In what way does media product use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real life media products?
by Saul Turner
1. Looking at some Indie and Electronic music videos, there are different conventions that portray the band or artists in a music video. After researching into both genres I found that it is most common for both Indie and Electronic music videos to be of a live performance of the band or artist, showing the audience what they are like live. Narratives are another way in which Indie and Electronic music video and is popular with other genres are shown with a story to tell with the song resembling the video or having some links within, this is what we chose when creating our music video
2. 2 . Performance: For the performance we needed it to look like a long and hard struggle for our male character trying to find the female character, we decided that when searching he should be doing what ever it mean necessary to find her so running, jumping and many other actions. I took this idea from Pendulums music video 'the Island Part 1 - Dusk' we the charter is running after some one and trying to keep up, our idea is that every time the male character is close to the women she vanishes, so he keeps on going looking for her
3. 4 . Camera angles, lighting and editing: The camera angles where inspiration from Pendulum 'the Island Part 1 - Dusk' as we needed similar angles and movements when our male character was running we used a variation of shots form close ups to wide angle shots. Lighting was all natural lighting as we filmed outside again inspirations from Sub Focus and Pendulums music video as well as Angels and Airwaves music video 'The Adventure' where the natural light gives a effect on particular scenes. For editing I used ideas from Sub Focus, I took the idea of using video crossovers where a clip is being played over another clip, then adding different effects like black and white and also the speed of the clips. the black and white was only used on the female characters scene as we wanted it took look like a dream, the speed changes helped as well in making the scenes with her look dream like.
4. 1 . Costumes: We have two performers in our music video, the intentions were to show a dream, with plain colours being used for the costumes, for this I looked at many artist and band music videos finding out what they particularly wear, for example in the music video 'Tidal Wave' by Sub focus ft Alpines the costumes Sub Focus is wearing casual clothing whereas the singer Catherine Pockson is wearing a flowing dress. I thought that having a similar look with our music would make our ideas better than the original ones. The costumes where just a list of things we told them to wear if they had them, luckily they did.
5. 3 . Location and setting: Having looked at many music videos within the two genres, outdoor video are common with both. We shot our video outside in a woodland area and we wanted to keep within the same area as moving to a more open area wouldn't give the same effect as the fields and woods shows how everything looks the same, this shows it as a dream.
6. Goodwin's theory states that close ups of the artist is what the record label demand for selling the artists ,I feel hat we have done that with a range of close ups and shots to show off the artists as well this the relationship between the lyrics and the video and lyrics and music. There are some matching visuals to the lyrics and music, but more with the music ,this is because we where unsure of some of the lyrics so tried to get some of the lyrics through listening and the ones we could understand where used to match with the video. I feel we could have done better with this as there isn't enough linking both the lyrics and the video, however we looking back I think we did good on what we could gather. Goodwin also says that video have the notion of looking. I would say that there are only a few reference linking to it e.g the man looking for the women and at the end with them seeing each other before she disappears. I feel that we have stayed with the main indie/electronic forms and conventions in the music video. Making sure that the techniques from indie and electronic videos link back to our video with our naturalistic look . Deciding that there would be use less bright colours than typical indie and especially electronic videos was a big ask, but I feel we pulled it off with nature theme and the black and white colour scheme used throughout. This is seen in my all my media products and brings together the forms and conventions of indie/electronic bands challenging the forms and conventions.
