Conventions in Our Music Video

When making our media products, we explored the effects of subverting and adhering to the conventions within the form.
Conventions which we would expect to see in the music video are things such as; a performance element, including close ups of the main singer and the band playing instruments; a narrative, either using the performer or actor(s) as the characters; shots of the singer lip-syncing; length of the video, three minutes in length and consistent styling of the band in both performance and narrative.

When making our video, we adhered to some of these conventions such as, firstly, the length of the pop promo.

As you can see, from this screenshot of the video on YouTube, our video uses the whole song and is 3 minutes long. We chose to adhere to this convention as we think it is a convention for a reason; songs that are much longer than this cause the audience to lose interest, this is especially relevant for us as our target audience are teenagers who generally have shorter attention spans than adults. On the other hand, if the video were too short there would not be enough substance and the audience may not feel satisfied with bot the song and the video.

Another convention we adhered to was the choice of shots we used. We focused more on the main singer than the band and did so by using many close ups of his face whilst lip-syncing: another convention which we adhered to. Our reason for adhering to this convention was that it reinforces the star image of the singer which is, fundamentally, what determines the success or failure of an artist or band. We still focused on the band playing their instruments however; to show that the band is important as a whole and to show that all the sounds heard in the song are organic and made by the band themselves. This will appeal to our target audience and hopefully ensure success for the band.

Including a narrative in the video is another convention which we used. We did this to reinforce the idea that the band’s music has a meaning behind it and so they make music because they have something to say, not for material gain.

The styling of the band in the narrative was the convention which we chose to subvert. We did this because we thought it would highlight the narrative over the band performance and therefore highlight the meaning of the song. The band, being indie-rock, focus on what their music means and how it sounds rather than their style or fame and so by highlighting the narrative by juxtaposing it with the style of the performance, we hoped to draw the audience’s attention to the meaning of the song.