Question 1 evaluation

This is my first question evaluation. I have included our music video in the background and have changed the speed to match me talking so the video was the same length.

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

 

 From the start of being told what our project was my group and I decided we wanted to do an Indie/Folk girl group. We liked the idea of the image we could create. The genre Indie/folk is recognised today by a lot of the youth, we decided on making the audience female as we were an all-girl group. We had problems deciding on songs as a lot of Indie/Folk bands back in the day are groups of men where as more newer groups are female which in our brief they did not want us to choose the newer music as the videos are too easy to be influenced by, so to challenge this stereotype and form we took the genre and made a girl group from it but with an older song, ‘Suddenly I see’. Our video has included the main conventions of the genre as we have used close up, high angles, low angles where needed to develop the conventions of a real media product and also the costumes we have chosen to wear suited the genre of Indie, we chose things such as dresses, denim, cardigans, tights and boots. We done a lot of research into the clothes we thought would be best to wear and also the social networking site ‘Tumblr’ includes various ‘Indie’ and unique clothing, this is where we got our clothing inspiration from. Also from looking at the latest music videos from the same genre we have also had inspiration from those artists, especially Haim.
 
We done a lot of research into different artists that we thought went under the category of an Indie/Folk groups or solo artists such as Lana Del Rey, Kings of Leon and Haim. Haim is where we got most of our inspiration from as they are three young girls who are representing the Indie genre, exactly like my group and we have tried to do in our video. Haim’s videos and posters tended to be outside a lot and they didn’t seem too forced which is what we wanted to portray within our project. After a lot of research into what an Indie group was like we settled with this. What we found was that a lot of groups under this genre revolved around nature and being care free along with natural and fun, the group Haim done exactly this. As a group we wanted to portray this message not only in our video but in our digipaks and posters too.
 
However although the term of the genre ‘Indie’ could be interpreted in different ways such as; partying and drinking, staying out late and going against societies norms and values, which was our first idea, we opted on going against this as we believed this would be showing a negative stereotype of young females, therefore going against the conventions of some Indie representations.
We decided our locations needed to be outside in the open, such as parks, fields, gardens so that we were surrounded by nature. We had a few issues such as weather to start off with as we chose the film in winter, however despite the cold all the footage came out with amazing lighting.
 
In our video we wanted it to look as relaxed as possible which became a problem at some point, however with various feedback from our teachers and class mates we overcome this by making the video look ‘home made’. This was done by using hand held cameras and not really going by our story boards, this then made the video more relaxed. In
the video there is a slight story line that could be applied to our video, the video starts off as us holding a map looking at places to go, we then have various shots of locations around London such as the London eye, arcades and other places, after this we then start making the video about the days out we have had, hence the costume change, towards the end of our video we come home and sit by the fire. By doing this we are showing the true nature and relaxation of the genre. 
 
Goodwin’s theory played a big part within our video as we wanted to include as many of his theories as possible to make sure we had included the real conventions of a music video. We used the theory of Visuals and lyrics a lot, for example in the video we have a map which goes alongside the first lyrics ‘ her face is the map of the world’. Throughout the video we had various shots of our main singer, we had close ups and lip syncing throughout which reinforces the girl group stereotype and also sticks to the conventions of real media products.
We also used notion of looking which was where me and the girls were walking in the leaves also at the very end the closing shot is of the sunset.
We have complied with the record label ‘Rough Trade’ by using close ups of the main artist as well as a range of different camera angles.
I feel that from researching into different artists with a similar genre to ours it has allowed us to apply these conventions to our music video and initially portray our band as fun and carefree and essentially indicate the genre.