Evaluation - Question 1 Plan

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

Throughout our music video, conventions common in existing music videos are used. This begins immediately with some location shots to set the scene of the video and introduce the location. This is also used in several music videos (such as Diddy - Coming Home). Since our location is Leicester, the artist's hometown, we used various landmarks which are easily identified by residents of Leicestershire, in order to give gratification to any audience from Leicester (similar to the techniques used in Empire State of Mind - Jay-Z) This, in turn, brings the artists closer to the audience.
Then, a long shot of the artists, followed by mid-shots of each artist, are used to introduce them. I felt this was important as 'Big City Life' is the artists' first single. We gained inspiration from 'Need You Tonight' (Professor Green's first single) and 'Lose Yourself' (the single that boosted Eminem's popularity). In order for the audience to identify with the artist, I felt it was imperative that they are seen as early as possible in the video, as other music videos have done.
Another element I took inspiration from existing products with is the use of other characters to support the theme of my products of loneliness in their urban environment (hence, the album title 'Big City Prison'). This is used in other videos (like Devlin's 'Runaway'), to help give the video various subplots. Used in combination with the lyrics, they help convey the message we were trying to put across. This also ties in with theories about characters in narratives established by Vladimir Propp. The artists act as narrators through the words they sing/rap, and look upon the storylines of the other characters (myself and Em). There are various examples of this in our own video and, whilst interaction between the artists and the characters is not present in 'Runaway', it is in 'Big City Life' - we have adapted what we learned from our inspiration and incorporated it into our own video. Also, we have Em loosely playing the 'damsel in distress' in our video; whilst not completely sticking to the conventions of this character role, there are some elements of it displayed. Examples of these include where Em's character drops her bag and Ricky helps her pick it up (she gets 'rescued').
'Big City Life' challenges Todorov's theory when it comes to narrative styles. Todorov explains that when it comes to storytelling, equilibriums are disrupted and replaced with new ones. Our video does not perform this. Instead, our video shows various aspects of big city life through the characters actions and the locations they visit, as they are interpretted by the narrating artists. Overall, our video is more of an observation than a story - no equilibriums are changed, which is perhaps more effective when it comes to conveying our video's theme: the idea is that, the city has trapped our characters and made them lonely, the lack of change in the narrative throughout the video establishes this in a way which most music videos do not. There is no 'happy ending' and nothing changes from start to finish. Therefore it challenges the conventions of standard narratives.
Symbolism in our video is also present in 'Big City Life'. It is quite literal, for example when the line 'all lined in a row' is heard, a shot of a queue in a restaurant is shown. Another example is the line 'take a moment to relax, before you do anything rash' is accompanied by a drawn out shot of one of characters stopping for a moment reflectively, and breathing slowly. This example in particular develops conventions seen in existing media. Of course, literal symbolism is no new thing when it comes to music videos (it is featured regularly in Eminem's 'When I'm Gone', where the lyrics are reflected by what is seen in music video) as it is an effective way of getting across messages in the song in a 'double-barrelled' way - the audience sees AND hears the message. What we have done though in the 'take a moment...' shot, is challenged the way shots are performed in music videos; normally in music videos shots are very quick and take up fractions of a second (this can be seen in our very own music video) but for this particular shot we felt it was important to emphasise the message being conveyed by making the shot in excess of 8 seconds long. I felt this fitted in seamlessly with the rest of video and it stands as a memorable part of the music video because of its non-compliance with the general conventions and forms of music videos.