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

In this essay, I am going to discuss the different ways our product used and challenged conventional forms of real media products. I am also going to discuss how we developed the idea from inspiration and research on already existing products.

To help us with our planning and research, we reviewed and watched similar media products in the genre we wanted to work in. For example, we wanted to work in an indie, folk style to connote the genre of the song we chose. To do this, we singled out a few bands we found, such as Ok Go, Arctic monkeys, and our main style influence, Florence and the Machine.

Here, you can see we were mainly inspired with the mise en scene of Florence and the machines video 'the dog days are over'. We liked the way how they ahd designed the costumes of the dolls to give them a Halloween, 'macabre' style in a normal, everyday setting of a woods. To show how this video inspired us in our own, we  decided to recreate the dolls style into a more friendly, appealing look to please and amuse our viewers.

Our audience research directed our creativity and inspired us to try and make something different and unpredictable to make it satisfying and keep our viewers engaged. To help us create what our target audience wanted to see, we asked them half way through production about how we could improve our project. The main point that came up was out editing speed, so to change this we made it faster in some places and tried to tie it in with the beat of the music. Once we had done this, we showed our audience again, and they commented on an improvement, and said that the video felt more like the song.

Our media product is a lot different to other media products as we had to plan our budget to a very low degree and use the technology available, this limited our ideas on what we could do using the resources to make our video as effective as it could be. To do this, our video had a very prominent 'home made' effect which made us stand out from the real professional media products as ours looked carefully made, instead of investing in powerful CGI to do our work for us. This home made effect makes our video look highly created, as all the costumes, make up, sets ans stop motion was all hand made by us, this also made it original as we had made it ourselves without the help of others, giving our product a really individual feel.

To a broad extent, we have been very original with our video, by making our own costumes, sets, make up and so on. We have also combined stop motion with real footage, as we saw this would make our video stand out from many as this technique isn't widely used in the genre we chose.

To an extent, entropy has been used to give our music video a disjunctive effect. We chose to do this to engage the viewers to make them think about the video and whats happening in it. After showing this to friends, we have found out that this entropic effect is very good at making the viewers question the video and the narrative, and get them talking about it afterwards. This would be very effective in the industry as it would be easy for us to get people talking about our video, as a positive word of mouth would help our marketing strategy of our products.

In our video, we challenged the conventions of narrative, and tried to show that we didn't have to follow a clear story line to make a music video. This was difficult as once we gained audience feed back, we received comments such as 'it didn't make sense' and 'there was no clear narrative'. This shows that people are expecting music videos to have a clear narrative and story line and would judge on this point. We also challenged mise en scene and tried to create our own costume based upon the macabre/folk style of Florence and the machines costumes in their music video 'dog days are over'.