IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE,

DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE CONVENTIONS OF REAL

MEDIA PRODUCTS?

Ryan Honey

When we started our planning we tried to make to make our music video as original as we could but by also keeping the

process simple, as we are both amateurs with the music business. Me and Mike sat down one morning and created a mind map so that we could get all out ideas out, and onto a piece of paper. We was both told that lip synching was very

important when producing our music video. So we wanted to try and get a lot in to our video. Our first thought was not a good one as me and Mike both don’t have a acting or music

background. We tried to avoid aspects in our music video that would make us look silly, therefore we didn’t want any of us to pretending to play a musical instrument, that we didn’t have a clue how to play. Another reason why we didn’t use musical

instruments was that the musical instruments in our song choice where not accessible to us.

By looking at the lyrics of our song choice we tried to construct a strong narrative, a typical convention of music videos. We spent a long time thinking about the shots and scenes that we wanted to use, but we had to try and work out the story of the song, which took some time to figure

out. We decided that we wanted to emphasis the way that young teenagers deal with their problems when they get

caught up in life. Normally they turn to alcohol for escapism, this is a serious issue that we think relates to our target audience of young adults and teenagers. Therefore we

wanted to do something different in our music video then any other, we didn’t want to use the pop scene at all by

using dance scenes. That’s why we didn’t look at videos from artists like Cheryl Cole, Katy Perry and other pop artist.

Another convention of media in the making of our video that we used was mise-en-scene. We thought and spoke about this for a long time as there is so much to think about. We had to think about the shot, props, locations, positioning of the camera, costumes etc. After looking at the convention from our genre we decided together what we would use, develop or challenge. By looking at two different genres

that we thought our song was involved in we saw that the abuse of harmful substances like alcohol and drugs where

used all the time. An example to show that we thought about this in our music video was the bottles of alcohol used and also a paracetamol (that substituted a ecstasy

tablet) as props. Both of these props reflects on the genres conventions and also emphasises his method of escapism

from his shattered reality.

Next in the terms of locations we wanted to develop the conventions from both the indie and hip-hop genres.

There was one band/artist that we look at in a bit more detail and that was “The Streets”, so in our music video

we wanted to use similar locations, which would be simple urban locations. For example we used a tracking shot while lip-synching, walking down a road/pavement, looking directly into the camera. We developed this idea by involving more rural locations like public parks and

nearby lakes etc. We wanted to do this so that we could show that peoples emotions are related to the

environment they are bought up in. We tried to look at as many different ways of showing this as we could to

represent both the urban and rural locations.

We both felt that we challenged the conventions of real media products when we analysed our camera work. Both indie and hip-

hop music use similar conventions. In hip-hop they use long shots to show the wealth of the artist the shots normally include big houses, and very expensive cars, also they use close-ups of jewellery and assets these all are very expensive. Examples of artists that use this in there music videos are 50 Cent, Shaggy

and T.I. In indie music videos they use long shots as well but they used more extreme close ups. We looked deeply and decided that in some cases we would follow and in others we would challenge. We used long shots to establish the settings but

showed no wealth or money in any scene, we have a reason for this which is we wanted to show reality not fantasy. We also decided to use a lot of mid-shots to find a balance that we

needed, we used them to express the distorted feelings and thoughts of our main character.

Lastly we looked at the importance of costumes as a convention of our video. We decided that we wanted to follow this trend in our music video. We used a typical

costumes for this sort of genres which are hoodies, jeans and trainers. We decided this as we thought it would contribute on the urban look that we wanted.

Indie costumes are more black and white and a bit more casual. Therefore we wanted to involve both of these in our music video so that we had a balance. We wanted the character to wear black and white in the past and we also used that while editing. We wanted them to

come across as flashbacks. By changing the colour of the scene it adds to the narrative but as well gives the

indie feel to the video.