This is the cover of our Digi-Pack. We don't have a picture of the band, to appear more mysterious, this is very convential for more alternative bands like ours. It's quite simple yet the pill and funky font of "The Spinning Teacups" suggests a pshychadelic side. the pill contains little red hearts unlike your typical pill suggesting this isn't any "ordinary" pill. The name of our band "The Spinning Teacups" was chosen as it conjurs up feelings of sickness and fun, that you might on the spinning teacups at a fair. Everything was chosen portray a specific image for the band as being crazy, psychadelic and funky. It fairly convential for an Indie band album cover, and similar to other album covers for example "The Red Hot Chilli Peppers" Im With You album:
This is the inside digi-pack cover, which is a complete contrast to the cover. We used lots of bright colours and pictures to synbolize having a "reaction" to an illegal drug and relates to our music video. Which explains the pill on the front cover. We used photoshop to compile these pictures together, which is generally used in most albums digi-packs. However our use of such loud bright colours is probably fairly unconvential.
In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products?
Our music video had a very strong narrative through out similar to other music videos like Michael Jackson's "Thriller". We decided to use a pre-roll like "Thriller" to introduce our characters and set up the story line. The story is roughly based on "Alice in Wonderland" with elements of other fairytales. A young girl who is lost and stumbles across an old house looking for help, instead she finds the Mad Hatter and many other washed up fiarytale characters who invite her into their crazy make beleive world. The narative was inspired by the Panic at the Disco "I write sins not tradgedies" music video.
Overall our music video is very visually exciting with lots of color and detail in our mise-en-scene, props and costumes, which is quite convential in alot of "Pop" music videos, for example Rihanna's "Who's that chick". The artificial lightening was also carefully chosen to create mysterious and mystical mood/atmosphere. We used a long tracking shot to really capture all the characters and action going on in this scene.
These are Sleeping Beauty' "Sleeping Pills" which is an example of the kind of symbolism we used to portray the fairy-tale characters. Sleeping Beauty is seen as a sleeping pill addict. There is alot of other symbolism which shows a darker side to all the fairytale characters such as the princesses fighting over the crown, showing their jelousy.
Our lead singer/Mad Hatter (played by Jamie) has his own performance scene lipsyncing, with no band visible accompanying him which is quite unconventional. As well as playing the main character in the narrative, though it has been done in many music videos for example Cee Lo Green's "Forget you" and Taylor Swifts "You Belong with Me". We found that playing the Mad Hatter really suited his eccentric, crazy image. We also used loud, crazy makeup to create his look. We replicated the makeup exactly from The Mad Hatter in the "Alice in Wonderland" movie played by Johnny Depp. Many other music videos use heavy makeup to accentuate the characters and their image, for example any of Lady Gaga's videos.
Here shows an exmaple of a "Mid Shot" used to show the Mad Hatters body language, costume and facial expression. We used used many other camera techniques such as Close ups, Wide shots and tracking shots. This variety of camera shots are very common in all music videos. We also edited these shots to match the pace of the song, and insynch with beat. As well as discontinuity and jump cuts to create high energy and a sense of frentic movement. This technique is used in nearly all music videos, and is exclusive to only music videos as it wouldn't make sence in a movie and TV show.
This picture shows the detail we put into our props and mise en scene, all in very courful loud colours. Much like a Lady Gaga video has. We used many close up shots to capture the detail of everything. We really believe its the detail that makes a music video good, and helps to tell the story.
