Week 14: Evaluation

1) In What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real life media products?
Our response to the brief, was to create a fun and energetic music video that could be enjoyed by viewers of all ages. ‘Welcome to the Discotheque’ by The Hit-ups is an extremely up-tempo song, therefore we wanted to creature visuals that had a correlation with an animated feeling of the song. By having a youthful and playful creative vision, we decided to make our music video extremely satirical; we wanted to convey a light-hearted approach to the cycle of life. We wanted to tastefully poke fun at the stereotypical views of “the meaning of life”. Defining our genre was quite difficult, as the band are heavily influenced by many genres such as indie, funk, and hip-hop. I think that the song ‘Welcome to the Discotheque’ is the perfect fusion of all three genres. Although it’s hard to pin-point their genre, I think that they have more of an indie background. Looking back on my research, I found out that the main convention of many indie videos, (such as The Smith’s “How soon is Now?”) was to subtly construct a narrative. The story-telling came through the lyrics and was also incorporated in the visuals to set a basic mood and tone of the video. However, another convention of many indie music videos, is the use of performance. Many indie videos have some sort of live performance in it, for example “Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon. Performance may be a key element, but it is not the most important thing. We wanted the performance to only be a small part of our music video and the storey of our protagonists emotional re-birth to be the main focus.


Our perception of the song was about having fun and living in the moment. We thought that the use of the phrase “welcome to the discotheque” was an analogy for reminding people about the joys of life such as falling in love and happiness. We wanted to represent these elements in our music video through the eyes of our protagonist. From our research, we found out the band’s target audience is of an average of 16 – 25. However, we wanted to create a music video that could appeal to everyone.
The generic conventions of an indie music video are based highly on the narrative structure. I feel that many indie music videos have an essence of the concept being the most important element of the video. There is always a message being subtly thrown in, whether it is through visuals or lyrics. We wanted to make an emphasis on various views on the meaning of life. Our protagonist was pining after an ‘old flame’, when he could’ve been enjoying himself at a gig. In the end, his Ipod battery had run out and he had another heart attack and this time he died. Even though we wanted to make a humorous video full of satire, we also wanted to create a thought-provoking one too. Another convention of any music video is the use of mise-en-scene. We thoroughly planned out our filming location. A lot like TV programmes such as Channel 4’s ‘Skins’, we wanted to use locations that are instantly recognizable to fellow Bristolians, such as Park street and Brandon Hill. It was an ode to The Hit-ups, as they are a famous Bristol based band. Our opening shot is in a park, we wanted to create a tranquil and peaceful setting, and then immediately create tensions and suspense with the stranger looming. I think that the opening of our music video is alot like the opening to a film. Just Jack’s video 'The Day I Died', had an element of a daily routine in it too.

We also carefully selected our protagonists outfit and the props used such as the pipe and fake moustache. We tried to think of the stereotypical attire associated with an elderly person, whilst still fitting the mood of the scene. For example the use of the dressing gown when the protagonist, ‘G’ is feeling sad and the use of a bright, tartan blazer to reflect his new youthful mood. Influenced by 'Bugsy Malone', we chose to leave the talcum powder stains on the bowler hat to ‘poke fun’ at our concept of using young people in a video about old people. Our plan to include a vast amount of satire needed to be continuous in order to be effective. As a performance is a key element in many indie videos, we wanted to include a small amount of performance in our video. When we interviewed the band, we were moved by their love for performing and engaging with the crowd. They wanted their music to be enjoyed by all ages. I think that the visuals from the performance scenes in our video, sets the tone of a lively song. The hustle and bustle of the party scene correlates with the energetic nature of the song. As does the ending part of the music video features lead vocalist Josh, swaying slowly to the soft music as the melancholy instrumental kicks in. We used many close-up shots to make an emphasis on the instruments and band members to show that it was a live performance. We wanted to capture the boisterous activity that our protagonist was missing out on. For the album cover, we placed a disco ball at the corner of a ‘water hazard’ sign in Brandon Hill. We edited the sign in Photoshop, and replaced the ‘water’ with ‘disco’. We wanted to create an abstract album cover and still get our message across of taking a light-hearted approach on discovering the meaning of life. The Hit-ups are fun-loving and modest, they aren’t concerned with vanity and fame. We thought that the band members themselves were irrelevant and it’s all about the music. We didn’t use generic portrait shots of the band on front cover, as it would’ve diverted the attention from the music, to the importance of the band members. A lot like the Maroon 5 album cover, ‘Songs about Jane’, the album cover is abstract and trippy, it reflects the mood of the album. We wanted to create a playful, colourful, eye-catching album cover to correlate with our comical music video. The use of the word “hazard” encourages the CD buyer to think that we are insinuating that our album is ‘dangerous’, again it adds to the satire and light-hearted concept of our music video. The CD advertisement didn’t come out exactly how we wanted it to. We wanted to create a collage of still shots throughout his day through Photoshop. During an editing session in IMOVIE, we created still images from the video, unfortunately we discovered the quality of the still shots were very bad when we went to the CLC. The disco ball is shocking blue, and we wanted to carry on this blue theme throughout the prints. The disco ball on the cover, the inserts inside of the CD and the writing on the advert all correlate. We wanted the image of the two main characters, ‘G’ and his ‘old flame’ to be recognizable. We wanted these two characters to be The Hit-ups trademarks. In terms of developing and challenging the conventions of indie music videos, we decided to poke fun at how serious the majority of indie videos our by using satire. Bands like ‘The Smiths’ have videos such as ‘How Soon is Now?’ that are dark and mysterious, we wanted to create a colourful video that was original and had never been done before. Whilst interviewing the band, we found out that they preferred performing to an audience at a boutique festival, Shambala than a well known mainstream festival like Glastonbury. The Hit-ups encourage the notion of making music for because they love it, not because they want to get famous for it. By making a satirical video, whilst still incorporating an element of performance from the artist, we wanted the message of the song, album, and advert to convey a message that it’s all about the music. I think that we challenged the generic conventions of a typical indie music video by contradicting the seriousness of indie videos, the satire element in many music videos lie in the genre of Pop.