Evaluation Question 1 Draft - Michael

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

When in the planning and designing stages of our media product, we needed to look and take inspiration from other videos. This was crucial so that we could ensure our music video was the best it could possibly be. To make sure that we could aim our music video at our target audience we had to use research to try an aim for a specific target market. We wanted our product to both meet and defy conventions. If we were to do this we needed to research and find modern day conventions which we could challenge. We took inspiration from many videos, mainly all narrative but also some performance videos, as we knew we wanted to make our video similar to this  style.

Originally we took large amounts of inspiration from Circa Waves’ – Stuck in my Teeth, as our previous ideas consisted of a greater ratio of performance aspect. In this video, the band are shown playing the song throughout, but with clips in-between off the group messing around. This had originally appealed to us.

After a while of planning, we decided we’d rather make a more cinematic/narrative styled music video. This goes against conventions of a stereotypical indie music videos, as the majority are performance based, even if there is a little narrative. To look for inspiration when making our video we turned to the music video for Milky Chance’s ‘Flashed Junk Mind’. 

 Although our video is a binary opposite of this video, due to the emotion and atmosphere of the final product, the style, shots and overall design of the video are similar. We took great inspiration from this video and used lots of the shots in our own video to create a similar style.. Similarly to the video for Flashed Junk Mind we also incorporated a slight performance aspect into our video. This mainly consisted of solitary singing and small slips of a guitar, however these stand alone performance clips meant we were able to stay in the genre of our song choice.  Also, because of this our product is more likely to be able to be recognized and appear as a realistic media product and music video.

When creating the storyboard and initial idea for our music video we had to come up with a story line that would fit the atmosphere and tone of the song, as well as the lyrical content. We decided that a more depressing style would suit our video. However, although we wanted to make the story clear to the viewer, we also decided that it was crucial not too make the video too cliche or blatantly obvious. We researched certain videos and decided we wanted to use the shots and the actors to tell the story rather than making it extremely obvious through too much visual aid.  For example, in our initial planning we wanted one of the main actors to end up standing on a bridge, to show he was about to jump off, but we decided this was too obvious. To make the video more professional we wanted it to be interpreted by the reader, so got rid of all these obvious shots. I believe that because of this we were able to compare our music video to other media products so that we could convey realistic conventions. Videos such as Green Day's 'When September Ends' has a similar tone to that of the atmosphere created in our own media product.