shola v the scum

shola v the scum

Tuesday 8 May 2012

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

Our project is a music video which does use some typical conventions, we felt it was important to follow conventions as if our product was totally different to others then it wouldnt fit into our genre of indie rock. We also felt it was important to break conventions to ensure that our product appealled to its audience on the fact that it has never been done before. There is always the chance that the audience wouldnt like the video if it was too different. The best example in a music video for this in my opinion is: Snuff by slipknot, this video inspired us to come up with a twisted tale about broken hearts and depression, the twist at the end of the video was influential in directing our video into a twist at the end. The girl in the video also the "victim" is a blonde haired girl which is a convention used by hitchcock in his movies, it makes the girl seem more vulnerable. We have broken Vladimir Propps theory that each narrative has many different characters but we only have two main characters: the villain and the victim, but we could say that the boy is a victim and a villain. As he is the victim of depression but he brings it on himself while playing the villain.
Tzvetan Todorov's theory that every narrative can be split into five categories is also broken in our video. He believes that it can be split down into EQUILIBRIUM, DISRUPTION, DISEQUILIBRIUM, SOLUTION and finally NEW EQUILIBRIUM. We never really have a balanced story to start with (equilibrium) as the boy rejects the girl in the first sequence. We start with a disequilibrium where the boy is troubled and the girl is rejected, the story never really gets resolved with a solution so our story breaks Todorov's theory. A typical convention we did use was the isolated look through bars, and a shot down an alleyway to make the boy look vulnerable. When editing these shots we had to ensure the boy looked vulnerable as that is how we wanted the audience to see him. We only used fades as transitions to make the video seem realistic as most videos use them instead of using flamboyant transitions as that wouldnt have fit our genre.
We originally planned to use some dialogue half way through our video but we realised it seemed unproffesional and because of our northern english accents it wouldnt fit the song which is clearly American. It would have broken conventions but in my opinion it wouldnt have been positive.

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