EvaluationEmily Tattersfield

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

Through our initial research we learnt a lot about the typical codes and conventions of music videos, magazine advertisements and digipaks. In particular, those of the Indie/Pop genre. We knew what was typical of this and decided to go against the conventions in an obvious way. The topic of the original Alt-J Breezeblocks video is domestic violence and we decided to continue this subject on in our own music video. Although we had carried on the with the initial matter, it felt as if we were totally going against the convention because domestic violence is a very sensitive problem and rarely talked about. Our music video tackles an almost unspoken issue and this is not like other music videos, particularly the genre which we we working with.

In terms of creating an entire storyline and showing the domestic violence being played out, we really followed the typical conventions. The Alt-J music video was complex and thoroughly thought through, It was telling you a story and we decided it

was appropriate to do this with our music video. You discover at the end of the original video that it was actually presented to the audience backwards, making the good guy

look like the violent one. We came to the conclusion that we would create a video that was in chronological order. So we were playing around with the conventions by doing

this. We discussed the storyline at great length to ensure it didn’t look thrown together and unconsidered.

We had to make sure that the music video was presented in a way that would attract the audience we are trying to aim at. Our target audience are young adults both genders age 15 – 25. The way we attracted this audience was by using both male and female characters and tackling a situation that anyone could easily

fall into in their lifetime.I thought that the music video itself had to be really interesting to attract such a

varied age group.The lavish house and how it seems so calm and lovely, when it is in fact a front for what goes on behind closed doors; it’s perfect for our target audience and for the

genre. Some parts of the music video are filmed inside the house, so the music video shows light and fairly steady scenes from the house, some of the parts are filmed outside with both of the characters running. The outside scenes are duller and have a fast cutting rate, like the abuse has been released into the open and becomes even more obvious as he is disturbingly chasing her away from their

home.

The elements we added in when creating the music video were carefully selected so we could target the genre and audience properly. We fitted all the

conventions in our music video so that the audience gets what they were expecting to get and this encourages them to watch the video. We set the scene

like any normal house, generally tidy, natural lighting etc.The opening scene of the music video is a woman being sung to by a guy who is

just behind her shoulder, after a few seconds it becomes obvious that something is not quite right and that she actually can’t in fact hear him. This pulls in any viewer straight away. This leads us on to a very harsh topic for a

music video to be covering. This already gives the audience most of what they were expecting.

It is typical of a digipak to have a running theme throughout it. For ours we had a specific colour palette that we kept for the whole thing. From our first hand photos we were able to collect a pattern that we found fitting with a wide range of colours. It was easy enough to spread repeatedly across the digipak without it looking odd

because the picture was already quite abstract.

The CD was also made from a picture from the actual music video to tie it all up

together.

Fonts, colours and images had to match in order for the posters to fit the typical conventions. They are very rarely completely different in appearance for the simple fact that people would not recognise it as being part of the band. Posters have to

consistent in what pictures and fonts they use in order to develop the stereotype of Alt-J.