Advanced Portfolio in Media 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The form and conventions in a music video defines its genre.
As a whole our group analysed various music videos similar to our chosen genre before beginning to address the forms and conventions we would be working in. What we generally found was that the running conventions throughout the Rock/Punk genre had a diverse range of emotional feeling and a sense of strength in portraying the performers in a powerful light. For most of the examples we studied, most notably the song Know your Enemy by Greenday, the performers are on a stage (Andrew Goodwin's genre characteristics) or in a position of height to depict power and dominance, engagingly commanding the attention of whoever is watching. For this very reason we decided to stick closely to this convention in order to present the usual compilation of Narrative/Performance contextually within our video, to initially captivate the audience. However, we did realise that by presenting our lead singer as a dominant figure in the video, we would lose the ambiguity of our narrative and the emotional side of the main character to an over powerful ego-enhanced image of the cliche "Rockstar" stereotype, which is something we didn't wish to highlight.
The ambiguous narrative is a choice we made in an attempt to challenge the forms and issues deriving from the music industry today, with the anticipated expectations we all have in the ability to subconsciously guess at "what comes next" in a music video, the very basis that music is founded upon of the freedom of expression and interpretation is lost. Our narrative breaks this mould by enticing the audience to believe in what is put before them, but then on the other hand begs the question who is obssessed by who? Is the concept merely a teenager dealing with her problems through music or is it something deeper, a "voyeuristic treatment of the female body" prehaps as Goodwin opinionates in the lead singers case? These signifiers to what the genre is attempting to put across can be seen from many different angles but the fact that remains is that our media product contrasts nicely in the way that the emotional side of the narrative collides with a strong band performance, hitting our target to treat our audience as intelligent viewers who can think for themselves.
The various apsects in our music video (pinpointly the mise-en-scene and the camera work/editing) have been constructed carefully to match the genre of our music video, and is created in a way to show the performers in a light to appeal to their target audience. With the social group chosen mainly older teens with an interest in the Rock/Punk genre, the key for us was to also represent costumes as a signifyer to what entails in the music video. The conclusion that evolved was that with the everyday clothing attainable to everyone, our audience would be able to relate further in the fact that they could identify with the actors in terms of appearance, as well as on a more deeper and confounding level of social issues. The camerwork follows a slow narrative that opposes the performance which is shot quickly and with sharp jogging movements, switching between the lead singer and the rest of the band. We kept close to the usual form and convention of close-ups of the lead singer and individual members of the band having certain time slots so to speak. The editing has been formed to develop conventions by reiterating the narrative with fast cuts towards the end, as to build tension and suspense. The mise-en scene was very much concerned with props and the use of lighting. We wanted to break forms and conventions of existing media products by using car headlights as our main source of lighting, due to our other challenge to the media world by filming at night in a public car park.
The general conventions of our type of genre are based very much around the relation and mood of the song to what is actually happening in the narrative. The fast paced editing that we have used in the band performance shots is something we decided to use to equal the intensity and situation of the music video when the tempo of the song is high. The first line of the song, "I saw you walking home in the dark"and "I always wind up thinking about you" is acted out in accordance to our film, with the shot of our actress walking alone at night and our lead singer sitting alone while pondering to himself (Goodwin's point on the "relationship between lyrics and visuals"). This is in addition to a mixture of many shots of the band performing and our storyline, plus scenes of the skyline and the location, to differentiate and hold the audiences attention. The line "But you're a working progress" is the main title hook in the song which sums up the video and hints at the idea of something fulfilling or becoming salvaged towards the end. (this is what the audience will notice rebounds off each other the lyrics and video to reach a conclusion)
We have used genre signifiers like the use of guitars, the traditional band set-up and in much detail, the link of a wristband which can be used to idenify the "saviour" at the end of the video. Hairstyles in the video also refer to the ideology of breaking the trend in flase modern music of having to be told how we all need to look, each band member has their own indiviual style, unlike some bands now that opt for a contemparary style or a themed look: indie, gothic, emo, etc.
Finally Roland Barthes shows in his studies of semiotics that people percieve certain aspects of life in many different ways and at times in some (bourgeois-middle class) societies ideals are contradicted by realities. In terms of our music video, what we see to be ideal in forming a good structure for a piece of film, may be contradicted in the way our narrative or choice of how we want our audience to see it is in reality.
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