Throughout the creation of the joint project; that of our media video we firstly tried to stick to as many conventions as possible, aware of the fact that this is what makes a professional piece of work we then moved parts of this process forward by allowing our own creativity to take these conventions to new areas and to put our own creative swing into the video.
The Mise en Scene of the music video is the first convention noticeable within our production. The opening shot of the band entering the garage helps lay the foundation for the genre of the song we have used. Along shot allows the band to be seen together whilst the efficiency with which they pick up their instruments and settle in preparation to perform shows that there is a job to be done. Indirectly linking to the post-apocalyptic feel we created via the idea that life is on a day to day basis and that surfing is a just a job to be completed.
The lighting; is again something which helps establish a mood; the bright orange is reminiscent of firelight, linking to the theme of survival which has been established.
The beginning of the video has no narrative; hence why the only thing established by the opening shots is who the band is. This is something that was important to use when planning the production due to the length of the song. We wanted an aspect of the song to continue being post-apocalyptic whilst not linking to the narrative formed in the choruses of the song. We left the instrumentals and verses to simply remain illustrative of a band playing music. For this I was influenced by the video of Many of Horror by Biffy Clyro. Whilst there is no narrative to the video I was intrigued by how they kept the song performing in just one location and wanted to take this convention of music videos and apply to our own production.
The conventions of a video being either Illustrative, Amplification of disjunctive was a convention that we directly stuck to by allowing our music video to take elements of the illustrative genre and create something from them. For example we took the illustrative genre and applied it to the garage scenes, providing images of the band playing the song and singing lyrics, just like in the Biffy Clyro video. However we then challenged this convention and pushed it further by creating a simple narrative with it by moving locations to both the hill and the warehouse. Creating a definite survival and post-apocalyptic feel to the video. The miss en scene provided for this by the fallen leaves and the grey sky.
It was in this way that our music video challenged the congenital ways of music videos. For example the use of three locations challenged the way many videos use just the one. The use of these multiple locations was intentionally used add detail to the video and to help the feel of a post-apocalyptic video.
A second convention of a music video is that of band performance. To be able to show effective instrument playing and lip syncing. Whilst this convention is challenged in some videos, even Muses' own for Hysteria, I felt it was important to use because of the length of the song and the video would need to be padded out with something and band performance was key to doing this. We took care in creating a realistic reproduction of the song and this was helped by the time taken before production to learn the song on both guitar and bass. Whilst this doesn't directly challenge convention it does adhere to it and allowed us to create a professional band performance. This was done by careful production over to drafts. Something which was key to this was to include an element that the band was truly playing by incorporating shots of the band rocking together. This is commonly scene in music videos.
We tried to include a variety of camera shots to increase the pace of editing to something which would resemble a conventional indie-rock music video. Editing on the beat provided pace to our video which worked well with the performance aspect of the song. Editing on the beat enabled us to do a variety of things. Firstly we needed different camera shots. Editing on the drum beat meant that we needed clear views of the drum performance and this allowed us to film from behind the drums, providing a diverse selection of shots, allowing our video to use a convention of normal videos. It secondly allowed for the Mise en Scene of the video to be clearly shown. Such as when the singing in the warehouse cuts from long shot to mid shot and the ghostly look of the lead singer can be seen. We developed this convention by reducing it sure. It was not used for very cut as the song was to long; it was however used for important beats, namely drums parts and thus becomes obvious in the video. It can be seen therefore that we challenged this convention to try and display the careful editing that runs through the video.
The pace of editing was then slowed drastically by lengthy shots of the singer singing the lyrics. Allowing the convention of close ups to be used to show the in sync editing.
We used an effect named 'Old world" on the shots of Croft Hill and the warehouse, allowing the transition from verse to chorus to be seen clearly and also to add a sense of an apocalyptic world to the video. Whilst we changed this lighting here we left the lighting in the garage as it was when it was filmed as it created dynamic shadows, something which again I liked in the Many of Horror video by Biffy Clyro.
We used fades at the beginning and end of the video as we liked how it introduced the band but then allowed the video to end in time with the gradual fade of the music.
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