Evaluation Part 1

Evaluation Part 1: " In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products? "

Music videos have many conventions that can change from different music genres. However, most music videos follow the theory laid out by Goodwin and include some sort of narrative. Other key conventions of music videos are close ups of the artist whilst lip syncing, footage in sync with the music and the narrative relating to the lyrics.

I researched into many videos from my artists genre, grunge rock, until I had found the key elements commonly seen in grunge music videos. What I noticed was that most of these music videos were very performance heavy. This inspired me to create music video that was performance heavy but included lots of visual on screen effects. Also as grunge was prominent in the 90's I wanted my video to have a VHS inspired look to it. 

I began to brainstorm ideas and start planning for my music video. I decided on a colourful, psychedelic and raw looking style for my video. The way that my video challenges toucan music video conventions is that it focuses more on the bands performance and heavy use of editing rather than a big story like narrative. However performance based videos are conventional for bands in the rock genre.

My music video starts of with a shot of a turntable needle being placed on a spinning vinyl record that I shot. This conforms to the conventions of real media products as it is a use of intertexualtiy referencing a scene from Tarantino's movie Death Proof. This shot also suggests the video will have a 'vintage' look to it due to vinyl being an old way of listening to music. As my video progresses and the singing comes in I used a number of close ups to show the main performer singing in time and in sync the lyrics of the song. This is a convention shot seen in many music videos. I also used a number of different types of shots to film the other band members playing their instruments. I shot a close up of the drums being played and adding them into the video so that they synced up with the beat of the song and matched the drum fills.

After the bridge of the song you see the whole band come together into one room. This is again a conventional music video feature. This was used to keep the flow of the music video progressing and not to become boring by seeing the same shots over again. I filmed the band in a small room to give the performance an intimate look to it to replicate what it would be like seeing the band live in a small venue.

Seen throughout the video is quick shots of items commonly associated with rock and roll such as guitars, leather jackets and boots, jewellery, alcohol and recording studios. This helped the music video have some sort of narrative to it and to show an audience what a typical day in the life of a rockstar might include.

The music video features heavy usage of effects found in final cut pro. These effects include prism, negative, colour correction, bad tv and projector. All of these effects when used together can give you a very raw VHS look to it matching the aesthetic of the band. The colour correction allowed me to manipulate the colours of the footage to help my achieve my desired vibrant look.