Evaluation Question 1

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

When creating our media product, we researched into the generic conventions used in real media texts from the same genre. This gave us a much greater understanding of what would be stereotypical for the audience to see within our product.

Our media product follows the generic conventions of our chosen genre from the way that we shot the footage to the themes used throughout the video and also included in our digipak and poster design.

We were inspired by the video for 'Asylum' by Disturbed as the themes used within this video are very similar to the initial thoughts that our chosen song gave us in relation to the music video. We felt that the motifs used within the video portrayed a very similar atmosphere to that by our chosen song.

We also noticed whilst analysing this and other videos in the metal genre was that they are often quite dark in colour and mainly use white light to give a colder feel.
Another generic convention of metal/rock music videos is that they use fast paced editing to give a chaotic feel.

These are some comparisons of shots taken from our music video and shots taken for existing real media texts.

 

From researching into the metal genre, we noticed that it is often much less about how the band members look than is seen in other genres such as pop. This is shown in a very literal sense in nu-metal band Slipknot's video for 'Before I Forget'. The use of very interesting camera angles means that even though you never see a full profile or head shot of the members, the video is still engaging to the audience. We took inspiration from this in our own music video by never showing the band members in the performance shots, the attention is entirely placed onto their instruments.

Below are some comparisons of performance shots from the video 'Before I Forget' and our own music video.

Another music video that followed a similar theme to ours through both lyrics and visuals is Avenged Sevenfold's 'Nightmare'. This video was a perfect example of how we wanted to combine a strong narrative with performance shots. This is also a convention that is commonly used within the metal genre. Fast paced editing that includes links between the music and visuals create a very effective atmosphere in a video and is used in most metal videos and we felt that this was the most important convention for us to follow when creating our music video product.

There were only a few actual shots that have been used as comparison against our own from this video, but the others were used as inspiration.