Task 1: Coventions of the Music Video

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

Music Videos are used to promote the artist and their work, so it is common in most music videos to have a key focus on the artist and try to promote her as much as possible. This was a key element in our music video to try and promote the artist as much as possible by using conventions, such as using lots of close ups and trying to keep the main focus on her by keeping her centre frame as well as having her lit differently to the other girls. We researched this idea as a group and tried to think of different ways we could keep her the focus with other people in the frame. This is used quite a lot in the industry with a synthetic artist as the artist is what they want to try and sell rather than the music or anyone else involved in the music video. As you can see from the snippet from one of Rihanna's music videos she is the key focus, nothing in the background drawing attention away from the audience, just like our video we try to make our artist the main focus.

One of our elements of our music video which challenges convention of a pop artist is the abstract outfits we gave our artist and our dancers. It is quite common to see very basic and clothing that could be worn by the fans of the video, but we wanted to create a weird and intriguing look to our cast which would fascinate the audience. Lucy and Crerar came up with the costumes and found them in a local charity shop when I made sure when filming that these outfits were shot in a certain way which would entice the audience. It can also be argued that these outfits do match the conventions of certain artists in the industry such as Miley Cyrus and Eryka Badu who are known for wearing whacky clothing which is a huge part of their image as a whole.

Another element of our music video where we follow the conventions of a pop video is our dance. In our video we have included a short dance routine with the main artist and a group of girls, this is very common to see in modern day videos, such examples include Beyonce, Niki Minaj and Jennifer Lopez. Although we do have a dance in way a way it does go against typical conventions, Crerar choreographed so it fit the theme of the video of being abstract and unsettling which is not what you would normally get in a routine dance in a music video. Normally you would see very on the beet movements and quick a snappy but our dance flows and is slow, to make sure this was conveyed as the editor I had to cut the dance similar to how the dance was being performed so that it fit well together.



One other convention of the type of genre music video is very dark mood lighting, we were able to achieve this through meeting with our lighting technician and working on the look we wanted to create. What we went for was dark blues, reds and purple to create a dingy as well as mysterious looking theme.

You can compare this type of lighting to a similar type of genre song Acid Rain by Lorn. They to have dark lighting with slight variations in colour, this matches the slow dark beats to both songs which is what we wanted to achieve.