Evaluation Question 1 Notes

Evaluation Question 1 Notes

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

Our final media product has come a long way from the planning stage that we embarked upon many months ago. We chose to produce a video for the song Brennisteinn, by the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Ros. As a whole our chosen song belonged to the alternative rock genre, and post-rock as a subgenre of that. You could argue that our chosen genre is not among the more popular chart genres, we simply chose this genre to cooperate with our own music interests and tastes.

When conducting initial research of our chosen genre we decided as a group that we are going to challenge some of the conventions of the genre as well as keep some things similar in our final product(s). We found that the chosen genre was typically ‘arty’ and very stylistic with an alternative take on things, this suited our initial ideas really well as we wanted to create a final video that is artfully different from the norm as well as to stand out for our target audience. Also we believe that there is a gap in the market of this genre to incorporate a post-rock video that is creatively different.

In the research phase of our project we researched key media concepts, which included some media theories that we were prepared to challenge. For example when researching the genre of our project we explored Goodwin’s theory of star image. Goodwin suggests that music companies demand a lot of close ups and shots of the “star” in the band or the band as a whole. We decided to challenge this by not including the band in our final video at all. This was a bold move as it goes against typical audience expectations, however when further researching into the post-rock genre we found that this is not unusual in this style of music. When we conducted further audience research to build a profile for the typical audience member for our final product we found that not having shots of the band in the music video does in fact meet the audiences expectations.

Researching genre also gave us Jason Mitell’s theory that industries use genre to sell products to companies. As much as our group completely agreed with this statement we decided to challenge it slightly by going against some of the typical traits of alternative rock music in our final product(s). We didn’t change it too much however; we still made sure that our video fit into the alternative rock/post-rock genre, as it was what our target audience was looking for in our product.

When exploring other real media products that are related to our genre, for example when analyzing some of Radiohead’s music videos, we found that the alternative rock genre uses a variety of camera angles such as high, low and cantered angles to make the video more alternative. We also found that low key lighting is stereotypically used in these videos to further incorporate the genre. In this case, we abided by the ‘rules’ of the genre here by using varied shots in our final product as well as all of our band footage being shot in low key lighting. We believe that this makes the final product look very ‘arty’ which is what we were aiming to do from the planning stage of the project. Furthermore, we wanted to challenge some media conventions of the genre we selected but not completely go against it. When watching and researching some typical alternative rock and post-rock music videos we found that they were all different in their own way so we deduced that the genre covers a variety of styles and what classes as alternative-rock is indeed alternative in that sense as many of the videos cover a broad range of different stylistic elements. This contrasts other music genres for example pop music – were different artists videos look practically the same and do tend to follow a certain, distinctive pattern.

In terms of media language, we believe that our final media product does incorporate typical conventions of real media products. For example, Goodwin stated that performers and objects move in time with the music in music videos. In the editing phase of our project we took exceptional care to ensure that the characters in the video moved in time with the music as well as the overall flow of the video. An example of this can be seen in our video at 02:02 where the screen splits into vertical columns of the male character. The columns appear on screen at the same pace as the music flows which results in the final scene looking visually dynamic as well as incorporating conventions of other real media products. This also links in with Vernallis’ theory of the camera moving in time with the music.

Goodwin’s theory of thought beats is perhaps the most important in our final media product. As a group we decided that using thought beats will be the making of the final product. This is because of the drums in our chosen song. Brennisteinn features drums that are instantly recognizable, and frame the song if you like. After listening to the track several times we decided that we can use the drums to our advantage by using thought beats and changing the scene, or something changing in the scene when the drums are sounded in the song. When looking back to our final product we believe that this has been a definite success and again makes our final video very visual and keeps the audience entertained.

When exploring the convetions of represention in the search phase we decided to use the lyrics to propose a narrative in the video. Obviously this was difficult at first as the band we chose are Icelandic, we therefore had to translate the lyrics and compose a lyric breakdown were we analysed the meaning of the lyrics to come up with a narrative. After we had completed this task we found that the song had a romance storyline to it in which two lovers were kept separated. We decided to build upon the foundations of this idea but change it slightly to create a different take on things. In the end our video followed the storyline of having 2 characters that have indeed being kept separate – to further use the idea of separation this is why we had the idea of using different locations to show this. When the 2 characters were reunited however we decided to twist the storyline so that the male character turns against the female. We didn’t want to make this too clear in the video as we wanted to keep an unresolved ending. Tis idea again, uses typical real life media conventions as we found that similar bands of our chosen genre do this quite frequently in their music videos. The ending of our music video proposes that the male has killed the female but it is open to question by the audience – we aimed to keep it vague and slightly unclear to keep the audience guessing. This backs up Vernallis’ theory of keeping the narrative fragmented.