The document discusses the media production of a music video by the author and their considerations of genre conventions. They researched how bands in their genre typically dress in videos, sticking to the convention of skinny jeans and t-shirts but also challenging it at one point. They looked at typical band sizes too, going with a three-piece band to match conventions. Both narrative and band performance were included to keep the audience interested, focusing on the lead singer as protagonist.

1. 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’

2. (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.