EVALUATION Q1

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

When we were in the research phase of this unit we asked a selected group of people in which there were 10 males and females to complete a questionnaire based around the conventions of rock and what they expected to see in a rock music video.

(results here)

The information we received showed that our audience had mixed feelings about what the video should be (in this case live action or animated). Everyone asked listed highest and lowest values on each choice of convention trends found in rock music videos, from our results we found that the audience wanted to see long hair in the video, as long hair is a typical rock convention.

I feel that our final product uses and conforms to multiple conventions of the rock genre, such as including long hair, facial hair, etc but also challenged some other conventions such as having a female band member.
In performance based videos such as our we found that another convention that we conformed to  was a lack of narrative and often rely on a variation of close ups and wide shots to progress the video.


We also found that there was often an average of 4 band members: 

• A vocalist (often has a guitar)
• two guitarists
• and a drummer

We used this convention in our video by having at least two guitarists, one drummer, and a vocalist (as seen below).

Another convention that wasn't mentioned that often was the location used, in most not all rock videos (The Pretender music video show this) the band is performing to an audience at a gig for example, typically performance videos are in concert halls or at an outdoor concert. I feel that we conformed to this convention.

• A few other conventions that were raised and were conformed to were:
• Close ups and fast cuts between shots
• The use of conventional instruments such as guitar, etc
• Long hair

However we also challenged some rock conventions, we felt that by doing so we had created a new media product and gave the ausience a different experience to our target audience.

One of the most common conventions in rock videos we challenged was the destruction of instruments (often a guitar), the main reason for this was that our skills in Adobe Flash wasn't too advanced as we had basically learned how to use the program over the creation of the video.