EVALUATION - Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

After extensive research and planning, we decided on the song 'You and Whose Army' by Radiohead, which as an existing band, challenge the mainstream music video conventions themselves. As they are an alternative band, they also release rather alternative and quirky videos to match. Here are a few examples of the kind of videos Radiohead release:

Just

This video leaves the viewer wondering, and it also leaves it down to the reader's interpretation as to what it stands for. We liked this idea of everybody interpreting the video differently, and so as our video is surreal and symbollic it is up to the viewer to decide what everything stands for, and what the underlying message is.

Street Spirit (Fade Out)

We liked this video for its effects, especially the slow motion and reversed shots and thought this would be an interesting element to include in our music video too, to create a distorted feel alongside the theme of 'mental distortion'.

Weird Fishes


In this video we loved the use of animation and so took inspiration from this for the paper-scrunching animation part in our video, at the chorus. We thought the outcome looked professional and effective.

Another convention we developed was the 'television' idea which was already previously used by Radiohead as well as Bowling For Soup, and we posted about this earlier in our Research/Planning:

http://youandwhosearmyproject.blogspot.com/2012/02/video-research-tv-effect.html

Our interpretation of this in our video looked like this, with the added effect of snow to the scenic backdrop. This made the contrast of black and white be portrayed continuously, from the beginning to the end of the video:

The main concept of our media products however, was to portray contrasts and opposites, and combine the two together for effect. Radiohead's video for 'All I Need' did exactly this for the topic of exploitation and trafficking, and was one of the most inspiring videos for us to develop and conform to, when producing idea's for our own story/timeline.

This hard-hitting video with a message incorporated into it gave us the inspiration to challenge ourselves, and approach a topic ourselves which is not commonly approached for the storyline of a music video. We chose the mental illness of schizophrenia, which too has 2 sides to the illness and can be portrayed carefully and symbolically by opposites of colour/contrast, behaviour, and in our instance the 'bird trapped in the cage' metaphor is also an underlying message throughout the video.

Ways in which we portrayed this include:

It is not only conventions of Radiohead videos however that we used - we researched into many other existing alternative bands, in order to conform accurately to such conventions. 

One in particular was The Scientist by Coldplay, which is a fascinating video with a narrative told in reverse. This too encouraged us to use reversed effects, as well as shoot a video outdoors. One effect in particular we liked was the 'falling leaves' reverse shot [2:22-2:24 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqWLpTKBFcU] and incorporated our own version of this into our video.

Although we challenged mainstream real media products with our alternative video, for our target audience we technically conformed. For the niche audience that listen to bands such as Radiohead, it would be inappropriate to produce a music video for example that didn't suit their style. Instead, we took it on ourselves to develop existing conventions for an alternative video to create an effective outcome.

If we produced an R'n'B however, then a quirky and symbolic video would be challenging existing conventions. Instead for existing R'n'B videos it would be expected that the artist would feature heavily throughout, presenting an egotistic persona and commonly featuring dance routines and also usually adheres to the male gaze.

Beyonce's video 'Video Phone' is a prime example of conforming to such existing conventions, and although this style of video is expected for such a song, a video like this for Radiohead's 'You and Whose Army' would not be appropriate and not conform at all to the conventions of their style.

This shows how important it is to take into consideration the genre of the music video and how this affects the typical conventions that should be followed in order to produce a successful video for its target audience.

As for the ancillary products, it is the same as in they conform well to the typical Radiohead conventions, however not necessarily for the mainstream conventions that an R'n'B artist for example would. For instance, a mainstream artist such as Rihanna's album artwork is very different to our artwork, as it firstly centres on the artist herself, as well as conforming to the male gaze with a provocative photo to appeal the viewer's eye:

Our artwork challenges this mainstream convention, but this is appropriate as we are appealing to a different audience and so although our finished artwork doesn't appeal to the mainstream audience, it is important that it conforms to our niche target audience, in which it does.

The typical convention for alternative bands isn't to centre their artwork on the artists themselves (as can be seen by the examples below) and instead it is typical to create artistic album artwork instead, in which we have too developed through our own photography and ideas in order to create a successful digipak.

It is clear to see that our digipak adheres to this artistic type of artwork and therefore we are pleased with the outcome which uses these typical conventions: