However, due to not be able to really use anyone famous we were looking on the copyright free music sight ‘Jamendo’ but we were unsuccessful in finding something that we really liked. Now we are looking at ‘Ellie Goulding’ to find a song that hasn’t been released or had a video made for it yet. As this would be an easier solution for us. But we are going to keep looking until we find something that will really work for us.

I have chosen Taylor Swifts video ‘Love story’ which portrays the classic story of Romeo and Juliet. The narrative works by mixing a modern day high school scene with the olden day Castle where supposed Juliet (Taylor) lives, at the high school two students first meet (love at first sight) Taylor and boy, which then cuts to her being Juliet and meeting Romeo at the royal dance, not knowing who he is till after, creating the concept of forbidden love, and that they are both young. Obviously the song ends with her last verse stating that Romeo asks to marry her,

yet then Taylor comes back from her fairy-tale ending back in high school where she starts talking to the boy that she has just met, it shows the love can be seen as a fairy tale and most girls can relate to these situations when they are young and fall in love for the first time. The ideology shows the story of Romeo and Juliet, every relationships has its ups and downs. People fall in love and someone is always against it or they supposedly live happily ever after in the end.  

The main target audience for Taylor Swift would be teenagers to young adults, predominantly female. This is because most of her songs are based upon adolescent memories and previous boyfriend relationships. Representation is used in the video through the characters and location. The song is called ‘Love Story’ therefore the audience would realize before even watching the video that a love story would be represented in the video. In this aspect the video shows the representation of a stereotypical High School scene

with a young adolescent boy and girl, it then stereotypes the traditional setting of romantic scenes of a castle and forestry with the use of Shakespearean dresses and menswear this shows a typical young girl fantasy of love. The use of the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet is what teenagers would study at school and a play that is well-known to most. It uses the connotations of betrayal, forbidden romance and rebellion, which can still be seen in schools today on a much smaller scale. The old castle is a beautiful romantic location to set a love story, and many can relate to this fantasy and its every young girls dream to live happily ever after.   

The video has a linear narrative, with an intertextual reference to Shakespeare. The beginning of the song has them meet at a party in the first verse. The second verse where she has snuck out to the garden to see him “We keep quiet ’cause we’re dead if they knew” seems to imply that something is going on. In the very next bridge she refers to herself as a scarlet letter, which could easily imply that she’s pregnant. When they finally meet on the outskirts of town and he tells her that he has spoken to her father, and he has apparently consented to the marriage. One good reason for this quick turnaround may be to save the shame of a baby out of wedlock. If this is the case though, there is a very ironic suggestion to “pick out a white dress,” though this could be intentional to keep up her image of virginity. This has the potential to be a very ironic representation of a girl’s infatuation with a guy, which leads to an unfortunate marriage of necessity. Also it is perhaps a satire of how people always seem to believe that their own romances are worthy of Romeo and Juliet (which we all know does not end that well) and are always blinded by their position within their own relationships. At the end the song returns to present day where she goes and talks to the guy for the first time, showing the audience that this could be the beginning of the fantasy she has just imagined in her head. The Shakespearean references could be used to over dramatize the narrative, and as we all know they die in the end, instead of living happily ever after. However the ‘scarlet letter’ reference could also show her desirability but that she is off limits as seen in the video at the grand ball.

This is the foundation of Swift’s lyric–that any ‘love story’ is rife with complications, peaks and valleys, extreme joy and unbearable heartache. And by comparing the song’s characters to Shakespeare’s, she’s simply alluding to the idea that all love stories are fundamentally the same, regardless of their origin or outcome. There is a relationship between lyrics, visual and the music. There is also lots of close ups of the artist as she is the main character in the video. The institution of a music video would be the record label, company as they have the main role of making the music video promoting the artist to their audience and fan base. The video helps market the artist and wants to create the most profit, as videos can cost an extortionate amount of money. “Love Story” was first released as the debut single off Swift’s second album, Fearless, in 2008. In an article for Billboard, Swift described “Love Story” as “a love that you’ve got to hide because for whatever reason it wouldn’t go over well. I spun it in the direction of Romeo and Juliet; our parents are fighting. I relate to it more as a love that you cannot really elaborate on — a love that maybe society wouldn’t accept or maybe your friends wouldn’t accept.”

The language used in the video is modern day love lyrics except for the use of ‘Scarlet Letter’ in the lyrics, the narrator alludes to Romeo and Juliet and The Scarlet Letter to describe a lover whom her father will not let her see. In the end, however, the father reconciles and the lover proposes to the female narrator. The proposal is accompanied by a key change.

The camera is constantly moving to show that the narrative is always moving on to something new. It keeps the audience entertained with a quicker paceas the audience become more excited of how the characters relationships evolve throughout the video. The camera angles change as they like to show different perspectives of the narative. They use closeups of Taylor and the Boys faces, to see their emotion by making it vey intimate to eachother and for the audience to be involved with that intimacy. There are also tracking and establishing shots of places and people. And this is a birdseye view of the dancing to make vary the shots to make them more interesting and enjoyable for the audience. The music directly correlates at time with the footage. As the song progresses the editing gets quicker as the shots cut from her on the balcony, to a close up of them holding hands, to the forest back to the balcony.

Here Taylor is in the forest as she has seceretly come to find Romeo. The camera likes to zoom into the action and focus in on Taylors facial expressions. It brings in the songs lyrics ‘we’d be dead if they knew’ showing how they cant be seen together so the mise-en-scene of the forest, night time and the lantern emphasises the secret love they share.

A white horse is shown in the video obviously the one the man rode to see her on, the use of an animal shows the gentleness and romantic nature of the video. The shots are repetative but put into different orders. When she is on the balcony she engages with the audience by looking directly into the camera as if she is telling you this stoy of her love personally just to you.

This shot is just after she has seen him running to her balcony, she smiles and then there is a typical dramatic almost slow motion running scene, where they run to eachother and have a full on romantic kiss scene.

I like this image as it shows the secretness of their relationship and that the audience is involved in this secret. It uses iconogaphy of being quiet by putting a finger to his lips. So that nobody hear them, and setting their meeting in the dead of night shows the exciting and typical routine of secret meetings. This single part of the video links eveything together by showing the fairytale she dreams of and the love she has for him.

This is the final shot, where she comes back to reality, where in her fantasy she thinks he asks her to marry her, to her real life where this guy actually comes up to talk to her instead, the scene then goes to a black out as the music fades.

media-evaluation

Open the Word document above.

technologies

These annotations highlight the ways in which our film opening links to the conventions of our genre in order to attract our particular audience we have previously identified. The annotations refer to genre conventions and the use of music.

A lot of young men in today’s world tend to be quite stylish and most likely shop at places like Next and Top Man. Our main character, Michael Andrews is also image conscious and in our opening he wears the typical fashionable attire we tend to see on young men today. Our target audience can relate to the young Michael Andrews and perhaps even aspire to him, as he is an established young man out in the working world.

Our target audience are likely to listen to the modern rock genre. Bands such as The Kooks, The Fratellis, Lost Prophets etc seem to be popular amongst the young generation. The music we used in our opening was inspired by this modern rock style and this kind of music would probably make up the soundtrack for our whole film. This is another good factor to why our film would appeal to our young target audience.

The genre of our film is crime/thriller with many aspects of action/adventure as well. In general, crime thrillers tend to appeal more to male audiences. Our target audience probably watch popular TV crime series such as Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. Also things like Supernatural and House may appeal to our target audience. Although these TV series are not exactly under the genre of crime, each episode involves a good amount of action with the main characters unravelling a mystery to find the answer they are looking for – much like detective dramas.

This explains some of the key features of our opening and some institutional issues.

Nicolas Angel played by Simon Pegg      Michael Andrews played by Ed Watson

Here we have to lone cop type characters, ‘Nicolas’ is the main character in ‘Hot Fuzz’, although it is a comedy and may strike a completely different audience it is still based around the Police Force and how Nicolas is very good at his job just like how Mike in our film ‘Hidden Crime’ is amazing at his job. So although one is a Comedy actor and the other is a crime thriller actor they both share the same love for their job. There costume is very similar they both wear black trousers, white shirt, black tie and handcuffs. Michael is more casual with a smart grey coat, whereas Nicolas wears proper full kitted out police gear. Both of these actors are the main character in their films and are a key role model for all up and coming policemen, they are both astounding at there jobs, and there bosses share the same hate for them. However, where Nicolas’ boss sends him somewhere nice in the country to get rid of him, remembering this is a comedy, Mike’s boss decides to seek his own revenge on the young lad due to his resounding jealousy for him.  Nicolas is playing in a Comedy so needs to make the role funny and sometimes reacts to situations in humorous ways, whereas Michael is in a serious crime film where he needs to act very natural and as a very realistic policeman to get his part across to the audience. Nicolas is slightly older than Mike and Mike has a more fashionable hair style showing his youth, for the modern era whereas due to Nicolas age he has much shorter, easier manageable hairstyle for a policeman.

They both share the same facial expressions at different times in the film. Nicolas is more of an action packed policeman who uses a walky-talky to communicate to other colleagues, we also see in the opening him using big weapons, whereas Mike is more of a detective and prefers to investigate the murders rather than fight against the criminals. However by the end of both films they both have to save their own lives, where Mike seeks revenge on his own boss, Nicolas must save the villagers lives. Mike works alone, he has a girlfriend and at first glance leads a simple life which soon whirlwinds into a huge line of events, on the other hand Nicolas had a huge action packed life until he got told to move away and there lives flipped around but by the end they are both fighting crime again. When Nicolas gets sent to this small village he also must deal with the policeman he meets there, who becomes his side kick, this is different to Mike as he is alone against his boss and other work mates, whereas Nicolas was alone but now has back up by the very dumb village policeman. However, we must remember that one is a comedy and one is a serious crime thriller, therefore they are going to use different aspects and conventions to create particular moods for their audiences.

1. Special Effects        

2. Genre and how the opening suggests it

3. Title font and style

4. Story and how the opening sets it up

5. Costumes and props

6. Camerawork and editing

7. Setting/location

8. How characters are introduced

9. The title of the film

Special effects make it look mature and professional, use of blue and white are modern bold colours and similar to police colours, the use of red in the titles creates and indication that there will be death involved in our film. The smoke also creates that eerie thriller mist and makes the audience feel uneasy.

The most important thing is getting the genre across, we chose the handcuff clip as this shows the audience our main character is obviously a policeman and this is a main part of the narrative. The handcuffs are a good convention to portray the crimes that may be committed and that our main character will have to arrest people.

The title font is the same as our actors names font as we wanted to keep the continuity going, we kept the font white to carry on the continuity colours and this is also the colour of interrogation lights and spotlights which make the writing bold and eye-catching yet also relates to our film genre. It is thick and bold text all in capitals which make it stand out, we placed it at the bottom of the frame so it doesn’t distract the audience from the main focus of the particular shot yet it still gives enough impact with a black shadow behind it to blend in with Michael’s police uniform.

The next shot is Michael kissing his girlfriend. This is the simple outline of one part of the narrative structure, yet as the whole film progresses so does their relationship. At this moment it shows that they are happily together, through her smile after the kiss. For the audience, it gives another interest into the story line and makes the film seem slightly less about the police, thus broadening the target audience; however his girlfriend becomes a very key character as the film progresses, but the audience are unaware of this as it is not seen in the opening.

Costumes and props are very important for our whole film, especially keeping to the conventions of crime thrillers. In this shot you can see a case file made by Sally. This was an effective shot as this tells the audience, Michael is a key character that the audience should admire, and realize that he is the main character. This case file was very good to show Michaels importance and as he has lots of writing on the file shows that he is hard-working and very dedicated to his job. This impacts the genre conventions, as we have a ‘good cop/bad cop’ situation which is popular with many police dramas. Pieces of costume also help show a character. Michael is quite smartly dressed showing he takes pride in his appearance, and in our opening he takes the time to pin his officer badge in the right place showing this pride.

Camerawork and editing is crucial in a crime thriller as the use of the camera needs to use a variety of shots to keep the audience interested and build suspense, therefore the editing is very important as this is the place the editor selects the best shots to portray the films genre to the audience. We used our CCTV camera shot as this shows how our editor, Ryan, created variety in our shots and also made the verisimilitude and the presence of the piece seem like it was set in a real police station, which is vital in making the genre of our film believable.

The simple shot for the location of our film was chosen as it shows the plain, white corridor of a police station, again this helps the verisimilitude of the film as it helps the audience realize they are in a setting of significance to the film and this is a place they must familiarise themselves with as many of the shots for the rest of the film would be shot here. The blank walls really help to emphasise the cold and lonely feeling of a police station.

Characters are introduced literally by seeing there faces appear in shot, however in this shot there is a voiceover stating his name ‘Dan Johnson’. The audience understand from the tone of Michael (voiceovers) voice that this is his boss, and they don’t get on well. The camera is on a slight low angle shot which gives Dan the slight superiority over Mike. But apart from that the shot is a very simple, head on shot, almost like Dan is so important that the audience can understand him through his use of characterisation.

The Last shot is of the openings title, ‘Hidden Crime’ this was created on the programme ‘After Effects’. We wanted it similar to our production title, so we kept the blue and white colours but swapped them over, like I mentioned earlier this helps to reiterate the genre of our film as the colours are significant to storyline and conventions of the Police Force.

Good editing. Understand the storyline and would want to find out what happened with the two main characters. Graphics were good. Couldn’t think of anything to improve on.

This is really good feedback and better than i would have expected. I am glad they understood the storyline and that they seem intrigued by what will happen to the characters next. I am suprised they couldn’t find us anything to improve on, as you will see in my final evaluation that there is a few things i think we could do to improve it.