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

I am going to answer this question in three sections describing how our product challenges develops and uses the forms of a real media product.

Using the forms of real product

Our music video has many different forms and conventions used throughout, including a variety of shots such as close-ups, pans and jump shots; our video also consists of a narrative, which is a form used throughout the rock industry in modern day music videos. Throughout the research prior to the creation of our music video, as a group we looked into the main conventions of a modern day music video to explicit lengths, learning that music videos within this genre (Rock) are quite similar in certain ways, and dissimilar in others. One similarity between music videos of all genres and that of the rock genre is the lip sync/miming of the song by the band - including all members. The reasoning behind this is to add a sense of realism to the video, and also to replicate the band producing the music live. One difference between music videos of the rock genre and that of most other genres in the modern day, is that music videos for rock songs tend to contain a narrative explaining a small story, or at least the narrative will have some background information explained and there will be something for the viewer to follow. This is unlike most other genres as some genres (hip-hop) don't use a narrative as often, and other genres (indie/pop) use a narrative quite often but it is usually combined with the replication of the song or it revolves around dancing in time with the music.

Developing forms used in modern day music videos

We used many of the forms that are found in a modern day music video to make our video look as realistic as possible; we achieved this by using an initial basis for what a viewer would expect a 'rock' music video to look like, and the conventions that are consistent within these, and expanding with our own ideas to vary the shot range and add excitement to the finished product. I think we achieved many different and diverse shots within our video.

Challenging the forms used in a real product

To challenge for forms used in existing rock music videos, our group researched many videos and tried to manipulate small variables that we could change to diverse from the norm of a music video in the 21st century. I think we achieved this very well, as we used many shots that are already consistent in videos of this genre, however incorporated other various camera angles and camera shots that are found not only in music videos of other genres but in short and long feature length films. An example of this would be the shot in our video of the protagonist of the narrative (myself) pondering his thoughts in the suburban setting we chose to shoot this particular part of the song in (Poole Park) where we shot still shots of an almost still image, where the body posture of the protagonist did not move, however the camera angle was changing around every half a second.

This shot, along with many others helped us to challenge forms used throughout the music industry today whilst still using the classic conventions needed to produce a music video of the highest calibre.

Our music video did not follow or challenge existing conventions to any serious degree; we used the forms found in a modern day music video and expanded on the ideas, hence achieving both similarities and differences to existing products.