This document discusses the conventions of indie music videos and how the student's media product both conforms to and challenges these conventions. Some key conventions identified in indie music videos are outdoor settings, natural lighting, relatable storylines, monotone color palettes, and heightened emotions conveyed through slow motion. The student's video tells a narrative story about a mother-son relationship, includes black and white and color scenes, and uses lip syncing. While conforming to the genre by having a storyline, it also challenges conventions by incorporating lip syncing and using black and white/color contrasts to represent emotions and reflection on actions. The goal was to both work within the genre of indie but also challenge some typical elements.

1. Question One
In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions or
real media production
To discover ways in which we could conform to or
challenge the conventions we had to research into
different genres and videos to identify the
conventions. We Looked at different videos of
different genres in order to identify the distinctive
conventions of our choses genre; Indie.
During the research into my chosen genre for my music video, I found
that in many videos of this genre including ‘Josh Record’, ‘Mumford and
Sons’ ‘Kodaline’ and ‘Frank Hamilton’ included outdoor settings and there
was a feel for nature in each of the videos. Also there was a significant use
of natural light which shows that these artist are not superficial, they
want to be closer to the audience, creating a relatable environment for the consumer. This
relatability also comes from the storylines that the indie genre tends to have. By doing this it
creates more of an interest for the audience.
A good example of this would be Kodaline’s ‘All I want’ which is a two part music video. There
are underlying links to lyrics and visuals, they are
not as apparent as they are in pop videos, through
looking into the Indie Genre I found that the colour
pallet was very similar for each video of the same
genre. By using monotone, sepia, brown colour
tones I felt as though they add to the emotion of the
video, which compliments the storylines that tend
to run through indie music videos.
Our final product conforms to the indie genre through the fact that our video tells a story in
which the audience can engage with, we chose a narrative that would leave clues throughout
the whole video but never fully give away the full
story. The narrative we chose was a mother and
son relationship and the conventional stories that
crop up frequently in many different genres, as
well as Indie, are love stories so we wanted to
stray away from the typical love story and explore
the parental kind of love that seems to be lost.
We used projection in order to show this parental love, we chose to use projection as it was a
discreet way of portraying the love in the video. We challenged the conventions of this
genre, however we still conformed to that fact that there is a storyline. In our music video,
we adjusted the colours to some shots in black and white but then contrasted them with
scenes that are in colour. By doing this we are showing that the black and white shots, the

2. emotions are heightened and impulsive, but the shots that are in colour are reflective of
what has happened, and that our character is reflecting on the impulsive behaviour that
happened in the black and white.
Music videos for the indie genre tend to have points that the emotions are heightened
further with the use of slow motion. We included this use of editing in our music video
alongside the use of black and white as we felt that the narrative was very heartfelt therefore
by adding these different aspects, the emotions were amplified. We used black and white to
determine the main characters thoughts and actions for example, we used black and white
for the dancing and in the reverse scenes at the end; we used sepia tones when at the
beginning when the arguments happen.
Lip syncing isn’t widely used in the indie genre as this
may take away from the realistic feel for the video, the
links between lyrics and visuals are mainly through the
narrative. However in our music video, we decided to
make use of lip syncing to form a relationship between
our character, the lyrics and the narrative. An example
of this would be where he is sitting in the car which gives
the connotations that he is going to leave during the lyrics “I’ll carry your story wherever I
may go”, by doing this we are challenging the conventions of the indie genre.
There are also moments in which the visuals are symbols for the narrative, the first chorus
the dancers reach out there hands which could symbolise the mother and how he is reaching
out to him. Overall there are moments in our music video in which we conform to the indie
genre, we did this to secure that it is within this genre however we do challenge the ideas of
the genre, to show that we are able to challenge the continuous conventions and still show it
is indie.