Evaluation Question 1

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

Our video was based on the conventions of Indie Folk because focusing upon just the folk genre wouldn't have been suitable for us as a group because it would have been too difficult to get the correct instruments solely for that genre type. We therefore analysed bands that are placed in this genre category and looked at some of their music videos, clothing and albums to grap some ideas from them.

Here is my prezi showing how we used the conventions of the genre and how we challenged them.  

This is a powerpoint showing the features of Andrew Godwin's theory and how we incorporated them into our video.
 

As you can see this gif shows that our music video atmosphere had a very happy tone, which was created by the upbeat dancing within the video and the smiling faces on the characters we used too. This is because within indie folk videos the music and atmosphere must be parallel in that happy songs have to be replicated in the video by the visuals. This is apparent in music videos like The Lumineers - Hey Ho as seen in the gif below. The lighting also has to replicate the tone as bright lighting emphasises the colour of the background and costumes more whereas darker lighting gives a grungy feel.

Within the video we focused on the costume similarities between Mumford and Sons for the male because we felt that they had the best style to straight away simplify what the genre is without any confusion. The use of props also with the tambourine and the guitar also highlighted the conventions of the genre and because the song had both these instruments in it was simple to show this.

The way in which we showed our characters in the video was that we used many medium close-up shows of the pair together in the barn whilst they were singing. We found this happens a lot in the genre to symbolise the tone of the song as the facial expressions help to create the tone itself and how the audience should be feeling. The movement of the camera to follow the people around when they're mixes up the style of the shots instead of just having still video shots in the video as this was also a feature of Mumford and Sons. We showed the different locations of the video within cutaways on the video, we tried to ensure the lighting was similar throughtout the whole of the video especially in the barn because this again helps to show the atmosphere of the video.

For the actual set design in the barn we used the main setting for Mumford and Sons - Hopeless Wanderer with the barn location and the hay scattered around and then also using the design of Lily Allen's Not Fair video as she doesn't usually have a folk type genre to her music so we wanted to see how she thought the representation of this genre in her video. We found that she used different costume to us but she also used hay bails in the background so therefore we had another cutaway where the two of our people dance in between hay bails.