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

In this blog post, I will be going through some of the features of my music video and the conventions that I either developed or challenged.

The music video often follows a set of conventions, which varies depending on the genre of the song. Indie music videos have their fair share of conventions, in terms of camerawork, editing, and mise-en-scene. A lot of indie videos used to be performance based, but now videos are a combination of both, which is something that I have tried to do in my video.

A lot of the focus is also on mise-en-scene, as I believe it helps create the mood of the video, and I have tried to do this in my video through my use of setting, a "run-down" housing estate, which I think represents the character's (myself) despair and loneliness. I also think that because I am the main character, the more attention I will receive because of it. I was also particular about the type of clothes that I was wearing. In indie music videos, the bands or artists are represented to be quite fashionable and "cool", so I wore something which I felt was representative of that.

Another feature of my music video was that I used a variety of shots, but the types of shots that I believe were the most significant were the close-ups that I used, as I think they capture the emotion and establishes an interaction between the audience and the artist. I also think the longer shots were used effectively, because they helped to capture how isolated he is and how separated he is from other people.

In terms of editing, I didn't stray away from the standard form of editing for music videos (montage). I felt that would seem too much like a short film otherwise, and I wanted to have the performance aspect in my video also. Another common characteristic that I noticed was that a lot of videos use filtering and colour correction, which I used in my video to create a darker atmosphere and an old-fashioned effect. I think that a varied use of transitions was unnecessary and inappropriate for my video, but I did use fades to open and close the video, as the song that I used doesn't start or end abruptly, especially towards the end where the song fades away.

The reason why I was almost totally conventional was because I feel that the target audience (working class, teenagers) would struggle to understand a non-conventional music video, where for example there would be no lip-syncing and the video would be chronologically correct. However I think that it isn't a problem because boundaries haven't been broken in the way that music videos are filmed and edited in a long time, and that it's near-impossible to create something that is 100% original today.