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

To summarise our project:

Song: "Unbreakable" (Originally by "Fireflight")
Artist: The Defiance
Genre: Rock
Target Audience: 15-22 year  olds

Throughout the project, research and planning of real media products influenced every decision we made as a group. We researched real artist brands, music videos, websites and album covers to note conventions of these products and draw inspiration for every aspect of our project. Below are outlined some of the artists and campaigns that influenced our decisions such as: Paramore, Within Temptation, We are the In Crowd, The Script, and Train.

Music Video

This director's commentary explains how we wanted to follow some general music video conventions, but also produce a rock video which stood out from others and gave a meaningful message.

Narrative influences:

As explained in the commentary, many of the rock music videos we watched were performance-driven or only followed the lead singer in a narrative e.g. just dragging the seek bar quickly through the music videos below, the narrative only follows Sharon Den Adel, the lead singer. The second video demonstrates the conventional performance-based rock music video.



This video is an obvious example of the lead singer being portrayed as the most important figure, which we wanted to avoid.



The Paramore video is completely performance-based, which is also what we did not want for our own video, as we thought our song was more meaningful (addressed further below).

We wanted to break this convention, and decided to create a narrative-driven music video. Although our storyline was inspired by "Hall of Fame" by The Script, the idea for the whole band narrative stemmed from "Rumour Mill" by We are the In Crowd. 

These are the final shot of the characters in "Hall of Fame" - They have successfully achieved their dreams.

As shown in the gif of "Rumour Mill", each band member had their own storyline, which we wanted to re-create. The story itself in uncommon in rock songs, where performance is the priority (as mentioned in the director's commentary). Our message of never giving up or becoming "unbreakable" was not common in the rock music we listened to, or the videos we watched in the rock genre.

"Rumour Mill" band member character storylines

Our recreation of this

Todorov's narrative theory:

As we wanted to tell a story, almost like a film, we decided it best to stick to this theory.When we had access to our edit suite, the first thing we did was start working on the narrative sequences for each character. This was because we had not had many performance shoots, thus we did not have much footage. The narrative footage was also easier to edit together as it did not require as quick editing as performance would.

Each character had 3 sequences, which we tried to fit to Todorov's Narrative Theory as best we could.

Created on gliffy.com

After trawling through hours of footage, we picked the best shots, and created 3 short action sequences which we could integrate together for the song verses in the music video.

My / The lead singer's narrative sequence

Aidan's / The Guitarist's narrative sequence

Camera/ technical influences:

The music video to "Drops of Jupiter" by Train heavily influenced the camera movement in our video. We wanted to create similar constant camera movement. Although this particular song is not a rock song, many rock music videos (such as the ones above) do contain a lot of camera movement. Without narrative, or with less narrative, it is crucial that the performance maintains audience interest for the duration of the song.

Drops of Jupiter camera movement example

How we tried to recreate constant  different camera movements

Styling

The artists already mentioned: Within Temptation and Paramore, also influenced our styling. The band members are dressed in casual but stylish t-shirts/ shirts and jeans. Each member has an individual look but complements the others.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - Dark shirt, sleeves rolled up - This corresponds to the colour of the drum-kit, therefore completing his look as a drummer. His costume is different to what the other members are wearing, therefore he stands out even though the outfit itself is quite simple. He also has a beard, which none of the other band members do.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - The guitarist appears the light, quirky one of the group as he is wearing a light blue shirt, and even his guitar is a brighter colours  He has his own character and personality within the group, which is an important convention of music videos when portraying band performance.

Screenshot form "Ignorance" - As mentioned, each member of the band has an individual style, but also work together well to complete the whole band look. We wanted a similar effect for The Defiance.

As you can see, we chose a more Paramore - inspired look for the male members of The Defiance, while the leader is dressed in a more Gothic style dress. This was so that she was immediately different and unique in the band.

In this screenshot from "Stand my Ground", the band are all dressed in similar black Gothic clothing, whereas we wanted to emphasise the lead singer in the group shots, therefore we broke this convention.

Representation:

Goodwin's theory points out that the music industry often has "voyeuristic treatment of the female body", hence we wanted to steer away from the sexualisation of women as outlined in our gender representation research post. Thus, the lead singer of The Defiance, while we tried dressing her stylishly and so she would appeal to both the male and female audience, is not exposed or inappropriately dressed.

Website

In a research post, we investigated the features of music artist websites and female fronted rock band websites:

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We stuck to these music artist website features, but also had to personalise ours to suit our rock genre. Dark colours, such as on the Evanescence website, were typical of rock websites, so we wanted to portray our genre clearly, therefore followed it. There was also a banner, which most artist websites had, that stayed constant in all the pages of the website to promote one overall brand, which we also drew upon.

Evanescence website banner

Album cover

The Album cover features were some that are present on all album covers such as a bar code, album title, artist etc. The cover similarly portrays the genre of the music, and must efficiently give an idea at first glance of what the audience can expect from the songs. 

The following research made clear that we should include an image of The Defiance band members on the front to immediately promote our brand, and our album and artist names should be clear and bold.

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Altogether, we wanted a product that was somewhat conventional to the rock genre, but we did not want to simply copy or follow blindly. Therefore by having an unconventional narrative, we tried to make our debut single and music video stand out.