Evaluation Question 1. In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

For our project we created an alternate rock band called Animal Silence. There new album was a self-titled album so it is also named "Animal Silence". For our music video we used the Paramore song 'Now' it is largely performance based, it is set in a barn but for the narrative we chose to have a girl running through the woods in the night like she was running away from something.

We decided we wanted to do an alternative rock band with a female lead, stereotypically rock bands are all male and we wanted to challenge this convention by using a female lead. We researched similar bands with women in like Paramore, Tonight Alive, The Pretty Reckless and Mindless Self-indulgence. We used Paramore as our main focus as they have a female lead like we wanted.



Andrew Goodwin's Music Video Theory.

Typical Genre characteristics - though out our music video we showed typical alternative rock characteristics, such as having the band playing instruments usually associated with rock music, like electric guitars, bass guitar and a drum kit. We also thought the kind of run down location was useful to represent our genre because a lot of alternative rock music can be related to run down, dirty, broken locations.
Links between visual and lyrics - To link our video to the lyrics we thought it would be a good idea to have the narrative part of the music video having a girl (our singer) be running away from the past and running towards the future.
Narrative and Performance - In our music video we thought it would be a good idea to do both narrative and performance, although for the best part of the video it is performance there is still the running away narrative with the girl. Doing a both narrative and performance based video was a good idea because it shows a wider range of camera angles and allowed us to explore different ways of using a camera and seeing what effect that had on the video.
Star Image - We created a star image around the lead singer, it was obvious she was our star because we used her for the narrative as well as placing her center frame during the performance based part of the music video showing she has agency over the other band members. One of our panels on the digipack also focused on Holly (our lead singer) again creating a kind of star image. We focused on just the singer with a black background for parts of the video reinstating the star image  as there is no other band member in this part of the video.
Mise-en-scene - We tried to use a range of different lighting, this created a problem because we wanted to film in the woods in the dark, we had to find a way of lighting up our actor so the video camera would be able to see her running away. We used a work lamp form a building site so we could see. It was still very dark which created the right atmosphere for our genre.

Genre.

We researched into the alternative rock genre, we looked at websites, album covers and music videos.

These are some examples of album covers from the Alternative rock genre. Bands like Deftones, Bring Me the Horizon, Paramore, Rage Against the Machine to name a few. We looked at some of the conventions of the album covers.

This slideshare shows how we took the generic genre conventions and applied them to our album cover, generally we stuck to the conventions but we also did try to challenge them slightly generally black and white are used in most alt album covers, we decided to use a picture of the woods where we filmed (Gilling Woods) we chose to do this as the green helps the cover stand out from other bands covers, but the the white still stands out well on the background of the woods.

Album cover comparrison. from 044391