Discuss the ways that you have used media language to create meanings in one of your media products (Music Video)

     For the music video we thought a lot about what camera angles and shots we would use and what effect these would have. We ended up using quite a large variety of camera angles and shots to portray different things. The long shots that show the character walking through the field and used with a straight angle and panning. This shows desolation which links with both the song and the band name and it makes the character seem small compared to her surroundings.  The close ups were used to show the emotion of the song and we used the camera at an eye level angle to make the emotion even more obvious. The mid shots used with a straight angle were used mainly for performance purposes; to capture any gesturing as well as body language and emotion. The other mid shots used with a high angle were used to show the character as vulnerable while also capturing body language, costume and emotion.

     The editing of the video was kept quite simple with mainly straight cuts between scenes and shots to keep the pace and to make the cuts clean. We did, however, use a dissolve cut between two of the scenes when the band shots are first introduced to differenciate them from each other. 

      The lighting was also simple because we wanted it to be natural because of the situation. All of the external shots used natural lighting to create realism and the internal shots use low key lighting to keep it looking natural and realistic. Because it was a highly narrative video realism was important and it wasn't apprporaite to use a lot of light and colours that may be used in more pop videos.

     All of the sound used was non-diegetic because the only sound used is the music track. When editing this was put in as a seperate audio line and the video was placed on top.

     We wanted the external setting of the field to connotes a sense of lonliness and desolation because this  fits with the song and the band name so there is a strong theme throughout. We used Barthes code for this which talks about the connotations that can be attributed to denotations, the denotation being the field. In these scenes there were no props used and this created a contrast between these shots and the internal shots where quite a few props were used. The letter in the internal scenes was a vital prop because it laced the narrative of the video together. We also used some props to dress the scene and make the internal set look realistic. The costume e for the external shots was a black lacy dress paired with docs and leather jacket, this meant that a mixture of feminine and grunge was used which is quite conventional for the genre of music and the style of the song. The make up was also very conventional and typical of a female rock genre artist. On the internal flshback shots the costume and make up was different because it was a different scene and they weren't 'performance' shots.

     We used some special effects during editing such as the 'cold steel' colour effect for the flashback scenes. This acted as a black and white kind of effect and was another way of differenciating the scenes from each other. This is a convention seen in films and music videos used for the same purpose. We sped up and slowed down some of the shots meaning the timings of the shots were changed to fit them with the pace of the music as well as to create atmosphere.