Evaluation: Question One - Part One

Whilst we were researching in the planning stages of our music video for A Town Called Malice, we decided that we wanted to stray from the look and theme of the videos already produced by The Jam. The main reason for this being that the original music video for A Town Called Malice (top left) was released in 1982, a time when technology was a lot less developed and music videos played a much smaller role in promoting artists in industry. This was mainly because they were rarely broadcast on daytime television and the internet did not exist. Thus, because the audience was not able to watch a music video, there was no demand for them. As a result of this most music videos of the same era were largely performance based with no narrative, and used only one location. This was purely done for convenience and because it was easy to create, especially if the live performance was already recorded as part of an existing television program. An example being The Jam's video for All Around the World (found below this paragraph) as it was recorded as part of the Marc Bolan Show in 1977. In summery, when the video for A Town Called Malice was released, it's purpose was to convey the bands song image to the audience on a less frequent occasion, and as a result was not made to be as entertaining as music videos of today. However, as the music and television industry has developed they have used synergy to market artists and there music video's to a now demanding audience. To accommodate the now growing demand to see music videos, we had to make the idea for our production more entertaining and relevant to the style of music videos produced today. This meant that we had to flout the original conventions produced by The Jam's existing videos to make our campaign more successful.

To make our idea unique we decided that we needed to combine our music video with another style of broadcasting, and after looking at more modern music videos such as the Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up  (bottom right) it became prominent to us that the music video doesn't always have to feature the artist in it to convey their style. After looking into various idea's we all decided that our music video would be a hybrid of a television documentary and a performance styled music video. With the influence being a old style television documentary about the Birmingham Bullring's opening (bottom left) and the original A Town Called Malice video (top left).