Question 1

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

• In many ways our media product follows many of the generic conventions that would be seen in any other similar form of music. Especially within our genre of ‘indie’ music. The indie genre is very simple, plain and minimalistic.

• Our main source of inspiration came from other artists in this genre. An artist we all had an interest in was Ben Howard. His music is similar to the music of Erick Baker, who was the artist we chose. His influences show in both our music video an our digital work. Including shot types and layouts.

• I regards to our audience feedback it was clear that certain areas needed work, especially in our music video. Overall we re-shot our video around 4 times, each with improvements but the lip syncing was a real problem and was the first thing to come up in our audience feedback. We really tried to keep a theme of colours continuing throughout our work, from the video to the advert poster to the digipak. This was something that was noticed by our audience.

• Obviously there are some differences between our work and the real products. We had to keep in mind the idea of budget. With mainstream artists comes much higher budgets for music video. The locations for our shoots were much less glamorous and showed a simple natural view, linking to our genre. We were also limited to the technology to develop and create our videos. As students we cannot simply afford the camera equipment used to create mainstream music videos, this is clear in our video, however this did play to our advantage.

• Regarding originality I do feel we have something other videos do not posses. Our aim was to create an emotional atmosphere, through the story of our character loosing a loved one. And through the song and the camera work I feel we achieved this, especially the end of our video. The video constantly refers back to visions and memories of a daughter who was lost. However we leave room for imagination in the audiences heads as to what happened and its this mystery that I feel is original.

• Throughout we have used redundancy and entropy. The redundancy of our indie genre shines through in our video, the locations, mise-en-scene such as clothing and the song itself is all very much as expected. However using an emotional slant on things was something that we found was not a generic convention in this genre, this is where our entropic features such as the dark side of loss and love is introduced and the fact our video ends on a low. This plays on the mind of the audience as its not what is expected. Challenging the generic conventions is an aim I feel we achieved.