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

real media products?

LocationsWhen filming our music video, we chose very urban locations in which to film to use the conventions of other indie music videos, the urban scenery being a recurring location in many indie music videos that we looked at in our research stage. In the picture in the left, we filmed at South Bank skate park which is covered in graffiti and attracts many young people to skate there who fit into our target audience, both age wise and in terms of their culture and music taste. South Bank is known to be a very urban place and is easily recognisable as the streets of London This idea of urban scenery in music videos can be seen in other music videos by the Kooks and Arctic Monkeys (see left) where the location the video is filmed in is very urban e.g council flats or a nightclub. By using this location we hoped to use these successful Indie music video conventions.

LocationsDuring the performance based shots of the band in our music video, we used a white studio room to film these shots to mimic the same kind of effect used in the Two Door Cinema Club video, “Something Good Can Work”, where the video is very minimal, yet the white background allows easy application of colour to the video, a concept we wanted to harness for our music video. The location, while smaller than the one used in the Two Door Cinema Club video, produces the same kind of effect and conforms to the conventions we saw in this video.

Type of music videoAfter research into existing Indie music videos, we found that it was quite common for bands to have a part narrative and part performance-based music video and therefore, we decided that we would make our music video use the convention of having both of these aspects to our music video too. We found a variety of purely narrative or purely performance music videos that fell within the Indie Genre and used some aspects of these in our video, yet chose to follow the convention seen in The View’s music video, which contains narrative and also performance when the band are in a club playing a gig towards the end of the video.

CastingMilo – Lead Singer. (Right)I was chosen to be lead singer in the video because I am male and was the only male in the group. From studying conventions of Indie music videos, we found that the genre was dominated by male-fronted bands and so i was chosen to fit in with the conventions of other Indie music videos including The View, The Kooks, Two Door Cinema Club and The Arctic Monkeys.

Suzi was chosen to be in the band too, as she had an indie style e.g the sunglasses and pink wig, which were the type of things which had previously been seen in Indie Music Videos. We also used Suzi to challenge conventions of all-male Indie bands which dominate the genre, and so we made this decision to break convention.

Pierre was used for the music video because of his Indie-look, conforming to the conventions of many other Indie music videos with his curly hair, something seen in many other Indie music videos e.g The Kooks – Naive. Also, from doing research on our target audience, we found that checked shirts were popular among fans and he was able to provide such items of clothing.

Arifa was chosen to challenge conventions of all White-British Indie bands, which seem to dominate the genre as we saw in every single one of the videos that we analysed. Therefore we chose her to break convention and give way for a more ethnically varied genre.

CostumeThrough conducting our target audience research, we found out that popular stores among fans of Indie music most commonly bought their clothes from H&M, Topshop and Uniqlo. Therefore, we all wore clothes that were from these stores or stores that had a very similar style. We found that checked shirts were very popular among the Indie audience and so, we wore them in the music video too. Hats were also popular and are worn for this reason also so that we followed conventions of Indie Rock culture. Suzi wore “Ray Bans” sunglasses, a very popular look and brand among the Indie community. The wig was also used because it gave a retro feel, which is something desired by our target market. We also used conventions we had seen in other Indie music videos to determine our clothing in the video. It can be seen in the first two pictures that both our lead singer and the guitarist in the Two Door Cinema Club video are wearing a leather jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, a popular look among the indie community. We did this to use present conventions of Indie style in music videos to ensure relevance of our style to the Indie audience.

NarrativeIn our Indie music video, the narrative was intended to portray the story of love between two people gone wrong and the narrative showing flashbacks and hindsight of the relationship. We got this idea originally from the lyrics of the song as this is the story that they tell, however, we used imagery and ideas from the Kooks’ music video for “Naive”, where narrative shots also show the space growing between a couple and imagery is used in this way to show the distance between them. The shot in the Kooks’ music video of the boy and girl sitting opposite each other on the bed was our inspiration for our shot on the pier of south bank of the boy and girl standing together but not paying any attention to each other. By doing this, we used this convention of existing narrative in Indie music videos to ensure our narrative was of high quality and would appeal to our target market.

PerformanceAs stated before, our performance based part of our music video was highly influenced by Two Door Cinema Club’s video for “Something Good Can Work” where it was filmed in a very minimal location, allowing variety and the chance to add colour. We added colour in the editing stages of our video to mimic the effect achieved in the Two Door Cinema Club video. We did this to use the convention present in this well respected and well known Indie band’s video which would help us to ensure it would be popular and well liked by our target audience.

Framing and ShotsWhen researching Indie music video conventions, it was found that a common demand of the record label and convention in such videos was many close-up shots of the lead singer, something we tried to include as much as possible to use this convention to our advantage. We can see evidence of this convention in the Kooks’ music video for “Naive”. There were also many shots of the lead singer in the Kooks’ video and so we also used many shots of the lead singer throughout to show that it was from their point of view and that they were fronting the band. This mirrors conventions in many other successful videos and is what would usually be expected from any Indie band from their record label. This is also present in the View’s music video, with lots of shots of the lead singer in both the narrative and performance aspect of their music video.