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

Our music video uses forms and conventions of real media products. For example it features band shots, shots of the lead singer and a good structured narrative. While doing my research I found that every music video either has the band performing or the lead artist singing to the camera. We knew from the start that we wanted to have a very strong narrative in our video. This is because ‘The Script’ always has excellent narratives to go along with the music. On YouTube all of their official music videos are about 5 minutes long as they have a lot of narrative in the video it make it more interesting for the audience. We wanted to do that with our video especially because it is such an emotional song and we had lots of creative ideas.

 The video has lots of conventions, such as iconic locations, by doing this the audience can understand the locations helping them understand the video better. In the real video for the song the band shots were filmed in an abandoned car park, we wanted to portray this in ours so chose for ours to be filmed in an isolated building estate in Woolwich on a Sunday.

The mise–en-scene used is the same in both videos for example, the costume our lead male was wearing is the same as Danny O'donoghue and by this I mean, it was dark, had a hood for the rain, and looked like a tramp however we know he isn’t a tramp from the song lyrics. There was only natural light used to make it look realistic. We also had the same props, our lead male has a sleeping bag through some of the video the same as Danny O'donoghue has as well.

The themes in video are very conventional; most songs these days are about a past relationship or a brake up. So the themes are isolation, harsh reality and moving on. Isolation because of the band shots and emotionally the man is now alone, the girl & this band have gone. Harsh reality is a big thing because people are always thinking about their pervious relationship (the flashbacks) and miss it. It is obvious that the girl broke up with the man and she is now trying to move on and forget about him by being with her friends, this is also part of reality.

However we have challenged conventions in our music video. I don’t think I have ever seen a music video for a band that has shots of them performing and of the lead singer singing not in the narrative, I do feel this elaborates the isolation theme though. In the real music video they didn’t use a variety of shots when filming the band; however they did have a timelapse unlike us. So to make it more interesting we used a number of variety of shots, the reason we never used a timelapse was because we wanted to keep the editing basic, to make it more urban and simple.

Overall I feel our video was very conventional and we stuck to the lyrics.