The document summarizes how a media group followed conventions of indie music videos in their own media product. They researched music videos, digipaks, and magazine ads in the indie genre. Their music video included a narrative storyline with surreal elements, references to death, handheld camera footage, repeating strong imagery, close-ups of the protagonist as lead singer, shots of looking at screens/photos, and superimposing the band name on the first shot. They developed some conventions, like separating the band name from the first shot. Overall, they aimed to follow conventions of indie music videos but challenged them in some ways.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After researching the forms and conventions of music videos, digipaks and magazine adverts in the Indie genre my
group decided to follow the forms and conventions we found during our research.
When researching music videos from the Indie genre I found that they often have a narrative running throughout
and often a surreal element to this narrative. The storyline to my music video follows both these conventions. The
male protagonist of the video is visiting several places where he had previously been with his girlfriend. In the
video we allude to the fact that his girlfriend is dead however we never said this explicitly making the video more
ambiguous, leaving the audience to make their own decision as to whether they think she is alive or dead.
Throughout the video his girlfriend appears alongside him before disappearing again as if he is having flashbacks of
her or she is a ghost.
Although the original video to accompany ‘Of The Night’ simply showed a journey walking through Venice, the
official video they released to accompany the video dealt with much deeper issues. The video shows the story of a
police officer visiting a series of homicides before killing himself, this influenced our storyline. We were not afraid
to tackle issues surrounding death as many of Bastille’s video contain an element of death.
The unofficial video Bastille had
released to ‘Of The Night’ was
all filmed in a handheld style.
Bastille’s video to ‘Laura
Palmer’ also features elements
of handheld filming. This
influenced our choice to film
some parts of our video
handheld, as we wanted to
follow the conventions of
Bastille videos.

2. Bastille videos often have a strong
iconography running throughout the
video, we tried to replicate this by
repeating a strong image from our video
throughout and also using this image for
the album cover.
Another convention of Indie music videos
I found is that they normally include
close up shots of the band
members, primarily the lead singer. In my
music video the actor who plays the
protagonist is also supposed to be the
lead singer of Bastille. In Bastille’s videos
it is always the lead singer, Dan, who
appears in the video.
Andrew Goodwin believed that a key element of music videos is the reference
to the notion of looking, this often includes screens within screens and
telescopes. There are several examples of this in Bastille’s video ‘Bad Blood’
such as the girl (pictured right) looking at the lead singers photo and later on a
shot of a T.V with the lead singer on it. In our video we included a shot of the
protagonist looking at a picture of his girlfriend on his phone and a later shot of
him looking at a laptop watching a video of him and his girlfriend.

3. In the official video the band’s name and the song title is super
imposed on the first shot. We have also super imposed the
band name and logo onto the first shot in our video however
we have done this separately as opposed to Bastille’s video
where it all appears on one screen.
This shows a
development of the
convention as although
we have done this we
have done it slightly
differently as we felt it
improved the overall
general appearance of
the video.