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

We chose as a group to use the rock genre for our media product and we did frequent amounts of research in order to find out the typical style and form of rock music videos, some videos we looked at included 'Hall of Fame' and 'Drops of Jupiter' . There are many ways in which our media product conforms to the conventions of music videos, but also many ways in which we developed and in some cases challenged the forms and conventions of real media products of the rock genre.

Director's Commentary

Here is a brief commentary about some of the forms and conventions we used both in the narrative parts of our video and the performance parts. We also talk about things we did in the music video that challenged or developed typical forms and conventions.

Influences of our Band

Below is some images of how we portrayed our band

These are some bands we were influenced by:

Paramore



We believe this is a rock band that was very similar to our desired representation due to them also having a lead female vocalist and a band image that we wanted to resemble, cool and fun while also being passionate about rock music. They have a wide audience primarily 15-25 year olds of both genders, and a wide range of successful rock songs such as 'Misery Business' and 'Monster'. Our desired primary audience was similar being both genders 15-22 years.

Fireflight



This band is the band that had the successful song 'Unbreakable' that we used for our music video. We learnt a lot from the way they presented themselves and took aspects from their image into creating the rock persona of our band. Such as wearing dark styled clothes which we liked and so developed to wear some dark clothes while also adding a bit of colour to our band image.

Hey Monday



This band was a cool rock band which we like the style of. We found them a little too colourful for our desired image and so chose to wear darker clothes as well as some bright clothes of the style Hey Monday wore. We also used a darker lighting set-up and backdrop when we created are music video.

Music Video

 

Narrative

Our narrative consists of three characters resembling each band member, who have individual problems with there lives. The guitarist is a passionate player who wants to be successful in music, but is stuck busking. The singer has a stressful job and wants to to do something she enjoys as such as singing. While the Drummer wants to find and opportunity to play the drums as a career out of the way of his frustrated parents. They come across an band audition poster providing them with the opportunity they have been looking for. The narrative ends with them meeting and entering an audition room.



Hall of Fame was a video that strongly influenced the story of our narrative. When we listened to the lyrics of the song 'Unbreakable' we like the idea that it was about having problems and finding a way or solution to return stronger and over come these problems. Hall of Fame has a strong narrative in which two characters from different backgrounds had difficulties and big aspirations. The girl had a hearing problem and wanted to dance and the boy wanted to be better at defending himself.

  The Script- Hall of Fame ft. Will.i.am

We also really liked the way the narrative followed multiple story lines and this helped as create ours as we wanted to focus are narrative on each individual band member. The audition scene helped give us the idea of how each of our band members could achieve their dreams of becoming successful musicians by coming together and trying out for a band audition.

Todorov's Narrative Theory

To help us form a convincing narrative we made sure we followed Todorov's Narrative Theory. Below shows how are narrative follows the theory.

Performance

We looked at a wide variety of music videos so we could learn to make our performance convincing and conform to the forms and conventions rock music videos.

Camera Movement:          
     

                                                                     

Were learnt from this video on how much camera movement was used in Music videos. It allowed us to help the music video flow and follow and trace the band through a using shots  pans and zooms. We also learnt to include a wide variety of shot types from long shots to close ups. As well as to show peoples emotions, we chose to use close ups to also create convincing lip syncs when focused on the singers face.

Miming Instruments Convincingly:

This was the video we watched after realising we didn't mime convincingly on our test shoot both singing and playing instruments. This video included lots of performance from about 1:30 onwards and were learnt to exaggerated movements and large gestures while playing helped improve the overall performance and made it look more realistic.

Gifs of Conventions we used from rock music videos 

Camera Movement

Exaggerated playing of Instruments

Head banging and large gestures to the music

Website

I have compared the forms and conventions we have used to create our Website with the bands we researched in order to help us make ours. 

Album Cover

I have compared the forms and conventions we have used to create our album cover with the similar band Paramore, for their album cover for 'RIOT'

So in the end we made sure our media products used good conventions of the the rock genre, so our products could be appealing to our target audience, but also have unique things such as our unconventional narrative to make our music video stand out.