Question 1

Question 1In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

CONVENTIONS USED

GENREThe genre of our song is indie, with the conventions followed suited to that. For instance, the convention of using black and white shots featured heavily in the duration of our video. Effects such as this are used to create an old or worn look to the video. Typical of the indie genre, the shots are cut fast and on the beat to reflect the pace of the music.

ICONOGRAPHY To create an association of the performers to the audience, the style of clothing was equally important. Both the band and the performers dressed in indie clothing to reflect the genre. They are pictured here wearing converse footwear, skinny jeans and checked shirts. Instruments have been important when creating iconography for the performance section of the video. For example, the iconography of the bassist would be the Aqua Fender guitar accompanied by the styled sweeping fringe.

PREDOMINANCE OF THE CLOSE-UPTo make known the emotions of the characters and facial expressions of the band, close-ups were used as cut-ins through the entire video. It was essential that close-ups are predominant in the video because it tends to highlight important features of a particular time that reveals parts of the characters or foreshadow the on-going plot line. Close-ups are there to draw the audiences attention to something: in the case of the performance element, the lead singer. It as often been cited that the lead singer creates an image for the band, since it is them who the viewer or certain group of audience will remember most. In the narrative side of the video, the close-up creates a feeling of empathy and intimacy between the character and the audience. This is important because the viewers have to understand what the character feels in order to follow the story line properly. A close-up is a perfect opportunity to do this.

MUSIC AND VISUALS The convention from Andrew Goodwin became particularly prominent for our performance part of the video: we were determined to match the timing of the music with what was happening on screen. When putting a video together, we found that Andrew Goodwins theory of 3 categories of music video particularly applied to our video. It became clear that our video comes under the Amplified category. This means that the director video is trying to make something louder, by using actions on the screen. Taking on this, our substantial editing made it so that at particular points the video, such as where the bass riff begins in the song or a prominent drum roll would be cut in to, from wide shots of the band or the incorporated narrative section.

LYRICS AND VISUALS Also under Goodwins amplified category is the link between the lyrics of the song and the visuals on screen. Simply, the lyrics are represented by images. Examples of this include the female character Jess taking off her shoes with the line the heels you wore or the things I said shows the main characters Martin and Jess in a heated argument.

SETTINGTypical of the indie genre is the low-budget setting the videos are in. The settings are usually suburban, in studios and cities. A good example for a video of the indie genre is that it may be filmed in the local park. These setting are usually very accessible and are kept simple to reflect the audience and keep the focus on the developing storyline or band that are playing.

[THE STUDIO USED FOR OUR PERFORMANCE ELEMENT]

PERFORMANCEIt is common for music videos in the genre to include live performance in its duration. This is particularly prominent in our video with our two individual sets of performance video, one of the full band and other of the lead singer Devon alone.

NARRATIVEWithin the genre, it has become quite popular to include a narrative element in the video. Usually the narrative will link clearly with the lyrics but leave the viewer to add to it with their imagination.

DEVELOPMENTS

ENERGY One convention previously seen in videos that we decided to develop was the appearance of major movement and energy. In videos such as Move Shake Hide by Marmozets and Smalls by JPNSGRLS, the bands seemed to have a lot of energy, shown by their erratic and frequent movements. We felt that this would carry well into our video because during the beat breaks, there is a lot of prominent riffs and drum rolls that conventionally would be matched with perhaps more movement than usual. We took his opportunity to allow the band to move around move by utilising a larger studio space and ensure that there were no obstructions for safety during these high-energy pieces.

Examples of the movement shots are shown below:

MOVE SHAKE HIDE- MARMOZETS

SMALLS- JPSNGRLS

OUR COVER OF CIRCULATION

STYLE Another key convention forwarded to our music video was the indie style of clothing. However, this particular style is made up of other styles that have fused together. Often people in the indie genre will take influence from rock clothing e.g. skinny black jeans and dark clothing to anything from folk-inspired clothes. We decided to take the edgy look from punk and fuse that with a softer look of checked t-shirts and roughed up hair.