EVALUATION QUESTION 1

1. In what way does your media produce use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Using conventions of real media products while planning is of vital importance, as to make a successful media text/ product you must first understand the conventions of both music videos and your own music genre. To do this I watched many pre-existing texts online via YouTube to get a sense of how to adhere to their conventions. I learnt of the conventions of music videos, such as having narrative, music/band/artist shots, no dark themes and videos that are easy to watch, that are suitable for a mass passive audience. Most music videos are watched on a platform like YouTube therefore anyone can watch it – so many artists make their videos suitable and appealing to all audiences. Adhering to these conventions is important for audiences to be able to identify it as a music video and it also maintains the audience’s attention. If too much is subverted you can lose your audiences interest and they may dislike the video as it does not fit their expectations. The same goes for my chosen genre of punk/rock alternative music as the audience for this market expect particular things – these are the conventions I discovered for the punk/rock alternative music genre:

• Band shots flipping to a storyline
• Close ups on instruments and artists
• Focus on lead singer
• Close half shot of lead singers face
• Low angle shots
• Wide shots of the band
• Constant variety of depth of field shots
• Usually a small band - 3 - 4 members
• Occasionally edited with a black and white filter
• Dark Clothing (rebellious)
• Make-up (eye-liner etc.)
• Crazy Hairstyles

• Outdoor shots - nature
• Natural light
• Indoor artificial light
• Always a form of narrative, but it doesn't always have to link with the song/ lyrics
• Many videos take one idea from a song and create a narrative around that.

These helped me design the mise en scene for my video allowing me to pick and choose what to adhere and subvert whilst knowing what my target niche audience expect.

I mainly adhered to these conventions:

•   A strong narrative mixed between band shots, lip-syncing the song.
•   Use of Star Image (Andrew Goodwin) – Important focus on lead singer, e.g. Extreme close ups and main attention on him.
•      3 members all male band - SUBVERTED
• Enigma codes – foreshadowing image of ‘Dan’, best friend.
•    Dark Themes.
•    Natural vs artificial lighting.
•  Narrative usually does not fit with song – SUBVERTED

Usually in music videos, dark themes such as death and post-traumatic stress disorder are unusual to find, as often videos that make people feel good or have a strong message are more popular. So in theory I have subverted the music video conventions, yet despite this I have adhered to the punk/rock alternative genre conventions, as dark themes like P.T.S.D are quite common within this genre.

I also subverted the genre and modernised my video by eliminating sexism. I chose to have a female drummer, which goes against the usual concept for both drummers and punk/rock bands - women are sparse within these bands. By also adding a female into my army scenes, I therefore added a counter-type to what people expect of army soldiers. This challenged conventions but in this modern 21st century day, the more media coverage of equality, the better the things will become in the future.

Pitching my song, genre and video narrative ideas –

I began with SurveyMonkey to identify people’s views on these ideas. The survey, I created online through the website was then posted onto Facebook in order to receive direct feedback from a mass audience via web 2.0, of people my age all the way up to pensioners. My main reason for addressing such a broad audience was to see if the narrative, genre and song would be appealing to an audience and also identify what age-range my audience were likely to be.

I then pitched my idea to our media class, in which we gained some very interesting feedback. When you work by yourself or in a pair like myself, you can become very closed off and focused around your chosen ideas, often neglecting some of the flaws in your plan. Opening up ideas to a wider audience allows those elements to be highlighted as everyone thinks differently and sees things in different ways. Through our audience feedback we discovered that our concept was too complex and that we needed to simplify the story, whilst giving it a bigger impact to an audience. Which is where the idea of P.T.S.D was born.