In what ways does your media product use develope or challenge the forms and conventions of music video?

It is important to understand the forms and conventions featured within a music video, as it is impossible to include them all in one music video. Therefore I have decided to carefully select only the most important and common forms and conventions that I researched earlier in my media blog. Below are the specific types:


Lip Syncing
If you can't lip synchronise a song for a media video, you might as well consider failing. It is paramount that it is done correctly and accurately to make the song and video synchronise effectively together. If the audio and video are out of synchronisation, a huge majority of entertainment is lost and the work becomes a great disappointment. Professional musical artists ensure that their miming or singing is in sync with their music before it is released. Our music video uses a large amount of lip syncing, which we managed to make awesomely without error. We were able to do this through using the special secret of miming a song: You must actually play the song on set whilst being filmed as it then makes the process impossible to muck-up. To eliminate the song being played, you simply mute all video recordings when it comes to the editing phase.


Visual Effects
The use of visual effects enhances a music video, making it come to life. What attracts the eye the best are optical illusions as they can easily boggle the mind effectively through a simple process. There are of course more common visual effects such as Computer Generated Illustrations and caricaturisation which tend to make the video well worth the watch.


In the extras of our DVD, you can find the title, "It Ain't Over Yet". This was just our group having a bit of fun with CGI and what can e produced. You are able to see the effects of gunshot wounds with blood splatters, explosions and a rifle being fired with the addition of muzzle flashes, ejection of empty cartridges and sound effects. All of which are fake and have been bopped on. We created this short video realising that it couldn't be used within our music video, rendering it all most useless. However, we did add it into the DVD extras to prove that we can use such techniques. Please watch this small video as it is quite amusing!


Our song is an average paced song and unfortunately has little or no sounds which could have been used with visual effects. We challenge this by using fading effects and a special transition effect - where the photo is torn in half - as it tears the next shot is shown through the photo ripping in half.


Close-ups
Close ups are essential for the creation of music video. They are most commonly used when viewing the musician singing or playing an instrument, just like at the point of a guitar solo. This gives a great effect as it is able to stun the audience through sheer beauty and skill. This can be formed by creating a series of close up shots to show emotion, relation, importance and lip syncing. An example of close-eps in our music video is when Courtney, our female character in the relationship, is gazing out of the window. We use the close-up on this camera shot as it projects her sadness.


Fast Edits
Fast clips played for a period of short time tend to add tension and excitement within the Music Video's atmosphere. These fast paced clips are most common in music such as drum and bass, rock, metal... We develop and challenge this convention by using both slow and fast edits in our music video e.g the changing volume of coffee in the coffee filter and the mug is sped up. This was done to prove the point f time passing by at a fast pace.


Montage Edits
This is when one type of footage cuts to another type, for example footage of a rapper walking in a street miming the words, cutting to footage of cars, buildings or other people. Our music video challenges this as we have footage of the artists performing with cuts to flashbacks of our two characters.


Names and Titles
Every music video played on any music channel has the name of the song, the artist(s) and possibly the name of the album the song is featured in. Our music video uses this as it has the song name and artist name at the beginning and we challenge it by not including it at the end. We did this because the lyrics do not tend to differ, most of them are consistently sung.


The Artist as the Character/Actor
In most music videos the artist is the singer or actor. This is happens on most occasions because there is more focus on the artist and this is used to catch people's attention. In other music videos the artist is the narrator of the storyline but does not sing. Some music videos have the artist seen rarely in the video not at all, an example of this is the release of, "Rockstar", by Nickelback. In this music video he only appears at the very end. Rather than a famous actor or artist singing, Nickelback has chosen a vast range of singers, ranging from different ages, genders and races. Our music video uses and develops this as it features the artist as the singer, but not as the actor.


Narrative
The majority of music videos have some kind of storyline which refers lyrics being sung. This is called Illustration. However, music videos do vary quite a lot, for instance, some music videos have some links and relations to the lyrics but still have some parts which make little sense. This is called Amplification. The last type of music video is Disjuncture, which normally has very little or no relation to the song's lyrics or style.

Our music video uses and develops this as most of the video has a direct link to the lyrics of the song, there are two parts in which there is little relation, this makes our music video an Amplification. This is proven through points such as the camera shot of my dog, "Toby". The shot represents how everybody's changing and in this situation, the tough do has grown some fluffy rabbit ears. However, this footage is fairly random in-comparison to the rest of the video.