Evaluation Question 1 - Moises Varela Guilherme

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

There are three media products to analyse to see if they challenge forms and conventions of my real media product of if they follow the conventions successfully.

                                            1. The Music Video for 'Enough'. 

2. The DigiPak that goes with the video. 

                 3. A magazine advert to promote the song and the album for the band.

For my media product I made a music video for the song 'Enough' by 'Dinner and a Suit' an Indie Rock band based in the United States. Genre can be defined as type or formats or formulas. The indie rock genre that I have chosen for my media product has many forms and conventions. This can be form the clothing of the artist or the general 'look' of the character. Moreover it also emphasis the genre of the music video being indie as well as gaining the overall look making it more indie. Outfits within music videos in the indie genre often consist of skinny jeans, a shirt which is often checkered or leather jackets depending on the type of song. The indie genre is very much associated with relationships as many of the songs are about relationships, such as Dinner and a Suits 'Enough'. 

Dinner and a suit unfortunately don't have a music video for this amazing song that me and my group have chosen.  Not having a music video to go back to and compare is challenge as we were not able to pul ideas from the original video that would help us make a video that sticks to the indie genre. However not having a music video allowed the group and I to come up with original ideas that we thought would follow the codes and conventions of music videos but also videos for artists in the indie and indie rock sub genre. 

Codes and Conventions of Music Videos 

• Promotes a single and, normally, an album

• Promotes the  artist or band

• Creates, adapts or feeds into a ‘star image’

• Entertains the audience

• Sets the ‘meanings’ of a song  by the use of images

The performance within a music video varies depending on the genre but majority of videos include a performance by the artist as part of the video. They also contain shots of the artist. It often includes lots of close ups of the artists and there can be particular visual style that goes with the artists such as a motif within the narrative e.g particularly with clothing, actions, props, type of images. 

Codes and Conventions of Indie Rock Music Videos 

Indie Music Videos are known to be quite low in budget as they don't focus as much on the location but rather the narrative and the connection between the lyrics and the narrative of the video but also the artist and the performance. The often generic videos for indie music is known to set in locations such as:

• Studios

• Cities

• Parks

• Fields

• Tunnels 

• Indie Style Clubs/Pubs 

In indie rock music videos it is very common to have  live shots of the band in the video, which is a convention we have supported and used in our music video as we have clips of the band playing their instruments. Many conventions of indie music videos or the sub-genre of indie rock as the same as any other genre such as pop or indie folk. The main shots and camera angles will have close-up shots of the main character if the narrative or the artist itself. This is something that I have also used in my media product. 

Our music video and links to the Codes and Conventions

It is vert clear that in our music video we have included many on the convention which I have listed in order to create a successful music video. The music video itself is based on three locations. The park fields, inside the protagonists home and the bands rehearsal space. The park and rehearsal space are equivalent to the settings in the conventions of Indie music videos. I believe that in doing this we were able to make our music video more successful as we did not go against the conventions of music videos for this genre. If we went against the conventions of music videos, audiences would not be able to see a relation between the genre, style of music and the video itself.  In our video we used a number of close up shots of not only the protagonist of the video but also of the band performing and their instruments. 

The Digipak

With our digipak you can see that we followed the conventions associated with digipak's. We made sure that we included what we found in our research or digipak's. Majority of them which I researched included the image of the artist as the main focus oft eh album, cover so it would draw in the audiences attention as fans would be able to recognise them instantly. For example here are the album covers of the digipak for pop artists Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. 

 

They main focus of the album covers on these digipak's is to promote the artists. They both include the singers who take up most of the space and the album title which is vital. "Swifties and Arinators" would recognise their favourite singers instantly.