Evaluation Question 1

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

As the band we have chosen for the music video is a rock/metal band we have decided to follow the stereotypical conventions of music videos in this genre. Videos with a narrative tend to have equal amounts of performance and narrative shots. This is because the performance is usually the strongest part of the video and the narrative is usually simple and very easy to follow as the audience is usually focused on the performance shots. The narrative shots in the videos will also often feature members of the band. One of the videos we used as inspiration contains a number of these generic conventions as it has a simple narrative, strong performance shots and members of the band are featured in the video.

In our music video we have used equal amounts of performance and narrative shots. We used a very simple narrative so the audience could follow the plot with the performance shots added in between. 

In some metal videos for example ‘Slipknot- Before I Forget’ the focus is more on the instrument and only very rarely show the faces of the people playing them. In videos of this genre the music is often a lot more important than the narrative so during performance shots the instruments are the main focus.

In our video we decided to use this convention and have the main focus on the instruments during the performance shots and only show the face of the lead singer/ actor in our piece.

The editing in majority of rock/metal videos is very fast paced, with short clips and cuts in between, this increase the pace of the music video. We followed this convention by using short shots and cuts to increase the pace of our music video.

The lighting in music videos of this genre is usually very harsh, the performance shots usually have artificial lighting to make it look a lot darker or brighter than what would usually be seen, in narrative shots this can be the same or the lighting can be more natural. We decided to follow conventions in our music video as we decided to use artificial lighting in both the performance and narrative shots to increase the brightness and harshness of the shots.