Evaluation: Question 1

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our media product we looked at past videos that were produced by the Arctic Monkeys and we made sure we made clear links between our production and official ‘Arctic Monkeys’ productions.

We took note of the mise-en-scene used in previous ‘Arctic Monkeys’ productions and other videos that are part of the indie-rock genre. We show this in multiple ways:

For example, we looked at an ‘Arctic Monkeys’ video called ‘Suck it and see’ and took inspiration from the costumes that were worn in the video by Matthew Helders (drummer) with him wearing a leather jacket and jeans. We changed the colour of the outfit so we were not completely duplicating the attire worn in the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ production.

We also took inspirations from other indie-rock videos, for example, ‘Mumford and Sons – Little Lion Man’ which is a solely performance based production that showcases every member of the band and explicitly shows what role each member has in the band. This video gave us the inspiration to go with a performance based narrative rather than a story-line based narrative; this video also influenced our decision to make the main focus point of our creation the lead singer.

After doing multiple textual analyses’ we stumbled upon ‘the Beatles’ album ‘Abbey Road’ which inspired us to contradict the idea that we believe they’re trying to connote in the album cover. I believe that the idea is that they are on a journey to success and the crossing of the road connotes they have beaten the last hurdle and achieved the greatness that they ended up achieving. We contradicted this idea by having the band walking across a zebra crossing and then rewinding it to show a certain humour in the video which we feel works well with the target audience of 14-18 year old males.

We went against usual indie-rock video ideas by the main singer holding the camera in his hand and pointing it towards himself. With this camera angle it brings a new feel to the video which is original and also unique as not many videos do this in this genre. Our video was a typical representation of indie-rock and fans of the genre will have appreciated this because it follows the stereotypical ideologies of the genre.  We feel that we have gone against Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory by how we didn’t have any female actors/characters in our production to be used as sexual icons. A video we researched ‘Scouting for girls – She’s so lovely’ which is a prime example of the Male Gaze theory by how the female is viewed as a sexual object to the men in the video which we do not agree with. This is why we decided to oppose this theory in our video and completely go against it by only including male characters.