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

The song which we made a music video for was My Little Haunting by Hot Club De Paris, and as a group we felt that the song fell in to the 'indie' genre. Once we knew that the song was within that genre we could start researching the conventions to get an idea of how we would create our media product. We researched in to bands, similar songs, and the the general audience and looked for common trends, themes and ideas. We discovered that some common forms and conventions were fun, humorous and quirky ideas and themes. That there was a focus on the performance of bands but they don't use the band members as promotional tools like those in pop videos who are constantly seen as the main focus of the video. Bright vibrant colours are used and the videos generally have a positive feel to them. From this research we knew that we would use many of these conventions to give the video the true indie feel.

Firstly, our research returned that the quirky ideas and themes was very commonly used throughout indie music videos and I feel we have used and developed this convention by using the masks as a main theme which add humour and a light hearted mood to the video, this is generally reflected in most indie media products. After first hearing the song our whole grouped returned similar ideas of the main theme which should run throughout the music video. Because of all the references in the song to 'hauntings' and haunted connotations. All our ideas had the ghost costume involved, and most had the ideas of other characters wearing masks, we knew we had to have this as our main idea and focus as it would work well within the indie genre and we had so many ideas. We felt very confident with this quirky theme as we could picture this video fitting in with the current indie conventions.

Secondly, another convention which our music video develops is the performance aspect of the indie music videos. Most indie artists, for example The Wombats, try to promote their performance as much as possible. This is because performance is a large part of the indie culture, fans of indie music generally enjoy going to gigs for the full experience. We, therefore, felt we need to use this within our music video trying to infuse as many performance shots as possible. There are examples of this at the start of our video where there are short shots of the instruments being played when they are the most dominant sounds in the song. This is so we had the performance running along-side the narrative consistently, otherwise it was a big jump to the main performance at the end. It is very common in indie music videos to not completely have performance as this probably wouldn't entertain indie fans, the genre is more about fun and excitement and this is why we chose to have performance and narrative, this strongly develops the forms of other indie music videos.

Many indie music videos use the form of having narrative and performance running throughout, or some infuse the two. Our music video uses this form idea but has separate narrative and performance that are inked through the masks. As well as this, many indie video have a slight story line, usually a simple one that runs throughout. This is where are music video conforms and breaks away from conventions. Our story is that the lead character who is also the band front man is followed by these hauntings throughout his day to day activities and is scared by them and so tries to get away, he ends up getting knocked down and wakes up playing with the band. The story-line is quite simplistic, but it is also surrounded by ambiguity, the different effect on the performance is to signify that you don't know which sections are reality. This ambiguity is backed up by the constant changing in the masked faces to the normal faces. This is why our music video is slightly different to conventional indie videos as it has more depth to it. However, some indie videos do still use this and therefore we still worked closely within the genre and stuck to the conventions of media videos.

However, there were some areas and connotations of the genre that we didn't stick to. An example of this is the colourful and vibrant aspect of indie. It is very common to see bright colours, flashing lights, fun flashes and bursts of vibrant colour. We didn't really use or develop this connotation of the indie genre. We did this because we felt with the theme and idea we had it was linked with horror and fear, and so the bright colours would ruin the humour and fun which we could create through dimmer colours. The idea was to create a music video that is humorous because it is laid out like a horror film but not in obvious places, for example the supermarket scene, its not often that a horror film uses people being chased in a supermarket, but we felt the bright colours would draw the audience away from the horror and haunting side of the music video.

Many indies artists are very different to pop artists because pop artists are generally the main focus as they are supposed to be the icon of their music, whereas indie artists tend to only promote their performance and not so much themselves as artists. They do this by not using them as main characters in their videos, they may use actors instead. However, we used me as the main character, we firstly did this because we found it hard to find someone who would fit the role correctly, fitting in with the indie genre. We also thought that the performance and the narrative wouldn't really link so much if we had a different character in the narrative, and that would mean that we would have needed to change the whole story line which would have been efficient. This aspect of our music video does challenge the more conventional videos within the indie genre. However, it is becoming a more common feature of music videos to have members of the band be the actors within narrative. This could be because it is harder to make money in the music industry now and therefore they don't have the money to spare on extra actors, as well as this it could be because there is less money in the music industry bands need to try and promote themselves more to get album sales.

Overall, my group chose to conform to most of the conventions of the indie genre as we felt this song itself sounded like a very conventional indie song and therefore this video would fit perfectly. We did however make some well justified choices to challenge certain conventions as it would fit in with out storyline. Below is a comparative video to show why we made some of the choices we did, and to show how our video fits in with other indie media products.

This video shows how our music video fits in with real media products of the same genre. We use similar ideas and concepts.

The man on the left is the frontman of The Wombats, a very well know indie band. As you can see his look is the very common shirt with top button done up. This is a classic indie style which I tried to encorporate in to the music video by using the best indie shirt I could find and do the top button up with skinny jeans.

The front man of The Cribs is wearing a retro style jumper and denim jeans which is similar to what Alex is wearing with her knitted jumper and denim shorts.

Babyshambles has a very smart style which has been claimed as 'indie' so the use of the bow tie by Annaliese is our attempt at trying to conform to the indie style.