Question 1 : A2 Evaluation

Myself and my group immediately identified what we wanted to do with our music video. We wanted  a clear accompaniment with the song's lyrics, as well as show a clear storyline within the video. My initial idea, whilst in pre-production, was to show that our main character was going nowhere, and each day was a repeat of the previous ones. In order to do this, we had to make use of different angles and editing techniques, as well as using a decent amount of footage, to help portray this storyline. The grey chrome cast effect was key in showing this.
Other than this storyline, a key feature we felt the need to add was a good accompaniment with the lyrics of Kid Cudi's Day N Nite. For this we needed a good use of Mise-En-Scene, good camera angles, more good use of editing and, of course, good miming. In terms of Mise-En-Scene, we identified that the continuous alternation between Day and Night in the song would match our visuals. So every time the artist mentions what we was doing at night, we include a low lit shot, and every time he mentions his daytime activities, we show a brighter shot. This clearly helps the audience know what is being said and the meaning of the lyrics as the picture that they may have had in their head to help them understand the premise of the music is right in front of them. This clear relationship between the lyrics and the visuals is a good example of Andrew Goodwin's music video theory. A good relationship between lyrics and visuals can help the audience to understand exactly what is going on, and this can aid a song's success.
One thing that I noticed when observing our music video is that in certain ways, it is quite similar to the actual video for Kid Cudi's Day N Nite. For the most part, it only contains one character, it occasionally uses others to help portray the jealousy and the character's loneliness, and there is a clear relationship with the lyrics and the visuals. So it could be argued that our music video has developed music video ideas and conventions that already existed, as it is a theme that has been used before. However, there are features in our music video that perhaps go against the conventions of a hip-hop music video, even though there are moments which imply otherwise.
One common feature of a general hip-hop music video is the low angle shot to demonstrate the power that the artist has over their audience. This is an angle which can be seen throughout different moments of our music video. It helps portray the supposed power that a hip hop artist should have, as they are looking down towards their audience, but not in a patronising manner, although this has been the case in the past.
However, one of our features of Mise-En-Scene is the characters clothing. This isn't usual hip hop attire, and goes against the sport jerseys and sometimes provocative gear that is worn in a regular hip hop video. Also, we did not include any jewellery in our video as we didn't feel that it would adhere to the sad feel of our product.
There are no females in our music video, which is yet another feature that is rare within the genre, and we do not have other males to accompany our main character, which perhaps takes from the power we originally granted him.
There are plenty of reasons to suggest that, for the most part, we have challenged the conventions of a regular hip hop music video.
On the whole, we feel that we have both challenged and adhered to the stereotypical hip hop video. We do not include any shots of the main character having fun or any conventional shots that I have previously mentioned. However, we have acquired inspiration from certain videos, particularly the original Day N Nite video, and have incorporated these features into our products.

The Association : Website

This is the official website for my media group; 'The Association'. Here, you can find our merchandise, music, profiles, past work and upcoming tour dates.
http://kieranlukas1.wixsite.com/theassociation

Day N Nite designs

Here are the first drafts of our album cover and our back cover. These have been designed by group member Kieran, and there is a clear theme within the photos of technology, which has connotations of the future.
Our album cover contains a contrast between two colours, which helps signify the 'day to night' theme within the song.
The dark figure is that of group member Dan, who is the focus for a lot of our work and has been in the past.
Below the album cover is our back cover, which contains a tracklist, record label (Belt Buckle Productions) and a barcode.

Day 'N' Nite - First Draft

This is the first draft of our A2 music video for Kid Cudi's Day 'N' Nite, which we have been working on for months. There are still a couple of minor changes we would like to make and we will try to do this before the deadline.

Work in Progress

We are making decent progress in the filming of our music video. So far we have used locations like group member's houses, the countryside and some around a suburban area. We want to make this video get across the idea of 'repetitiveness', as it portrays a man who is constantly experiencing 'Groundhog Day' and seems to be stuck in a circle that he cannot get out of.
We have also used the school premises in order to gain shots to use for our website, 'TheAssociation.com'.

Day'N'Nite Copyright

Today, we decided to use our time to contact the distributing companies of Kid Cudi's Day'N'Nite, so that we were able to gain permission to use the sog for our A-level project. Unfortunately, wew were not able to find a way to contact either Dream on records, Universal Motown or GOOD Music. Since there is no way to contact any of the companies mentioned over their website, e-mail address or any form of social media, we decided to write about it on our blogs. Although this is a very popular song, I was very clear about the fact that we should choose the original song rather than any of it's multiple remixes to try and avoid any copyright issues. Myself and my group must stress that we are using Kid Cudi's Day'N'Nite for educational purposes only and do not wish to make a profit.

Kanye West - Stronger : Practice piece

This is our previous practice task, where we decided to make a video on Kanye West's stronger. It is only a minute long, and it was made months and months ago, but hopefully with the experience of making this video we will be in good stead.