Evaluation Question 1.

In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media productions?
Our media project was to create a music video for an indie rock song by a small local band (Against the Tide), with this in mind conventions were very loose.
 Rock typically aims at breaking convention, this is why it is so strongly appreciated by late teens and adolescents, therefore we struggled to find preformed conventions to follow and or challenge. The conventions that we did however settle on are the following:
- Rock music videos typically feature large amounts of live performance.
- Rock music videos typically feature abstract narratives.
- Rock music videos typically focus on more abstract issues for the teen demographic, such as dysfunctional relationships or breakups.
As we agreed that these three were the typical or generic qualities of rock music videos we decided that it would be mostly beneficial to conform to these conventions, we did however decide that we would develop and diversify on each point as we felt that rock is all about personal reflection and not generic modelling*1. We accomplished this in various ways, they are as follows;
- Indirect representation of women and relationship dynamics.
- Abstract sense of power and character roles.
We feel that these three things were most important in the development of or music video and the story arch of our characters.

INDIRECT REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN AND RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS.
Women and relationships were the main role in our media production, the song is highly focused on the concept of "unreturned love" and the negative side of late teen relationships. With this in mind it was crucial that we represented women and relationships in a negative way (to best reflect the song). We accomplished the, mostly, by choosing not to cast a female role and instead use signifiers to represent women (Sexy Girlfriend Joann). Joann was shown only through the use of the photo album in which the main character rips up and burns her image, other that this Joann is purely a non physical factor without any real presence. We chose to do this as we feel that it demonstrates the emotional turmoil which is generated throughout the songs lyrics.  In addition to this we decided that featuring two main male roles would change up the relationship dynamics, as this breaks the normal convention of having a music video which includes both a male and a female character in the main roles.


ABSTRACT SENSE OF POWER AND CHARACTER ROLES
We chose to have the characters as all male as we felt that would make an abstract approach to the conventional models that we have seen, in addition we wanted people to see our characters at the mercy of sEXY girlfriend Joann, who never makes an appearance in the video (excluding her images) as we felt this better reflected the general feel of loss and pain that the lyrics were demonstrating.

*1 Generic Modelling, modelling a set or group of beliefs that are accepted as the norm for society.