Evaluation Question 2

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

For our music video, we decided to focus on some key features from the original video and use them in our own product as a reference to the original work. This is why we decided to set ours in a forest area as we believed it conveyed the correct mysterious theme that is a convention of the dream pop genre. We also believed it would make the most sense whilst referring to the story in our music video, a man chasing down another with a bow and arrow.

However, we decided to change our filter and overall theme of the video changing the entire meaning of the song in the process. The original works is demonstrating the protagonist of the video as a victim whilst they regain their power, however, ours describes the wolf as an assassin in some sense, the representation of the wolf is changed to someone stalking and hunting their target or prey. In relation to our other ancillary texts such as the Digipak, we have focused on the imagery of the wolf to present our piece. This makes the combination of our Digipak and Song extremely effective as it depicts a wolf in a delicate pattern - noticing the vulnerability of the lyrics and the powerful imagery of the wolf.

We believed that this would be most beneficial to the overall storyline of our video and allow us to keep certain genre conventions such as a disjointed narrative within our production.

Furthermore, our music video was inspired by other media texts such as the hunger games. Our protagonist of the video was heavily inspired by the protagonist of hunger games, Katniss Everdeen. This is why we opted to use a bow instead of a gun as we believed it would present a much more rustic, dystopia theme. We presented this in our website with it having an ethereal theme with white and black colours taking priority and any photographs being washed out and faded. We believed that this design would be most appropriate when taking into consideration that the website is for the dream pop genre. It is also why the choices in font were rather gentile rather than bold font as it is indicative of the genre. We have also taken inspiration from the alternative genre to convey our website as dream-pop and alternative are extremely similar in stylistic choices which is why we believe the website and video combine perfectly.

What also became apparent was the use of modern clothing. We believed a fantasy (Our original idea) would not suit the lyrics in the music video, yet, we wanted to continue using the bow and arrow hence the dystopia a feel, as if the world were lost in nature. Katniss Everdeen embodied everything we wanted in our video as she is a strong character who holds traits that could be linked to a wolf such as her skill at hunting. We showed this in our Digipak also. The inclusion of the wolf on our front cover was supposed to emphasise the wolf as the primary aspect of our video showing that the combination of all of these emphasised the meaning and icons in our production.

We also believed that a lighter filter to our video would suit it much more as it includes fast paced shots and various match on action shots that are not featured in the original work. The original focused heavily on close-up shots and slow-mo which is why we decided to set ourselves apart to avoid falling into the trap of being too similar to the original product. Also, it would make much moire sense in our video as it is faster in shot speed and camera movement. The lack of slow-mo is another contributing factor as to why we did not include similar shots. The fact that we instead decided to speed up certain sections of our video meant the further away the person or object was away from the camera meant that the shot could continue for longer.

In the dream pop genre, there is usually a recurring object that appears in the video. For Phildel's version of the video, she focused on a twig which was uniquely shaped and it appeared in different art such as her album cover and EP CD disc. Our group chose to focus on a bow and arrow for our object. This worked well for us as the bow and arrow would have been in the video regardless, but with the inclusion of an object being the convention of a dream pop video we decided to include more close ups of the bow and arrow rather than it just being a prop, this makes it one of the most notable features of the video which was intentional.

In terms of ancillary texts, our website and Digipak follow a very similar design of mainly washed out colours being the theme, however when something is required to stand out more noticeable vibrant colours will be used which is inspired by Phildel's original artwork that she uses in her music albums. There is also similarities in the clear genre conventions we have used such as gentile thin fonts rather than harsh, bold fonts that would usually be used in  a house music genre. We have also followed the convention of the imagery of animals and wildlife in the dream-pop genre, also, inspired by Phildel and other dream pop artists.

Our video and digipak demonstrate clear imagery of wildlife. The protagonist being representative of the wolf that is mentioned in the song bringing an almost literal meaning to a metaphor within the song, whilst on the album cover, imagery of wildlife such as flowers and most notably a wolf has clear direct links to our music video making the combination of the two extremely effective when presenting this.

Our video's setting plays a large role as it shows the foliage and mystical theme we were trying to convey. Furthermore, the website follows the same theme depicting forest and foliage screenshots from our video which is what we, as a group, deemed the most important aspect to display. We have included a picture of the digipak also to emphasise the cross compatibility and combination of all our media texts.