Tuesday, 20 March 2012

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

When it comes to discussing ways in which my media product uses, develops or even challenges forms and conventions of real media products, we must first go back to the roots of the project and the research process.

The research process involved divulging into the selected genre of our choice and then break down and analyze every element of their representations of the genre. This first started with looking at similar bads within our genre, almost immeaditly the one we found being 1 very popular and 2 a big influence on our own product was the band: Mumford and Sons.


Mumford and sons breifly are a well known British folk bandand became a huge part of our research, this began with looking at some of the music videos they had released and examine conventions or recurring connatations and draw inspiration or otherwise develop these original conventions.
One video that we found to be a great influence in our research and then our production itself was

Mumford and Sons - Winter winds:



In the video above and their other videos that we observed you can note several recurring connations such as; The clothing, the clothing shown here is convention very much associated with the folk genre of wearing plain/floral shirts and waistcoats or blazers over them with usually dark jeans and boots on, this is also shown in our media product in which we have developed the original concept and gone a step further and as oppossed to having a basic costume as reference to the genre we decided that the protagonist of ours would have a few costume changes that all fit the conventions of the clothes seen in folk music videos. Another connatation of the music video being the rural location, rural locations are often used within folk music videos as reference to nature, that a link lies between folk music and nature, our product chalenged this connatation and proposed that a contrast between rural and urban would be highlighting the journey of our protagonist within the story present within our product and it would be emphasining the extremes of locations delibretely contrasting the oppisite ends of the spectrum to give the audience the impression that within our product it is in a constant state of disruption that once you think you know where the narrative is taking you it shifts and sets out to get the audience to question where the narrative is taking you and what the end result shall be.

When researching our genre we established fairly quickly that our narrative was going to be based around a 'journey' for the protagonist and this case our journey was concerning our protagonist travelling to great lengths to see his lover again and this journey convention we also found present in another Mumford and Sons video as shown below.

Mumford and Sons - The Cave



As seen in this video we see the protagonist/protagonists on a journey throughout the music video but it is not a constant journey in every shot, there are cuts to a band playing instruments (which is also a convention) on a beach which is a performance element, so not just having a narrative element it also has a performance element in which it shows the instruments being played and even an incorparation of both elements into one in which the protagonists themselves sing the lyrics of the song during the narrative element. This was a connatation that we felt was crucial to have in our product because it was a connatation that was very popular within the folk genre and we felt to be true to the genre our product needed to develop or at least represent this connatation, and because of this we incorparated a performance element along with the narrative element, and like the video above we also combined the two so that the protagonist is performing during the narrative, this was achieved in our by having the protagonist sing whilst walking along and then having cuts to the protagonist looking out of a window also singing the lyrics in order to feel true to the genre we selected.

As mentioned earlier the use of instruments is also a convention used in folk music videos primarily in the performance such as the video below, but also as a narrative plot device such as the Winter winds video at the top of the page.


Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man



In this video it highlights the clothing of the folk genre but more importantly to our research it helped us understand the performance elements within the genre and the significance of the instruments such as; Accoustic guitar, banjo and keyboard becuase we recognised this as a convention of folk music videos it was hard to neglect that it may be a useful convention to develop and therefore we made the descision to have our protagonist play the accoustic guitar because we found that was a valuable convention to explore.

We found that many connatations and/or conventions found in our research process gave us a greater incite into the folk musc video genre and a better understanding when it came to the production process and therefore due to our recent extensive observation into the genre characteristics present in these videos were developed/challenged existing connatations/conventions as shown in our final product below.

The Wishing Well - Paper People final cut