Evaluation Q.1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In todays music industry, music videos have the purpose to promote an singer/artists music and now it seems they are steadily becoming for entertainment purposes. There is now a big demand for big theatrical music videos with huge complicated performances and amazing new special effects. As the video-editing program was Final Cut Pro, which is now certified as professional video editing software because it has been used in many big blockbuster films like ‘The Social Network’, there should be no reason why the standard of this music video should not be equal to that.

Our music video contained clear elements of a performance and a narrative that was illustrative, meaning it corresponded with the message with the song lyrics which a lot of music videos do have today. The song is about the thoughts of a mentally ill person, so we thought it would be expected to story tell the person’s life, in this case a female antagonist character, in a chronological fashion. The Star of the band, which was the lead singer, was connected to this female character, which we showed with cross cuts throughout depicting another parallel element to the piece. Examples of this in videos now are ‘Brick by Boring Brick’ by Paramore and ‘Hey there, Delilah’ by the Plain White Ts. Rock videos contain strong amounts of performances in the videos, where the video is either all performance or just the majority performance with some narrative. Our video contains an equal mixture and also towards the end, the performance becomes a part of the narrative as the narrative character interacts with the lead singer, which we felt was quite creative and unique.

Our music video was inspired by many 70’s artists for example ‘The Beatles’. We felt it would be interesting to bring a more modernised theme to a 70’s psychedelic themed song, but still retaining its trance like atmosphere. The coloured filters in the video, created a 70’s psyschedelic feel to it which was also enhanced by the pace throughout the video which was quite slower than many videos today. So in a way we challenged the conventions of todays music with the song choice. However, the original music video to Brain Damage by Pink Floyd’s narrative was disjuncture and it contained a political message of Government corruption which was very common for a video to have in that time period. In todays Pop musical culture, music videos with disjuncture and a political message is quite rare. Few bands like Radiohead still favour this type. Overall in order for our music video to appeal to our large target audience, having an illustrative narrative in our video is advisory. Although there was no signs of a political message in the video, we felt it was quite important to still show its deeper representations of insanity.

Raph Jims