1. Question 1
In what ways does your media product
use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
2. • In many ways our media product follows many
of the generic conventions that would be seen
in any other similar form of music. Especially
within our genre of ‘indie’ music. The indie
genre is very simple, plain and minimalistic.
3. • Our main source of inspiration came from
other artists in this genre. An artist we all had
an interest in was Ben Howard. His music is
similar to the music of Erick Baker, who was
the artist we chose. His influences show in
both our music video an our digital work.
Including shot types and layouts.
4. • I regards to our audience feedback it was clear
that certain areas needed work, especially in our
music video. Overall we re-shot our video around
4 times, each with improvements but the lip
syncing was a real problem and was the first thing
to come up in our audience feedback. We really
tried to keep a theme of colours continuing
throughout our work, from the video to the
advert poster to the digipak. This was something
that was noticed by our audience.
5. • Obviously there are some differences between
our work and the real products. We had to keep
in mind the idea of budget. With mainstream
artists comes much higher budgets for music
video. The locations for our shoots were much
less glamorous and showed a simple natural view,
linking to our genre. We were also limited to the
technology to develop and create our videos. As
students we cannot simply afford the camera
equipment used to create mainstream music
videos, this is clear in our video, however this did
play to our advantage.
6. • Regarding originality I do feel we have something
other videos do not posses. Our aim was to
create an emotional atmosphere, through the
story of our character loosing a loved one. And
through the song and the camera work I feel we
achieved this, especially the end of our video. The
video constantly refers back to visions and
memories of a daughter who was lost. However
we leave room for imagination in the audiences
heads as to what happened and its this mystery
that I feel is original.
7. • Throughout we have used redundancy and entropy.
The redundancy of our indie genre shines through in
our video, the locations, mise-en-scene such as
clothing and the song itself is all very much as
expected. However using an emotional slant on things
was something that we found was not a generic
convention in this genre, this is where our entropic
features such as the dark side of loss and love is
introduced and the fact our video ends on a low. This
plays on the mind of the audience as its not what is
expected. Challenging the generic conventions is an
aim I feel we achieved.
