Tuesday, 1 March 2011

Question 1:

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

Our media product was influenced heavily by the the conventions, or lack thereof, of independent artists who often afford themselves lots of creative freedom and attempt to break genre conventions. Because of this our media texts were heavily influenced by a range of artistic 'philosophies' as opposed to aesthetic principles.

Many many music videos often use narratives with specific timelines, stories and characters involved or just performance. Our media text attempted top blend the two and make it as entropic as possible. It is a piece of work that is entirely open to interpretation. Since our audience was one who would consider themselves philosophical and artistic they would enjoy a video which contained a slight amount of mystique and the least ammount of redundancy possible, as they would find a simple narrative or performance video boring. The album cover itself isn't much different to most, but the use of colour and photoshop to a very large extent shows the artistic nature of the artist in question.

in terms of originality I think we've been mostly original. The main theme we came up with was to look purposefully amateurish and seem like the footage was done on home video. This could be linked films which use the 'found footage' style of narrative. Where the film itself is portrayed to be real and the narrative is actually woven in to the fact that it's being filmed, drawing links to films such as 'The Blair Witch Project'. The idea that the narrative is told almost entirely through the body language and facial expressions of the actress also shows this mysterious quality to the genre, as are trying to work out who she is talking to and what she is saying.

The dangers of challenging lots of forms and conventions though were that if you go to far away from what's comfortable and you risk alienating the audience. Whilst may people would enjoy the innovation the risk of failing miserably and just appearing pretentious or tacky. Forms and conventions, whilst they can appear generic, are there because they worked in the first place.

Conversely, because forms and conventions can work so well they are obviously overused and may appear generic or boring or unimaginative. And appear unoriginal and unimaginative would be the kryptonite of any artist, so conforming to genre conventions to a large extent would be dangerously predictable.

1 comment:

  1. Good, but you do need some images in here - perhaps comparing stills from your work with stills from elsewhere. You could usefully use the Neale quote (on the evaluation handout) about repetition of difference to go with your last two paragraphs. Don't forget to discuss print work - you don't need to do this in as much detail as the video.

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