Reflective Evaluation Question One Ewan Moore

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

Our video for Natives

The official Blink-182 video for Up All Night

Sum 41's music video for their single, Pieces 

All three of the above songs deal with a dark subject matter. Natives deals with running away and isolation. Up All Night deals with angst and the fears of growing up and Pieces deals with depression and isolation. Up All Night and Pieces both have moody, dark lighting, something we wanted to achieve with our video and for the most part have. Usually Pop Punk doesn't look like this, but as we have mentioned in the blog before the genre can do "mature" and it always looks like this, dark lighting and old, run down urban/suburban locations. The emphasis on suburban life as seen in Up All Night is something we wanted to do mostly because it was easier to shoot in suburban areas, as well as the fact it follows the conventions. Our choice of location for the performance was taken from Up All Night. We wanted an area that looked fairly ruined and desolate to represent what homelessness is. The point was to try and show that it isn't a nice thing and that they are alienated from society, the band are playing in an isolated area surrounded by junk and rubbish. In the Up All Night video, they're playing in a ruined street, but we obviously couldn't afford to make it look quite so cinematic. In both Pieces and Up All Night, the entire videos are shot at night. This is something we considered doing as it may well have suited the tone of the song better. In the end it just became an impossibility as our actors had work/other commitments etc. Arguably in that respect we have challenged the standard convention and still managed to give the video a dark style through editing and playing with exposure on the actual camera. Many in our media class did comment on liking the distinction in lighting between band sections and narrative points. In this way we again challenged the norm as in Up All Night there isn't a distinct switch in light or tone. As for Postmodern concepts, we have indulged in intertextuality by showing a Blink-182 poster in Rory's room, and Rory dials 182 when in the phonebooth. Besides that, we show no sense of awareness as that might have underplayed the seriousness intended in the video. The same is true of Up All Night, which is played straight, despite a quick flash of the Blink logo on a fence. Pieces is different, having some arguably light moments of comedy with the people in the vans, though it might just be me who finds those scenes funny. Everything is subjective in the end.