Elliot - 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The Smiths - Nowhere Fast

Oasis - Supersonic

Our Music Video

It is clear that we have used the forms and conventions of indie music (both contemporary and "classic") in order to establish our genre and target audience. The most obvious way we have done this is include a solid performance, with a full band (in the video for Nowhere Fast, The Smiths take the performance to the extreme by setting the video in the studio, seemingly as they record the song), in an urban/suburban location. We have also used the idea of a house party to appeal to our target audience (teenagers/young adults) as this is what they are now notorious in the media for. This is a way of showing development of the conventions of indie, adapting them for a contemporary audience.

 Our mise-en-scene, sound and shot types/editing are all fitting within our media form and genre, including locations such as pubs and petrol stations. This is similar to Oasis, who filmed the video for their debut single Supersonic on a rooftop. The shots are quick and punchy, with fast editing, as they should be in an effective music video.

 One way we have challenged the conventions of our genre is by having our main character as a Chav, completely subverting audience expectations, as they would expect to see a more "indie" individual as the main character in an indie music video. This is why we show the indie lead character at the start of the video, to create a false expectation for the audience. This is a form of irony, as you would expect to see a charming, dapper man in a video for a song called "This Charming Man", not a Chav. Despite the seemingly miscast lead character, the video works on the basis that the Chav is seen to be the complete opposite of a "charming man", which is what the song is about. This is including irony in our video. Also, our target audience would enjoy seeing a chav trying to fit in with them and failing miserably.

We did not explicitly use postmodern ideas in our video, however we did use modern social technology by including a Facebook status. This will appeal to our social networking target audience. This is a form of intertextuality, as we are utilizing another media form for our media form. This is also developing the conventions of the indie genre, as Facebook has become the replacement for the "flyer" method of promoting bands. Instead of physical flyers promoting band's gigs, as many famous bands used when they were starting out, Facebook pages and events are used to promote gigs, as we use in our video.