Question 1 write up

Evaluation.

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

During our media course we created a music video for ‘The enemy’s’ song ‘Away from here. Since we didn’t have any past experience in creating a music video we decided to carry out some research in order to enhance our understanding of the industry. To begin with we decided to research into how different bands and artists appear within their videos. We looked at different bands that are have a similar genre to ‘The enemy’ including ‘ Arctic Monkeys’ and ‘Catfish and the bottlemen’ and we found that the majority of theses bands all have a very similar image when it comes to how they dress. We found that the members in these bands tend to wear skinny jeans (usually black) and a T-shirt. We decided to stick to this convention because we felt that this particular image is fitting to the genre and if we were to wear something like a suit, then we would look out of place not only in the video but in the genre also. However, at one point during our video, we have decided to challenge this convention and dress our protagonist (Josh) in shirt and trousers, the reason which we have done this is because, at this particular time in the video, Josh is in his working environment (where he would look out of place in a pair of skinny jeans) and therefore we were able to dress him in a more formal sense, without the risk of making him look out of place.  As the narrative in our video takes part over a few days, we assured that Josh didn’t always appear in the same clothing throughout the narrative, however during band performances, all members are wearing the same clothing they were in previous shots.

After this we decided that we needed to further research into how different artists/bands appear. We wanted to find out what was the normal number of members for a band in our genre. Again, we looked at bands such as the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ and ‘Catfish and the bottlemen’, which both consist of 4 members. We considered having four band members in our video, one to play the Bass guitar one for the guitar one for drums and a lead singer, however we felt it looked better and more realistic if we had the protagonist singing and playing guitar, which only required us to have three members in the band. As there was only 2 of us working on this project (Robson & Josh) we had decided to ask Matthew if he would play the drums in our music video, he thankfully agreed, which gave us a three piece, which helped us stick to the conventions. The reason, which we wanted to stick to this convention, rather than taking the easier option and challenging it, was because we felt that, if we wanted to create a believable band performance, we would have to assure that all instruments (Guitar, Bass Guitar, Drums) were being played during the video, which wouldn’t have been possible with two members.

During our research, one thing that we queried was what is more popular in a music video, band performance, narrative or both. We found that many artists tended to include both band performances and narrative within their video.

Whilst watching ‘The enemy‘ and other bands, we found that the lead singer generally plays the role of the protagonist throughout the video, for example Dave Grohl in Foo Fighters’ song ‘Walk’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkcfQtibmU), during band performances the camera is constantly focusing on Dave, with him being the frontman also throughout the narrative the story is being told from Dave’s point of view. We chose to incorporate this into our own work as we found that if the story was being told for the lead singers point of view, it will hopefully create a star image (within the frontman) for the audience. We also thought that it could become confusing if we kept switching characters between narrative and performance, as it would be unclear to the audience who they are meant to focus on, which would therefore make it more difficult to create a star image.

During our research we also found videos that only stick to either narrative or performance, for example in Foo fighter’s song ‘Best of you’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_L4Rixya64&ob=av2e) the music video is entirely performance based. We felt that this wasn’t a very effective way to keep the audience interested in the video and we actually found that this makes the video increasingly boring, consequently losing the audiences attention. This therefore further prompted us to create a narrative/performance-based video.