me doing some singing. Unlike the standards of Goodwin we had very few or no close up shots of my attempt of miming dramatically and they where all mid range with other members of the band in shot, this shot ended up being dubbed as our master shot that we always referred back to and had as the base shot for the whole video. We had a very big range of coverage with not much time to fit it all in especially with the subplot story element.

Apart from this we kept the performance segment conventional to the genre a good example being from 2.29 - 2.35 where we really showed how editing can fit with the pace of the music to keep everything relative and flowing. 

 

(Video for reference)

As well as the video itself as a group we had the task of creating an authentic digipack panel for a CD and a magazine advert promoting the CD we have created. After looking at several digipacks in our genre of "punk pop" or something like that I came to the conclusion we needed something abstract that is not just a photo of our band but more like symbolism or something else that stands for something and is eye catching so I opened up a oil painting of a smoking skeleton I did, as it seemed deep and symbolic in someway that all these other guys where doing trying to keep in conventional in Adobe Photoshop that had disappointingly not been updated in awhile and gave it some fashionable aviator sunglasses with the reflection of our four band members in it. I also changed the colour scheme to make it jump out more and be all in your face and noticeable. 

Before on the left and after on the right.

 It could have a message that smoking kills and therefore is ironic with the skeleton smoking or it could just be a "badass" cover with a skeleton with pimped out shades living life.

Our magazine advert also had the same feel and conventionalism as the digipack with similar images as seen on the digipack. Unfortunately I do not currently have access to the image of the advert so hopefully I remember this and come back and edit it in, if not and you are reading this then I apologize for being so forgetful.

Question Two: 

Question Two can be found here: http://prezi.com/q9ze-jogi9ek/

Question Three:

 

Question Four:

 Question Four can be found here: http://www.xtranormal.com/xnmm/story/14039536/&movie_id=14039536