MUSIC VIDEO
I tried to challenge conventions of real music videos by adding in short clips I found on YouTube to add to the narrative. Our narrative involved a woman getting ready for a night out with her friends, and reminiscing about her youth. Although I thought the narrative good and clear, I thought I could add to it to make it more developed and prominent in the video. I decided to look on YouTube for some old videos of house parties and people dancing. I tried to find videos in old VHS style as this reflects the 80’s style that the character would have had their youth in. I decided to place short sections of these videos in my music video to develop our narrative. I made it look like they were videos of the character’s past and she is reminiscing about them. I thought it worked really well as it made the narrative clearer and gave the video the 80’s style I was looking for. This challenges forms and conventions of real music videos as they rarely use footage separate to what they have filmed themselves.
DIGIPAK AND POSTER
I have perhaps challenged conventions by doing a vast amount of editing on my digipak and poster. I decided to do quite a lot of editing to my digipak and digipak poster in order to make them look emphatic and stand out to the audience. This challenged conventions, as most digipaks in the indie rock genre don’t have as much editing done to them as I have. I wanted to give my band a unique identity, and I thought my editing did that as it is quite different. An audience would be able to see a panel an easily identify it as my band. In addition, I am aware that they, especially the poster, are made to promote the album and help them sell more, so I wanted to make them emphatic and noticeable so they attracted audiences to the band and album. Despite challenging conventions, Ido think they conform to the style of indie rock, as they are black and white and have an edgy, dark style to them.
I challenged conventions by adding the social media names for my band for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook onto the poster. This challenges conventions of indie rock posters as bands usually try and keep some anonymity about them, so they often don't have social media links on posters. It also goes against the simple theme they try and go for. However, because my band is unknown, having social media links is a great way to promote the band. Getting followers on social media helps build hype around the band and lets the band interact with fans. This helps them promote the albums, tours and singles and will increase the success of the band.
On most album covers and posters for indie rock bands, they have the album name and band name in the same colour.
This is seen on Arctic Monkey's "Favourite Worst Nightmare" album and many others such as "Fourth" by The Verve. This has become a standard feature of the genre. I decided to challenge this convention by putting the artist name in black, and the album name in white. I did this because I wanted the album name to stand out slightly. I thought that if they were both black, they would drown out into the background and be less visible. I think the contrast of the black and white makes them stand out and both be noticeable. My audience feedback also supported this as they said it looked better when they were different colours.
I challenged conventions of real media products by putting a vintage filter over the performance side instead of putting and black and white filter that would be more suitable for the genre. I did this because I didn't want my video to look like every other indie rock video in black and white, so I made it have a slightly older look by putting a vintage filter on it. I think it worked well because it made the video more interesting and contrasted well with the narrative side of the video. This is unusual for indie rock videos, and is an example of how I have challenged the conventions.
I also challenged stereotypes by having a female protagonist. This is uncommon in music videos, especially indie rock, however because we wanted to portray the lyrics of the song we needed a female protagonist. The song is about a woman reminiscing about her youth and getting ready for a night out. To accurately portray this we needed a female main character.
