Thursday, 26 January 2012

Reflective Evaluation Sarah Carter

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our video for the song "Natives" by Blink-182


 The video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day

The video for "Adam's Song" by Blink-182

Shown above are the videos for three songs - "Natives" by Blink-182 which is the song that Ewan and I created a music video for, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day and lastly "Adam's Song" by our chosen artist, Blink-182. The two existing videos show the genre conventions of pop-punk very clearly - the use of lighting, location and subject matter all point towards the more serious, melancholy side to the music genre of pop-punk. Although the genre lends itself to the more humorous and fun side of music, it also tends to dabble in the more serious side occasionally and to good effect. I believe that in many ways, our music video has also stuck to the conventions of a pop-punk music video through the connection between its subject matter and mis-en-scene.
As seen in the previous Blink-182 video, the subject of suicide is addressed in the lyrics of the song, and the entire mood is generally quite morose. We thought that our song choice was also based around the same sort of topic - the idea of loneliness, isolation and depression - and therefore we decided that it would be best not to challenge the genre conventions to avoid creating something that was inappropriate and inevitably ineffective also. By having a serious approach to the video, I feel we have conformed to the general conventions of a pop-punk music video in a way that benefits our video significantly. Similarly, the video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" demonstrates the same sort of mood and subject matter which is typical of a ballad-like, sad pop-punk song. In this way, the two videos has several similarities in their mise-en-scene qualities, including their use of dull and muted lighting/colours and run down environments and locations, such as the warehouse in "Adam's Song" or the deserted town in "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". The idea of homelessness and isolation is something we incorporated into our own video and I think the locations we used were sensible, appropriate and effective in making the narrative of our video look convincing and visually appealing. I especially feel that our band performance location is very effective.
Another aspect of pop-punk videos that we thought we should conform to is the split of narrative and performance - as seen in the two previously existing videos and our own video, there is almost an equal split on performance and narrative, which gives a good amount of variety and a sense of reality to the video, to ensure that the viewer is fully engaged throughout and also, the band themselves are being promoted/sold in the video. We used differing shot types to keep the video interesting and dynamic whilst also taking into conideration hwo these shot types would work best with regard to our actors and performers.
With regards to postmodern ideas, we decided to use a slight sense of intertexuality in our video, but in a discreet and appropriate way. We incorporated a Blink-182 poster into our video, which is only seen briefly. We also got the actor to dial the number "182" in the phone booth, which we believed was a sneaky way to fit the band name into the video.
I thought another way that we used genre conventions is within the narrative itself. We made a conscious effort to ensure that the main character in our video is treated badly from start to finish, with no real care and attention being paid to him at all. This can also be seen in the video for "Adam's Song" where we see still frame shots of the band coming across the characters who are 'in trouble' and yet they pay no real attention to them whatsoever. We thought this was interesting, as usually music is seen to be people's 'saviour' whereas in this case, and in the case of our own music video, we see that the music treats him just the same as everyone else.

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