Evaluation Question 1

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

The band our group chose to create a music video for was “Kill the Freak” who are a metal band. We decided, as a group, that our music video will also be based on the rock/metal genre to reflects our band's image. When researching into existing music video’s, we made sure to look closely at video’s in the rock/metal genre so that we could see and understand the types on conventions that could relate back to our own video when we created it. Consistent in the video’s we researched, we discovered that the majority incorporated both a narrative and performance of the band/singer into the video. One good example of video that has a good use of performance shots would be “Avenged Sevenfold - Hail To The King” which our video took inspiration from with some of our shots:  



Avenge Sevenfold's video:                                                                       Our video:

Another convention this specific genre of music video uses is fast paced cuts and editing. In most cases, the music is also fast paced and the storylines used in this genre of video is most commonly tragic or hectic, so the fast paced cuts work well with the contents of the video. A good example of this would be “Slipknot - Duality”:

Also, the majority of rock/metal video’s a shot with dark colours, some even in black and white, again to work with the storylines of the video and to connote that the genre as a whole is quite dark and angry. I think that this aspect of the genre works well with the storyline of our music video so we have chosen to edit our video in a darker light to connote how our storyline is also very dark and twisted. We chose to use a similar colour scheme for our music video to 'Duality' to highlight the dark and gloomy narrative we chose to use:

Slipknot's video:                                                                                     Our video:

Another video we took inspiration from was Disturbed - Asylum. We chose to consider this video as it fits in perfectly with our mental hospital theme and some of the shots used really sparked our creative imaginations. Since this video is purely narrative with no performance shots, it goes against the conventions of the rock/metal genre, but it has a very similar storyline to our own video which was a good influence. It had some really good close up shots of the mental patients face which I thought worked really well with the theme and gave the video a disturbing vibe to it. There are also alot of fast paced cuts in this video which is a common generic convention, which we chose to include in our own music video as well to reflect real media texts accurately.

        Disturbed's video:                                                                                       Our video: