Evaluation Question 1

Music Video

One common convention of the Indie genre in terms of editing is applying effects/filters over the video in order to give it a sad/ historical look which is usually relevant to the storyline as there are a lot of Indie-Pop music videos that are based upon a sad theme. The most popular effect used is the black and white effect as it further adds to the emotion of a sad themed song. As a result of this, this was a necessary effect to apply to our own music video as we needed to exaggerate the sad/morbid theme that runs throughout our video. We chose to only apply this effect to the performance shots in our music video where the artist can be seen on his own in the attempt to express his emotion/feelings to the audience. The pace of the editing in the Indie genre is usually determined by the beat/pace of the music for example there are more cuts when the pace of the music speeds up. This follows Goodwin’s theory and it makes the music video easier on the eye for the audience and more comfortable to watch. This editing technique can be seen in our music video as the end of the music video the pace picks up which also expresses the artist’s emotion but also as the pace picks up the cuts used are much more frequent jump cuts jumping from scene to scene to show the artists thought process is all over the place.

Another basic convention of Indie style music videos is that they are usually filmed on a low budget meaning that public areas such as parks, woods, amusement parks etc. are commonly used in our genre. Because of this, it made it fairly simple for us to follow these conventions due to having a low budget as well, these locations were free to us and we used this to our advantage to make our music video look professional.

Our narrative was developed with assistance from on exciting media text being a film called Charlie St. Cloud which followed Goodwin's theory in terms of lyrics closely linking to the on screen visuals. As well as this, we used existing music videos in our genre in order to fully understand the generic conventions of Indie music videos when actually applied to an existing video example; examples that we used were chocolate from the 1975 and Rollercoaster by Bleachers.

Overall, our music video followed the conventions of our genre fairly closely as we really used our research to develop our narrative. This is the main reason that our music video is a good reflection of an existing music video in our genre. As well as this, our music video did not go against conventions of music videos in terms of Goodwin's theory, in fact our video closely follows the theory because this, our music video resembles a good example of a music video in our genre that follows conventions meaning that an audience for our video would be satisfied as it involves key plot points, and characters that they can relate to.

"Chocolate" by the 1975 is an example of a music video form the Indie Pop genre that follows the conventions of the genre closely. Similar to our music video, this existing music video uses a black and white effect, this amplifies the emotion within the video like ours. This music video uses a combination of performance shots as well as having a narrative which is becoming increasingly popular within the genre recently making it a typical convention expected from music videos in this genre. Our music video also has the balance between performance and narrative because it is a convention in our genre.

Magazine Advert & Digipak

Unlike our music video, our magazine advert and digipak do not follow the conventions as closely. Both our magazine advert and our digipak challenged the conventions of our genre in terms of including a photo of the artist on each of our media products. Having said this, we ensured that the image of the artist used on our digipak was located on the inside cover and used an image of the sea on the front and back cover of the digipak as objects/scenery are commonly found on these media products within the Indie genre. On the other hand, the image of our artist used on the inside cover of the digipak is the main image on our magazine advert, this is the main convention that we challenged in the design of some of our media products.

Even though we challenged conventions of our genre in the design of our magazine advert and digipak, we also followed most of the convention of our genre closely like in our music video. We applied artistic effects to the images that were used on the media products as this follows the conventions of the genre being sad and old fashioned. Moreover, we used a suitable font for our chosen genre as we went with something similar to existing Indie-Pop music videos. Finally, a suitable record label that specialise in the production of Indie-Pop music video was used on the magazine advert and the digipak to emphasise the fact that we have followed the conventions of our chosen genre closely.

Final Digipak & Magazine advert 

After receiving further feedback on our previous design we changed our final design slightly by removing the artistic effects which reveals the identity of the character on the front of the magazine advert and digipak. This further challenged conventions of our genre as typically the artist does not feature on their media products instead, landscapes or objects are used. Other small adjustments were also made to the digipak however, these do not challenge conventions of our genre other than the artistic effects that were applied to the images have now been removed. The purpose of removing the filter applied is to make the image look higher quality as previously it almost looked like unfocused camera or just poor quality camera work. The improvements that have been made have now improved the quality of our magazine advert and digipak and has given them a more professional look.