Evaluation Q1

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

The forms and conventions used in our production vary this is due to the rather large and undefined convetions used within music production today which leaves the majority of music productions with very loose and unrestricted in terms of how they look and how they portray certain emotions or atmospheres.

The most usefull feature of most music videos that I came to understand is that the video side of the production is more of a support to the music in prodviding a deeper understanding behind the lyrics.

Andrew Goodwin stated that there were three different ways in which the music video can connect back to the song itself . These are: Illustration, Amplification and Disjuncture.

The method which applies to our production is Amplification, this convention is demonstrated by the music video creative director. They may use both performance and narrative, connotations of the meanings. An example of this is Kanye Wests homecoming where it does clearly show his home but the audience can work out that the song is homecoming and it is him walking around a city that he knows.

This was the starting base for our video and from here we had an idea on how to begin to develop our story through analysing the lyrics of the video we had chosen.

Although we already had a slight idea on what to base our video on through the title of the song, analysing the lyrics would provide an even deeper understanding and give us a smaller field of atmospheres and emotions which we would need to portray.

Lyrics, Music and Visuals; Our production has largely matched the industry standard for the selected genre in terms of visuals. Our editing methods which we used such as double exposure allowed us to develop the feeling of familarity with our audience helping them to relate to the genre. By doing this it frees up thought to the audience to allow them to gain a deeper understanding about other parts of the production such as lyrics.

Representation of the Band, Our aim with this production was to create somthing an audience could relate to. By setting this goal we required that the band members and sets would be seen as conforming to the social norm in terms of dessing and the set in which they play.

To do this we told our band memebers that we didnt require any specifc dress code/costume and that we could shoot the video in whatever environment they felt most comfortable in. By doing this we were able to relate our video to the band members on a personal level which enchanced the emotion and atmosphere created by our video.

Another main feature in our video was a background focus on a storyline, from our reasearch we concluded that this was a relatively common aspect of inidie rock videos and is mainly used to create or portray emotion, a good example of this was in the artic monkeys video for "Do I wanna know" although it is a very minor hint at a story this is still used to give the audience an image/something to relate the lyrics to.

In summary I beleive that our video largely conforms to forms and conventions, the use of a story to follow the lyrics is common and I believe that our story helped to create and enchance the emotions that are contained within the lyrics.

On the other hand I believe that our live performance aspect of the video is rather tame in comparison to other artists as a large proportion of indie rock videos have very bold and untamed live performances in order to portray a lack of care, in contrast our live preformance was very calm and just displayed the band memebers doing what they enjoy doing.