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

When creating a music video the starting point needs to be the song and artist that it will be based around. So the first thing our group did was to find a band and then decide on one of their songs. We spent some time doing this as we wanted to find a song that we thought had enough depth and inspired us creatively. We decided on All About Flux's song Just Don't Care.




After deciding on this song I researched, watched and analysed a variety of professional videos. This was an important step in the creative process. Here I generated ideas about what we might use in our video, what would not be appropriate and what characteristics made up the music video form.


The video which were the most interesting and engaging were those that had a storyline and were original. The most original videos had a lot of entropic elements, especially in the punk genre where individuality is important. It was clear that making a really good music video would mean doing something different and unexpected.


To get a good idea of what would appeal to our target audience I looked at videos that were popular with them. This was where the majority of our inspiration came from. I researched Paramore, one of the most successful pop-punk bands, and found that most of their videos had very interesting narratives. The songs and videos often revolved around relationships, this applies to almost all genres, and because our song was about a relationship the best choice was to continue that idea in our video. When studying videos I found that most of them had some link between the lyrics and the visuals and this was a convention we followed.


When researching music videos generally I also found common features that would not fit into our video. In many videos, mainly of other genres such as rap, there is a very voyeuristic approach to women. Women in these videos are treated as 'eye-candy' and are sexualised, the camera focusses on their body. This would be inappropriate for our video as the target audience are female and would likely see looks and vanity as unimportant. In many punk videos there are anti-establishment themes and representations of psychological disturbance. These have become quite common for the punk genre, seen in videos such as White Lies' Bigger Than Us and Paramore's Brick By Boring Brick. These ideas would not work in our video as they would clash with the emotional narrative.

Bigger Than Us                                                                        Brick By Boring Brick

The narrative we created was inspired first by Panic! at the Disco's video I Write Sins Not Tragedies. They took a redundant wedding scene and invaded it with clowns and circus performers. This idea interested us and we wanted to try and use a clown as one of our characters. The circus was a theme that suited music as it is another performance style and also the circus celebrates individuality and being extraordinary, something our target audience would associate with. 

We searched for any similar videos and found Take That's "Said It All". This video showed clowns getting ready and then performing on stage, this worked really well with the music and was something we wanted in our video. The clowns were emotionally represented and romantic issues were hinted at in the video, but this was not explored to any depth. We decided to create a video around these themes, using a clown's failing relationship as our narrative.

The Take That video was what we based the look of sections of our video on. Their clown makeup was our model and also we likes the way the video was shot. It used close ups on the clown so the audience would connect with him, then longer shots to show his performing.


Watching and analysing existing music videos was important as it forms a mould of what videos are like generally. It showed what features almost all videos included, such as performance by the artist which promoted them and created a star image. When creating a media product it is most often best to balance redundant and entropic features. This is an idea that Steve Neale has presented, talking about how audiences enjoy both repetition and difference. We want the audience to enjoy our video and so it needs to be familiar to them and fit in with the other things they enjoy; it needs to meet some of their expectations. To do this creators use redundant idea's that will signal the the viewer that this product fits into their preferred genre. In our video we styled the artist in black and white clothes and had them act with an attitude, thus fitting into the punk genre. But viewers do not want to see exactly the same thing repeated over and over, to make an interesting product something new is needed. Our narrative about a failing relationship is fairly standard for music videos, but by making the man a clown it added another layer. Now he was trying to decide between his performing and his girlfriend, as well as living on a small amount of money. This is a story that hasn't been used in music videos before and so would make our video stand out to viewer as interesting and be memorable.


When trying to do something different you can also go too far. There are many videos that 
have no structure to them or which are very experimental. Sometimes these videos work and are a massive success. But they can also be so radical that many viewers don't understand the concept and feel alienated or think the video is ridiculous. 


Getting audience feedback heavily influenced our video, showing wether we were working too far from the conventions or if it was all redundant. Before starting to plan the creation of our video the group created a detailed mood-board, this meant we had a clear idea of our audience and what their interests were etc. We pitched our concept and had an initial audience focus group. These highlighted some concerns from the audience. Although they thought the idea was original and appealing, they thought that the setting and clown performance might not look realistic. When they heard the song they commented that because the lead singer was female but the main characters was male it could be confusing who viewers are supposed to empathise with. This was something we made sure to address when planning and filming.


After editing together a rough cut of our video we performed more focus groups to see it what we had done was working. The biggest change this prompted was the addition of artist performance to the video. We had at first didn't want to have performance, this was a challenge to music video conventions and was clearly a step too far as it didn't work. The audience thought seeing the artist perform the song was a necessary feature and so we incorporated it. By following the form more closely and adding performance our video looked a lot more professional and came together as a whole, an example of when conforming to convention can improve the product.


Our video is quite similar to a professional music video in many ways. The narrative, editing and use of conventions are all very similar. There are of course some things which do not look as professional, due to restraints such as time, technology and expertise. Over the course of filming we used different camera's and this meant our video quality was inconsistent. Some of the scenes looks professional quality and some do not look as good. We also realised after filming one set of scenes that the lighting in the location did not work well when recorded. We learnt from these mistakes but did not have enough time to reshoot, as we would have liked too.