In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? One convention that I decided to challenge was the choice of font and styling. It is conventional of mainstream electronic artists to use big logos with fancy text to make them stick out. I decided to challenge this convention by using Adobe Caslon Pro as my main font. This font is more traditionally used formally so I thought that using it would differ the artist and make them stand out as something a little dissimilar from other artists in the same genre. This was not recognised as anything special by our interviewees, and my Music Tech teacher (not included in the video) went so far as to say that my font and styling choice was unimaginative. On reflection, it may have been a better idea to develop an iconic artist logo or font styling; something along the lines of Martin Garrix or Nicky Romero. This may have been more appealing to an audience that follows big recognisable names.
A convention that I decided to use and develop in my video was the editing style. It was common in a lot of the videos I researched to see fast paced editing to match the upbeat music. In my production I decided that this was not a convention to be challenged, so I edited the footage to cut from shot to shot during bar changes in the music to make the video appear fluent with the track. I developed this convention by introducing time-lapse and slow-motion footage, edited so that it still keeps in time with the music and fits with the rest of the footage. My audience feedback supports the statement that all of the footage fits in well according to the tempo of the music track. A convention I followed in my music video was the mise en scene, namely the weather and lighting. Common in the videos that I watched in my research (Red Lights by Tiesto and Summer by Calvin Harris), it was often the case that it featured a lot of warm colours, with high key lighting, since bright colours are often associated with the same euphoric feelings as the electronic dance genre. Choosing Brighton Beach as our setting meant that we could take advantage of the bright colours of the pier and the sunny weather we needed on the day of filming.
I also developed the use of narrative style. A lot of videos I found when researching were performance based, and used footage from the artist’s live shows. There was a lack of narrative based music videos in this genre so I decided to use elements of both performance and narrative styles when creating my production. You can clearly see the difference between styles due to the change in location. My narrative is set at Brighton Beach while my performance piece involves our
artist working in the studio. On reflection, it would appear that my performance parts of the video were not a valuable contribution to the overall video as my interviewees didn't make any comments about them and therefore maybe suggesting that they were unnecessary and the video could've benefited by replacing these shots with more narrative footage.
In conclusion, I feel that I was able to effectively use, replicate and develop conventions of the real life texts that I studied in my research. However, when I tried to challenge convention it did not come off as well as I had planned, and therefore if I were to create my products again I would either avoid challenging conventions or try to come up with another way to challenge them.