The genre and conventions of our media project are
used in many music videos, however many of them subvert from other modern music videos avoiding a story narrative approach to a video and the theme of realism.
Our video in distinction to these common techniques is centred on a performance
piece and other surrealism
design elements.
A fundamental genre convention that is used in music videos and that is used in our
media project is the stage band performance which
is largely conventional. Lighting and
equipment we used is usual for a music video, in particular, the soft lighting
on the parts of the stage without the band and the harder strong light on the
members of the band that are performing for example an audience cannot tell but
there is a spotlight on the lead singer throughout which for filming adds
effect. Correspondingly
most of the footage is conformist with close ups on the guitars, drums
and performers.
Additionally, the stylishness
of performance is what would be anticipated of an alternative band like the Maccabees with cutting between
drumming/guitar playing and attention to band unity in the performance. A predominantly
important
convention is the lead singer’s
performance which is very typical of
this genre;
audiences anticipate perceiving their lead singer performing centrally,
the way we use this convention with substantial close-ups showing lip synching
is very successful in achieving a genuine look of a music video. This is
how we used genre
conventions to create our music video
and make it fit in with expected video techniques.
The Maccabees were described recently as "seemed
like a band purpose built for undergraduates: a bit cooler than Coldplay but
undemanding enough to play in the background during revision sessions"
(The Times, 6.01.2012) .
This interpretation of the
Maccabees as orthodox
but ostentatious
indie pop was what we were trying to challenge with our music video. The post-modern
elements of our music video was our
method of doing this, by not having a story behind the music video it does not
follow the code which features ever so often in music videos but allowed us to focus exclusively
on design
and performance.
The highly schematized
playful elements of our music video are also to make a more visual interesting,
less conceited video in contrast to the student style of the Maccabees
music as mentioned in the article.
