Evaluation 2

Our main product that we have created is different to the ancillary texts that we have created in a variety of ways. The reason that they do not have such a strong link between the product and the texts and designs is that we felt that the designs should be more artistic to catch the attention of the target audience as this is just as important as an effective video. Will and I felt that it showed to be very challenging to include the 'Day of the Dead' designs into the video and also may turn the video to focus too much on the art and away from the original purpose of the music video. Therefore, we decided to do a theme that relates to the vast majority of our target audience could relate to, which is the theme of loneliness and depression. We did this by only having one actor in the whole video to highlight his isolation from the rest of the world. The two storylines in our video show how he copes with his loneliness, one being driving and wandering aimlessly around a town, the other being drinking alcohol to soothe his sadness. This is a way to try and expand on the Uses and Gratifications theory (Elihu Katz), instead of just having our music video be simply entertaining and/or used for escaping the boredom of reality. We tried to incorporate the gratification 'identity' into our music video to try and intrigue our audience more and make them relate to the storyline in our video.

Location - Our location was intended to be at night in a place where it would be bright and colourful at this time. Our reason for thinking this was because we needed to emphasise the bright lights and the contrast of colour between the night and the street lights and signs. Another location we chose was at a home environment where the star actor goes to various places around his home. Here we hope to create an atmosphere of identity with the audience. They may see themselves in the same situation as the person the music video and therefore gain some gratification from it.

Theme - The general idea was that the video was about following this person around the street at night and seeing what he gets up to and how he copes with being alone. He's seen wandering aimlessly into various locations with no motivation, he just continues to walk around, exploring the town while taking in the sights from his surroundings. The other theme that goes side-by-side with the first one is an add on to the theme of loneliness and subsequently depression. Here is a loose storyline of the main character drinking his problems away. Many teenagers may feel isolated and feel like they are on their own at times. They may relate to this storyline to times where they have gone through areas of sadness.

Colours - The colours we used tended to be quite contrasting, with the main character having scenes where is is in the darkness of the night in contrast of him being surrounded by bright colourful lights from street lights, signs etc. We used this to create binary opposites in the video as a reference to the binary opposites (Levi-Strauss) of "Day 'n' Nite" (the name of the song we chose to do). When inside the house setting. There is a few colours, but it mainly focuses on black and white (inc. variations of grey). There are occasional colour differences in things such as the liqueur that is being consumed in the video.

Angles - These are very important in order to create the image for the audience of the music video, the way we have made these angles portray the actor is so that they seem to be very lonely and also use shots in order for the actor to not be in the middle of the screen and capture lots of background information in order for the audience to digest. The one light emitted over the actor is surrounded by the darkness of the night in this image with also allows the songs lyrics and title to be related to eg 'Day and Nite'. During the lip syncing segment inside the house, there is a slight upwards angle to the scene, presenting them as the important figure. This person is the only main character in the whole video, so it was important to maintain the focus on the star figure throughout the whole video.