JM - Evaluation Q1

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

Depending on interpretation, our media product can be seen to simultaneously use, develop and challenge the forms and conventions of real media products. How we can see the different interpretations is to use critical theorists.

Dyer

• Dyer’s framework concerns the star image portrayed by artists in film, TV and music. When we look specifically at our video we see many of his ideas reinforced.
• The conceptual aspect of our music video is a convention of the ‘indie’ genre because it typical of this genre to create a more artistic text rather than one that is an advertisement for the band. Our music video shows this through the absence of the band for a significant amount of the video.
• This then makes the audience strive to ‘make sense’ of the video and fully understand the meaning behind it. This therefore makes our text stand up to repeatability, as our audience will go back and watch our video again in an attempt to clarify their understanding of the videos meaning.

• Hence, our video conforms with Dyer’s idea that the ‘star’ should be present but absent, meaning that the advertisement of the band is broken up as performance is out weighted by the conceptual narrative of the four unknown characters.
• An example of our ‘artistic’ nature of our music video can be seen in our photo montage sequences:


Postmodernism

• Videos at the present time are consumed in what is called the ‘post-modern fashion’. This concerns focused and ambient viewing and whether we perceive the text we are consuming to be art or advertisement’.
• The fact that our music video is heavily weighted toward our narrative means that we have created a more artistic music video. This is backed up by the amount of time that is spent focusing on characters outside of the band rather than the band itself.
• However, the lead singer is featured throughout the video, which may counter this argument because him being featured with many close-ups and meat shots means that our video swings back toward being an advertisement.

• Another way that our video can be considered ‘art’ is through our creation of narrative fuzz. The two most effective ways we did this were through jump cuts and photo montage that broke up the narrative and made the video polysemic by creating mystery around the characters and others featured in the video.
• However, this narrative fuzz means that our video has repeatability, which could be seen as intentionally used to make the audience come back to the video and other texts from the band to learn more about the band and their music, therefore going on to consume more of their products and make the band and record companies more money, again making a case for the video being advert rather than art.

Another video I viewed that created the same sense of narrative fuzz it Arctic Monkey's 'A View From the Afternoon':

Conclusion
• In conclusion our video is conventional to the indie genre, because it is lo-fi and postmodern.
• Our music video creates narrative fuzz and therefore has repeatability.
• In our video we create a star image which is in line with Dyer’s theory on media stars.