Evaluation 1- In what ways does your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of real Media Products?

I have gone through our final cut of our music video and selected specific frames which i have placed into a moodboard.

Setting and Location

Our music genre 'dubstep' generally doesn't have strong conventions as its a growing genre. However when researching our genre connotations that came to mind were it being underground and urban. The opening of our video suggests these this with the tower block and the basket ball net with graffiti. The location we used throughout our music video linked well with the themes within our chosen song. The song being called 'Getting Nowhere' ignited our idea of showing someones struggle and the problems they would face. When discussing the protagonist's (Tom) struggles, the main ones that came up were youth gang violence, drugs and money, which were all negative connotations of a rough area. Therefore, we decided a run down estate would be the most suitable place to film for our music video. 

As my mood board shows we came across a metal bin for discarding knifes. We wanted to portray gang violence in some way so decided the bin was a perfect shot to symbolise gang culture in the video without filming real forms of violence. Louton High Street was another location we filmed. This showed the everyday life that surrounded Tom and highlighted his insignificance as the public does not take notice of him. The dark underpass was an important location as that also captivated our theme.

The tone of the video is very dark and gritty and about his typical life. This opening shot helps set this up which we thought worked very well. Tom is framed in the foreground which shows the estate in the background. Again, it highlights his isolation and gives the impression of 'him' and 'them' and shows you he wants to part himself from the estate. Its hard for him to do this though because of the area the area he lives.

Originally, we were going to rely on symbolic references that related to the lyrics throughout our video but decided to change this, mainly because we did not want to confuse our young target audience. We learnt from this last year with our AS thriller as feedback showed us our plot was slightly confusion. We still wanted to link our video to parts of the lyrics which many music videos do of various genres, but not in an obvious way. This challenges the conventions of our genre 'dubstep' as this is rarely done, mainly due to the fact that dubstep is mostly instrumental and rarely contains vocals to relate to. We thought this was a strength as as it was something different which we could experiment with. It worked quite well as the video could give out deeper messages if you thought about it, which we thought was quite clever. An example of this is shown within the lyrics 'electronic world' where you see the gritty CCTV cameras around the tower blocks. This backs the idea of the song title 'Getting Nowhere' and the theme as our protagonist is always upon the watchful eye of the unknown, almost giving the feeling of isolation and not been able to get away.

Costumes and Props

Costumes and props were very important as we wanted our audience to believe that Tom was from around the estate. We accomplished this by giving a Tom a stereotypical youth look with a hooded jacket, jeans and trainers. The plain clothes show him to be indifferent, insignificant to the world and portray him as just a nobody. We also decided to have him with his hood up in the majority of the video, to add more suspicion about him and to show the character as to tyring to keep his head low, particularly in his location and area showing that he does not want contact with people, and when he does its brief and does not look up.

One important prop we needed were the drugs which were essential as they represented the protagonist's struggle. We obtained washing powder in a small plastic bag to demonstrate this in the alley scene. This was very controversial as showing drugs as this challenges all conventions of a typical music video including our own genre. This would affect what time we could broadcast our music video on specific music channels as it would not be allowed to be shown before the watershed.

Camera work and Editing

While editing we decided to add in a dark contrast effect which essentially colour coded our video with a mix of grey dull colours which exaggerated the gritty tone of the video. Shots such as the open green fields would then stand out, giving a different perspective to the estate. This also worked well in the brick wall scene as the sudden change from dull colours to brighter orange colours was quite striking.

An important aspect we had to take consider while editing was the timing. We had to make sure that the entire video was in sync with the beat of the song. This would be expected in our genre of music as the rhythm and flow of the song is key. A scene that used this technique was the brick wall scene where on each beat Tom would appear in a different spot of the frame, high lighting the fact he is stuck and is in a continuous cycle.

Another scene that used this was when Tom was walking towards the camera and the background changed on the beat placing him in a different location.

We purposely made the camera slightly shaky while filming, so each shot wasn't still and boring. The hand held effect also added a sense of immediacy and gave a feeling like you were actually there. As our video was mainly set in one location we always had to use a range of various angles to keep the video interesting. We particularly liked the shot where we famed nothing else apart from a row of flats which made the shot different, rather than just showing the entire building.  

One of the more interesting hots we had was of the traffic. Here we set up a tripod over an overpass and filmed the traffic below roughly for two minutes. When we sped the footage up it gave it a really good affect and showed the audience that time had passed. The darkness contrasted with the yellow bright lights of the cars which made it quite distinctive and interesting to watch.

We used many shots to give an insight of our protagonist. We used a long shot to introduce Tom because we wanted him to be portrayed as an outcast, this showed him in the open and the estate in the background. We used close ups of Tom's face to display his emotion to the audience. In the shot below you can clearly see Tom's expression gaining an insight into what he is thinking.

Here is a word cloud for our blog, relating to our finished music video. It conveys words that have been used most frequently throughout and gives us a clear idea of the most important parts and ideas we used during our production. As you can see, the conventions of our video are the most frequent with words appearing such as "violence", "drugs" and "gritty". These all link within the strong urban themes written in the lyrics and nature of the song and is something we ultimately aimed for. Therefore, as a group we believe our production was a success.

By Christian Sheen