Question 1 - In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

To answer this question we have created a video response in which we highlight upon how we 'used, developed and challenged' forms and conventions of real media products to achieve our desired effect for both our main product (music video) and the two ancillary products (album cover and website) we created.

Here are some relevant videos which we 'used, developed and challenged':

We drew particular inspiration from this video and adapted both its style and concept to our idea. The video has a very casual, 'proffesional home movie' style of camerawork in which we tried to use in our own video. The camerawork is often static, front on and has the actors directly addressing the camera representative of a 'webcam'. We decided to use similar shots within our video to create a similar professional yet home made feel to the video to create a friendly and approachable band image (as shown below).

The video creates comedy through featuring famous figures from YouTube, and thus popular culture, interacting with the band. We developed this idea and decided to take it a step further by using famous villains as members of the band. We believe this would create a positive band image as all the characters are particularly popular and also adds elements of comedy to the video, showing potentially scary characters making fools of themselves.

OK Go have become renowned for their success with creative and inspired music videos. When developing our idea we took into account many of the techniques they use in post production to create visually interesting videos. The video 'Get Over It' was created very early on in their career when they were just starting to try new things with their videos.

What I drew particular inspiration from in this video was the use of lyrical visual aids, jump cuts and lens flares. Keeping these shots and techniques in mind I decided to develop the idea of visual aids. Instead of being blunt and showing a picture picture of 'hay' on the line 'Hey!' we decided to storyboard a more subtle form of visual aid where on certain lines a character or actor would do something that connotes the lyric. For example, on the line 'What I saw I almost couldn't comprehend' we show The Joker clutching his head and shaking it. We also used jump cuts and lens flares often which are very common editing styles used in music videos from our genre as they have strong connotations with a party/festival lifestyle.

Arctic Monkeys are an example of a successful band from the same genre as us. Despite being very successful they are are very conventional in terms of style and image. Indie/Alternative bands are often very bland, they look like normal people just playing instruments, which is appealing to their fans as it makes for a friendlier and approachable image and it becomes almost cool to appear normal and making it 'all about the music'.

This is shown in this music video were a man plays the drums until his hands bleed. This connotes a very serious feel to alternative bands as it is normally all about playing good music without creating a spectacle and just enjoying it for what it is. We wanted our band to be similar to this, however, in our video I believe we challenge this convention as our video is comical and does not take itself seriously at all, in fact, I would say we are the exact opposite, there are many occasions when the band members are just having fun and ignoring the music. This makes the video feel all about just enjoying yourself to the music rather than enjoying the playing of it. 

 

Vernallis's Analysis

When editing our video we took into account many of the forms and conventions vernallis describes. For instance, we broke many rules of continuit editing such as jump cuts, irregular angle sequences and breaking the 30 degree rule. These editing techniques served to make the video more visually entertaining.

We also use vernallis's idea of narrative conventions, having no clear ending to the music video adds to the mystery and message of the video as it leaves the audience with something to think about, for example when the lead wakes up at the end of the video, was it all a dream? where did the villains go?

Website

Our website follows a number of conventions, it coordinates with the album by featuring all the band members and also the same american highway, this strengthens the bands image.

It also has many links to information about tours, albums, singles, blogs, band members and other useful websites such as YouTube, Facebook and the bands production company. We have developed on older websites by utilising web 2.0 to allow audiences to interact with the band to a greater extent than usual, we have created an online store filled with STA merchendise, blogging sections which allows users to leave comments for the band and a competition page giving fans the oppertunity to win personalised gifts.

Similar to the 'Cage The Elephant' website we wanted to make something simple and easy to navigate yet visually interesting and involving, to do this we created a obvious navigation bar yet filled the website with photos and videos to create a both visual and informative website.

Album Cover
 Our album cover follows many conventions of real album covers. For example, we have a constant American theme throughout the piece, shown by the highway and billboards as well as this we also show all the necessary band information required by a debut album both on our front and back cover such as the band name, album title, barcode, institutional information, record label and track list.

We challenged conventions of debut album covers by having our band members faces obscured by cartoonising them, we feel this creates a sense of mystery about the band members which would encourage people to purchase the album to find out more about the band or subsequently visit the website, all of which would give them exposure to our music.