Our Music Video:

This is my group's final music video for the song "Desire" by Years & Years. We created this under the fictional group name Cupid & Medusa. It was really enjoyable to create as we collaboratively shared the roles of directing and editing to make it. I also played the minor role of the "boyfriend/ex-boyfriend" in it too. We were able to use our combined knowledge and skills when using hardware and software from both the AS and A2 parts of our Media Studies course to produce a music video we were both really happy with.

Our CD booklet/Digi-pack:

The digi-pack template I used for my CD in Adobe Photoshop.

The album booklet has the themes of love and the loss of love, which my group wanted to emphasise. These are represented by photos of the main character in our music video we took. We edited them using the website www.picmonkey.com and Adobe Photoshop to feature broken hearts, subtly edited flames onto the front cover and insert, as well as the tearing of the heart on the Lyrics CD insert and the broken screen effect added onto the back cover. The snake theme is also present throughout as a metaphor for the male character in our video. Snakes also have links to the Garden of Eden, as do apples, which also have links to fairytales. These also imply that love can be tempting, but dangerous and it won't necessarily end in happily ever after as our music video shows.

By editing our female character into Snow White for the CD insert behind the CD with text in the form of the seven deadly sins onto it, it represents the corruption of her innocence, addiction, pain and loss of hope which are conventions which tie my music video and ancillary tasks together and link to the main themes. Therefore, we used our female character from our music video on the front and back cover as well as similar conventions to emphatically create a synergy between them.

We also incorporated promotional and advertising techniques in the form of the logo of 'our' fictional record label and a link to our website on the back cover of our CD. These would help to attract more people and gain more fans as I learned from analysing the group, Years and Years, and their official website. A larger picture of these can be viewed on the right.

The CD booklet/Digi-pack can be viewed by slideshow (which I created on www.albumizr.com) below. If you would like to view each individual image please click on the icon on the bottom left of the slideshow and click "direct image link" on the image you would like to view:



Below are some images I took of my digi-pack to display what it could look like if it was an actual media product:

Our Band Website:

In order to connect the conventions and themes of my group's ancillary tasks and music video together, create a synergy between them and help to promote our music duo as if we were real artists, we created a website.

Our website helped to emphasise the metaphorical meanings in connection to love and the loss of it which we wanted to imply. For example, this was done by including eye-catching moving gifs like a girl vomiting hearts, which represents our female character in our music video. This can be seen on the screenshot of our homepage below. It would also aid us in attracting, creating and maintaining a continually growing fandom by displaying features like links to social media, news updates, merchandise and our song and music video. These are advertising techniques which real artists use as I learned about them when I analysed Years & Years's website which can be seen by clicking here.

The website was created on wix.com. It can be viewed by clicking here or by clicking this link: www.cupidandmedusa.wix.com.

Music Video - Behind The Scenes:

Below is a video from my group's filming day which we uploaded to YouTube. It shows an insight into how we filmed with Lois, who plays the main female character in our music video. It also demonstrates how useful the storyboard which we created was to us as it inspired us to create scenes and use close-ups of Lois getting ready and doing her make-up. This is to emphasise that she cared about her boyfriend, put time and effort into pleasing him, but is continually let down which creates a sense of catharsis for viewers. Discussions and evidence of this can be seen in the video below:



The second YouTube video below is made up of more different clips that myself and my group member, Amber, also filmed during the days we have used to create our music video. Some of the footage won't be used in our actual A2 production, as they may be referred to as bloopers, however, it's interesting to analyse and learn from to see what we have done during our production stages. For example, by viewing the video below you will be able to see more evidence of how my group has took planning for our production seriously, so there will be noticeable links between these outtakes, our final production and our ancillary tasks.