Evaluation Question 1

In what ways did you use, develop or challenge the form and conventions of real media products?

As the band we chose to use was a metal band, we had to follow the stereotypical conventions of the music. Videos of our genre are very performance based and the story line isn't the main focus. But some often have a  have a clear mixture of both. This helps build up pace during the video and have fast cuts. Metal bands like to focus more on the music and instruments and don't like to distract from the performance. Also since metal bands are known for festivals and gigs, so they like to create that atmosphere with there videos. We wanted to keep this convention and keep our video balanced. For some of our shots and narrative we got inspiration from Avenged Sevenfold 'Nightmare'

There are lots of different ways this video helped develop our video for example instrument shots. They use a variety of creative shots which helped inspire some of ours. For example this guitar shot,

We used various shots similar to this in our video. We chose to use this because it fits the metal conventions of being more about the music less about the artists.
We also got inspiration from the high angle over someone in a straight jacket, we used this throughout our whole video. There are lots of points in this video where they have disjointed and sped up moments,

we really liked these and how it made it look like the character was going crazy, it really fit our narrative. The was our inspiration for our sped up and reversed clips. Through this video there is a lot of bright lights and we really liked the way it gave the hospital feel so we adapted this and had some fast fade to whites to give that flash of white. This video also contains a lot of gore in different parts.

We wanted to include this into our video, but much like this not make it the main focus,just small glimpses. We achieved this by having make up which shows cuts and bruises showing glimpses of blood, the main gore is the cut out 'Kill the Freak' in the main characters back.
In parts of the video there is are snippets of people rocking, this is a common convention within our narrative of asylum to show the patients insanity.  We adapted this to fit our character and our style.

This worked effectively especially sped up.
The ending shot in many ways is very similar to ours, the shot is slow bringing the song to a conclusion and drawing your attention to the final shot. Also the location in which it is filmed is very similar to the locations we used for our video.

Also we briefly looked into this video, Asylum - Disturbed, which also follows a very similar narrative. 

There are a couple of parts of this video which have influenced for our video and ancillary tasks. This video has no performance shots its purely narrative.

This is unconventional for our genre due to them being mostly performance based. There use of close ups was really effective for making screams look better on camera so we used this some for our vocal lip syncing. This really helped highlight key lyrics that we thought were important and effective. There are parts of the song where they sped up clips to show the characters insanity, this is a common convention through lots of videos

in this genre with similar narratives. There are several parts of the video which include running/chasing we really wanted to include this but found that we struggled to find a location with a corridor/ room suitable. Also had issues with our actor not taking the running seriously when we tried and made the clips unusable.  The use of high angles is really effective in

 in this video. Videos with this narrative have angles like this to show the lack of power the character has other themselves, making them look small. This was perfect for our video since it fit with the negative tone the lyrics have, showing the negative feelings the character has about himself. This convention really fits the narrative and help show the balance of power.

This video, much like many in its genre, contains a lot of gore. This video contains a lot more then 'Nightmare' and more then we wanted for our video. But much like this video we wanted to make the gore that we did use is subtle, so it didn't draw attention away to the rest of the video. That's why we chose to keep the generic convention of gore but not make it a focus.
Also this video has things that influenced us with our ancillary tasks.

The  location seen on the left is very similar the the image we chose to use in our diji pack. We felt like its was a really effective due to the length and darkness of the corridor, making it look like its never ending.
The other shot this this one where the lead character is being dragged off by the 'doctors' this is very similar to our shot of the whole band in the diji pack. we chose this to show the little power the patient has over the doctors.
More then anything this video was more of a narrative inspiration then shots. This is due to it clear story line which is impossible to miss, we wanted a narrative like this. But instead of telling a story we wanted the emotion and sanity of our main character to be the main focus. Also like both 'Nightmare' and 'Asylum' we chose to have one main character which is that main focus of the whole story line. But more like 'Nightmare' the main character is also the vocalist of the band.
For a video the gave us purely inspiration in a filming sense is  'Before I Forget' by Slipknot.

We chose to follow this style of not showing the band members face during the performance shots, to make the band more mysterious. This fits the convention of focusing more on performance and music other then the people in the band. We liked the washed out colour throughout the video. We liked how it made the video look so it inspired us to fiddle with filters and found that a effect
called 'Old World' really worked for our video.
Throughout this fast paced video they show lots of creative ways to film instruments and we took inspiration from the ones we found most interesting. For example this drum shot, this really worked for our video because the song contains a lot of predominant bass drum meaning this
shot was useful. We also liked the close up of the hand as the guitar is being played. This worked for our video because it helped high light the rifts in the song and show a variety of shots of the guitar. This video contains a lot of fast cuts making the video fast and hard to follow. We chose to not make our video that fast because we wanted to show a narrative which needed clear shots

but if we chose to do a full performance video this if defiantly the way to do it. We also liked the shots of the mic only showing the mouth of the singer. We chose to use this because we decided to have the main singing within the narrative shots and the backing vocals in the instrument shots. So to not take the focus away from the narrative we had the backing shots like this. This was really effective because it showed the

mask the singer wears which is the bands motif. We really liked this low angle of a bass showing up the neck. We felt it was a very interesting shot and really gave us a way to show off the bassist and it was a shot we could adapt and use for the guitar as well.
So over all we followed a lot of conventions we found from real media texts and really helped make our video and ancillary tasks as professional as possible.