The media product challenges conventions of music videos by featuring masked characters to represent deception and fantasy, rather than featuring artists. This creates a narrative rather than a dance sequence to match the song. Popular music videos usually have dancers wearing masks, so this develops the characteristics of the masked characters. The video also challenges conventions through its use of film audio that has a fantasy element rather than iconic quotes, and by contrasting urban and rural settings with alternative music.

1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR
MEDIA PRODUCT SE
DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE
FORMS AND CONVENTIONS
OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS

2.  The initial idea for our music video was to develop the idea of
narrative within our chosen genre, this was shown by our creation of
character and setting in the actual product.
We started creating the characters by
sketching ideas off of the top of our
heads, helping us with the creation of
our concept as well as characters.

3.  The video consists of various masked characters,
this was to conform to the theme of deception and
fantasy in the dance music genre. At the same time
we realised that we didn't want to feature any artists
and though this is uncommon within the music
industry it is very common in this particular genre.
The horse mask conforms with the fantasy genre because
of the horses role as the noble steed in many typical fairy-
tale stories. We took the idea of the swan masks from swan lake the
famous ballet production. This is used quite commonly in
popular culture to represent the different types of beauty
e.g. purity or corruption.
Gas masks have been used in
multiple music videos these video’s
mainly being punk and rock videos
but we also drew the idea from the
poplar TV show Dr Who. This
moves our product back into the
fantasy genre but draws away from
the nature and genre of our
alternative music.

4.  I realised that in order to create something that was visually
pleasing that also stuck to the various theories that we had researched
into, that we had to compromise on the concept and look deeper into
the theories of music videos. This simply involved looking at other
products and mapping out what conventions they had
developed/challenged.

5.  Usually masked characters in dance videos are dancers and this was what my
group and I wanted to challenge, we wanted to develop the characteristics of those
behind the masks and create a narrative rather than have a video with pure dance.
This was also down to our song choice, we realised that the pace was slow and we
couldn't really picture a dance sequence going alongside it. At the same time it was
too fast for something with a strict narrative and there was also no lyrics in which to
communicate this narrative in, so we decided to come up with something that an
audience could find intellectually challenging or simply visually stimulating.

6.  An example of more popular music videos that feature masks in
the typical way would be Nicky Romero Toulouse. The mask is a part
of popular culture and like our own music video, draws from aspects
of the film industry but unlike ours the enigma code throughout this
particular video is quite comical.

7.  Much like the song No Angels by the XX we wanted to have some
sort of symbolic audio attached to the video but rather than sticking
to a more traditional theme of using iconic quotes to use in our video
we went for a slightly different approach and chose to go for
something that had more of a fantasy element to it.

8.  The audio track we chose contrasted quite nicely with our video.
This was simply down to the fact that we played with the concepts of
urban and rural in the actual filming and then went on to play audio
that was a mixture of new and old. The style of music is alternative
so the idea of using alternative mediums works well with the audio.

9.  We had debated over our choice of film audio to use. Typically when doing
something like my group has you may think to choose a popular or well known
film to add as audio to the music and though there is no debate as to the quality
of the Labyrinth but considering its failure in the box office and its knock on
effect to the Henson company that lead it to being the last film ever made. On
the other hand the idea of the ‘underdog’ has become quite fashionable in late
times and this goes well with the idea we’ve chosen for the video and works well
with the theory of enigma which we used heavily throughout the project.