Individual Evaluation - Dom

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

To answer this question, I first needed to identify what genre of music our song choice would be classed as. This will help me in order to choose a similar song of the same genre and pinpoint the individual conventions used in that video and the conventions used in our video.
The genre I believe our song could be categorised into is the 'pop rock' genre. I feel our song is too soft to be classed as a full on rock song however it uses many instruments and is therefore not entirely poppy. A band that plays a similar sort of music to ours I would say is a band called 'McFly'. After extensive research through many of McFly's music videos I was able to identify some conventions and a video that portrays all of these conventions. (Shown Below)

This song, '5 colours in her hair' shows all the conventions that should be used in a music video of 'pop rock' genre. These are: Performance Footage, Bright Colours, extensive editing and Story-line. 

Performance Footage

In this video, there is a lot of performance footage showing the band members, this includes instruments and lip syncing. In some ways our video does use this convention as we have a lot of lip syncing. However, we also challenge this convention as we have no use of instruments in our video. This is not done intentionally. Originally we set out to use many instruments such as a piano for the music intro at the start of the video but a lack of planning meant we couldn't find anyone that could play the piano. Below are screen grabs of the use of performance in McFly's video and ours as well. 

Bright Colours

In a lot of McFly's videos there is extensive use of bright colours, coming in many different forms. The clothing is all very bright, so is the general style of editing. Our video challenges this conventions as we adopt a dark style of editing and as you can see in the pictures above, there is a huge difference in clothing we are wearing. I believe we adopted this style as our song, in contrast to many of McFly's, has quite a dark meaning and story behind it whereas McFly's lyrics and stories are quite upbeat and happy. 

Extensive Editing

Editing is a very broad subject there are two aspects of editing that I need to focus on in order to analyse editing. There are filters and effects applied to our video that make it look dark such as the saturation effect and de-saturation effect. But there is also editing techniques that change the size of the video and make it appear in different areas of the screen. This is used in both our video and McFly's video. Examples are shown below. 

Storyline

In both McFly' video and our video, there is a storyline and performance footage, therefore showing that we are using this convention, a convention that I believed we used quite well.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary products?

After researching many videos and ancillary products (eg DigiPaks) I approached the ultimate conclusion that the most successful DigiPaks were ones that included reminders that can be seen in the particular video. So we decided this would be a convention that we would try and incorporate in our digipak. Obviously, the pink in the DigiPak reminds the audience of 'The Pink Spiders'