In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products?
The xx - Crytsalized and Florence & the Machine - Cosmic Love music videos' contain elements of mise en scene, camera, editing and narrative we wanted to capture for our own music video.
The xx - Crystalized
Florence and the Machine - Cosmic Love
Although these bands are from slightly different genres both of them have elements of their genre in our song of choice. We looked at different conventions they conform to in their videos and tried to incorporate elements from both.
The projection screens over the artist in our video is greatly inspired by the the Crystalized music video.
We analysed closely at their facial expressions and their body language but the band are quite emotionless, almost miserable. They don't put much emphasis into their performance on the videos, they just seem quite relaxed, which is a convention developed by The xx. We conformed to this convention because in the projection scenes we made sure they were effortlessly singing the lyrics so that the audience could recognize the artists as The xx.
Another convention we conformed to in our video was the pop convention, used by Florence and the Machine in Cosmic Love. The lighting in Florence's music video is very brightly coloured, with lots of vibrant pinks and blues.
We wanted the audience to differentiate between the "black and white" xx scenes to vibrant Florence and the Machine scenes.
We used multi-coloured lights and strobe lighting in alot of the end scenes after Florence has been introduced into the song. In our song, the lyrics are slow and sang quite dull so the contrasting bright visuals would liven them up.
We kept the locations of shooting quite unnatural and surreal, places that are not public, their isn't alot of people walking around, the locations are secluded and only for the band. There is only one location in crystalised, as there is in alot of xx videos, and they are quite studio/empty room locations. Florence uses a more locations in her videos but they are always quite strange such as in Cosmic Love she
has a room full of mirrors, which create amazing effects as the lighting reflects off them. We conformed to the Florence convention of having quite out there locations and we filmed the majority of ours in a Architects of Air structure, which is not your usual, everyday location. We also incorporated The xx's location into it, we used a blank wall to film the projection scenes and the bright light scenes.
The camera work is what keeps the audience engaged in The xx's Crystalized video as their is no narrative and no other locations. The director uses straight cut transitions to close ups on the characters and pans across the band members, without the variety of shots this video would be very boring, just watching the same scene continuously. Similarly to this we used two cameras, one to film a master shot and the other from different angles and lengths to add a variety of shots into our video and also to enable us to edit the scenes together seamlessly, keeping the continuity when we want to go from a mid shot to a close up.
There is no specific narrative in Cosmic Love but there are different scenes which almost create a story, such as the scene where Florence is searching through the trees. Even though there isn't really a story-line to it, it still works as a music video, so we thought we could use this kind of narrative, with different scenes and locations intertwined to make a more interesting
video. Our music video doesn't have one specific narrative but we added shots of them entering and exploring the air structure to create short narratives within, similar to Florence and the Machines video.
As the band we are creating a video for is The xx we had too make sure they looked and dressed how The xx would. We dressed our male character in black skinny jeans and a plain tshirt. Our female character is dressed in a black leather jacket and a high-waisted leather skirt, so they are both wearing conventional, modern indie outfits. This is important so the audience can recognize the artists, the black outfits also aid to the visibility of the projections.
The projection screens over the artist in our video is greatly inspired by the the Crystalized music video.
We wanted to create a similar atmosphere and impression of our band to our audience.
Atmosphere is easy to change and create through the variation of content we can project over our artists. For instance, when we project images of clouds moving onto our artist, it gives the audience a sense of calm; while the fire image projected over the artists creates sense of enthusiasm and vivacity.
We analysed closely at their facial expressions and their body language but the band are quite emotionless, almost miserable. They don't put much emphasis into their performance on the videos, they just seem quite relaxed, which is a convention developed by The xx. We conformed to this convention because in the projection scenes we made sure they were effortlessly singing the lyrics so that the audience could recognize the artists as The xx.Another convention we conformed to in our video was the pop convention, used by Florence and the Machine in Cosmic Love. The lighting in Florence's music video is very brightly coloured, with lots of vibrant pinks and blues. We wanted the audience to differentiate between the "black and white" xx scenes to vibrant Florence and the Machine scenes.
We used multi-coloured lights and strobe lighting in alot of the end scenes after Florence has been introduced into the song. In our song, the lyrics are slow and sang quite dull so the contrasting bright visuals would liven them up.
has a room full of mirrors, which create amazing effects as the lighting reflects off them. We conformed to the Florence convention of having quite out there locations and we filmed the majority of ours in a Architects of Air structure, which is not your usual, everyday location. We also incorporated The xx's location into it, we used a blank wall to film the projection scenes and the bright light scenes. 
The camera work is what keeps the audience engaged in The xx's Crystalized video as their is no narrative and no other locations. The director uses straight cut transitions to close ups on the characters and pans across the band members, without the variety of shots this video would be very boring, just watching the same scene continuously. Similarly to this we used two cameras, one to film a master shot and the other from different angles and lengths to add a variety of shots into our video and also to enable us to edit the scenes together seamlessly, keeping the continuity when we want to go from a mid shot to a close up. 
There is no specific narrative in Cosmic Love but there are different scenes which almost create a story, such as the scene where Florence is searching through the trees. Even though there isn't really a story-line to it, it still works as a music video, so we thought we could use this kind of narrative, with different scenes and locations intertwined to make a more interesting video. Our music video doesn't have one specific narrative but we added shots of them entering and exploring the air structure to create short narratives within, similar to Florence and the Machines video.
The usual shot length in any music video is no longer than 2 seconds, in most of The xx's videos they break this rule with really long shots. We challenged this convention developed by The xx as we felt like the song was generally more fast paced and needed faster cuts.
The editing keeps in time with the pace of the music, at first the shots are very long when the song is quite slow and as it gets into the remixed parts of our song we keep the shots in time with the music by using fast pace straight cuts.
You Got The Love - The xx
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