When we began this project I looked at many music videos that I thought to be similar to the ones that we were going to produce in order to get an idea of the conventions that they used and the effects that each individual convention had on the overall video. Very early on in my blog I wrote a lot about how real music videos have budgets, be they huge or small they all had a budget in order to buy props, locations and other things that were necessary. This is one area that we were very different to real media products since we had no budget. We had to cover any costs by ourselves apart from the camera insurance fee which the school took care of for us.
A convention that we found was that most music videos had a story to it, this story had the aim of getting viewers invested in it and having it match the tone of the music. This is one example of a convention we used in our music video. Each convention has an effect on the viewer and it is the specific effect that we want to happen that leads us to using or not using a convention in our project. For example, when a character needed to look alone or isolated it was common to have that character be the only thing in a shot. This separated them from anyone else and left them alone. To further this effect we used colour correction in a few of the scenes to further show the tone of the song. For example, the first scene where the boy is walking up his street alone, we added a lot more blue to the colouring in order to give a gloomy atmosphere and to reflect what the boy is feeling on his way home. We did this again later on when he arrives at the ruined castle, by editing the sky so it appeared to be more golden it represents the boys hope and how he feels he has found a safe place.
The fact that we are able to edit our footage in this way is another similarity to real media products. We used equipment and software of a fairly high quality to get our footage. Adobe Premiere Pro is often used by professionals in real life when producing projects like this. Obviously the camera equipment would be far higher quality as well as leagues more expensive however it still is similar.
Due to our lack of budget we could only film in places that we could get free access to. This mean't we didn't have the sets and props of large production studios and we had to be mindful of the public. We had to think outside of the box in order to get around this.
In conclusion, we use media conventions such as camera techniques to create an effect on the audience. For example, having a character completely alone in a shot causes them to look isolated and alone. This can create empathy and pathos from the audience. A similar effect is causes when we would tweak a scenes colours in editing. We had to challenge real media products by finding ways to get around not having any budget at all.
