Evaluation question 1

How does your video, use, develop, or challenge the forms and conventions of real music videos?

The first point that needs to be made is that it is almost impossible to tell how we have used or developed the conventions of music video as they are incredibly varied! However, one thing that is usually always considered a convention of music video is that the artist is almost always seen ‘performing’ usually ‘live’ or miming; in order to give the video a sense of believability. Although in our music video we did not feature anyone performing at all, completely challenging the convention just mentioned as we maintained the loose narrative throughout the whole video instead of cutting to anyone performing. I believe that it worked perfectly as it does not feel empty or lacking in any way and it flows smoothly with the music maintaining the rhythm and not disrupting the audiences viewing experience.

Secondly it is often considered a convention that the video explores the lyrics or meaning of the song in some way, however we didn’t explore the lyrics in any way, but by ignoring the lyrics or any possible meaning to the song; we actually followed two other conventions. These conventions being disjuncture and developing a loose narrative, disjuncture is incredibly common amongst music video as it enables some true artists and talented directors to develop very creative technically profound videos; this is what we tried to achieve with our video, which I believe we achieved. I think using the idea of stop motion and disjuncture in conjunction with each other was a very good idea as for disjuncture to work, the video needs to be aesthetically pleasing and interesting, or simply. It must look cool; which stop motion does, so it combined perfectly to create an interesting and unique visual experience. And all of this was because we challenged the idea of using the lyrics to build up a loose narrative by just coming up with a loose narrative that used the idea of disjuncture instead of the lyrics as its base.

The last major convention that we challenged was the idea of cutting the edits so that they reflect the songs structure, as normally they cut from live footage to perhaps a close up of the singers face, or a loose narrative, however we maintained the loose narrative all the way through apart from at the chorus where we animated the lyrics on a piece of card (relating to synaesthesia) , we intentionally maintained our loose narrative all the way through so that we didn’t not over complicate the video and make it confusing or cluttered. We also did it to deliberately attempt to challenge this particular convention and see if it would work maintaining the narrative the whole way through the song. I feel that it worked brilliantly and it keeps the video simple but still visually interesting and repeatable due to the stop motion aspect of it.

In contrast though, there are some conventions that we did follow, for example displaying the name of the artist and song title at the beginning and end of the song, this is purely to do what it is intended to do and help the audience recognize the artist and the song, enabling them to find it at a later date if they wish so. So it is actually a marketing or advertising technique really, first adopted by MTV but has now become an important convention of music video simply because of the need for recognition. So we as a group felt that we should include the artist and song name because it makes it look more professional and likely to be on television such as MTV and secondly out of respect to the artist, as we would not want to take any undue credit for the song itself as none of us helped to write it.

Secondly we did use fast cuts, which are popular amongst music video, but we adapted the fast cuts and used them within stop motion, so we cut from different scenes of stop motion and cut the photos so they ran quickly with very fast cuts between them.
The major aspect for any music video though is seen to be; if it looks ‘cool’ it will work, and in a sense we used this technique as one of the major factors for us in creating this video is we wanted it to look visually striking and smart. (Hence why we used stop motion, it looks fantastic!) This idea is represented by the phrase ‘MTV foregrounds the signifier over the signified’ – John Friske.

We followed other smaller conventions of music video through contemporary culture, these would be things such as the costume our main character was in, the hair style he had, the items in his room etc; all of these are present in youth culture and appear to make the main character or the ‘meat’ cool and combined with the music they can be a useful marketing tool in creating a ‘star image’. This is the effect we were trying to achieve by using these clothes, hair styles and objects as not only does it make the video more interesting, it also adds colour which was another crucial aspect that we needed to bring to the media product.

So overall I would say that we used enough conventions to make it clear that it was a music video and that it still worked as one, but we also developed some conventions in order to stand out and produce a more visually interesting and attractive video than the completely conventional music videos on channels such as MTV.