Evaluation Question 1

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

Within the music video industry, there are a number of set codes and conventions that are followed or challenged and in our music video for the song ‘Heathens’ by DAZE, we believe we challenged the forms and conventions of real media products for the most part. However, we did in fact use some of the forms and conventions.

Prior to the shooting of our music video, we did some research to existing music videos within the genre, which is indie pop. We heavily researched the 1975, who is the inspiration of our artist. We gathered from existing music videos within this genre that black is the predominant colour used in the music videos. We then used this convention within our music video by having the main costume of our artist being fully black. This included black vans, black jeans, black bomber jacket, black hoodie and a black hat. We also followed the convention by including dark locations such as the dark room within the drama department. This room heavily featured in the video as it helped generate the mood and the tone of the video.

We also used some other conventions of existing media products in our music video. We included our artist in the majority of the shots throughout the video as this typically occurs not only in similar music videos, but in most videos, no matter what the genre. Another convention we used was lip syncing shots, this is a common feature of music videos and we used this throughout the video and most notably the first couple of lines and the last couple of lines were lip synced. We also learned from existing media products that the pace of editing in music videos is very fast and upbeat. Our group included pieces of parallel editing and as a result there were quick shots used because at times in the song, the beat was very fast paced.

However, we did in fact challenge some conventions of real media products. Firstly, typically the first line of the song is typically lip synced with a close up of the artist. We challenged this by using a medium long shot our artist and had him lip sync instead of using this shot. This was it being a stylistic choice as we wanted the video to not follow all of the codes and conventions. Another convention we did not follow was to not have a set narrative across the video. Most music videos have a clear narrative throughout the video but ours is not as clear. Our narrative, which is the artist being more comfortable in Camden compared to shy and unhappy at school, is subtler.