Q.1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The genre of our music video is rock/metal and usually with these kind of genres, there is usually quite dark and Gothic narratives (stereotypically). Using the song Faith for our music video, we've made it so that the narrative is linked through the pace of the music, the beat of the music and the general feeling of the whole song and of course the lyrics.






When I first listened to this song and we were trying to come up with ideas, I felt that it would be quite dark and mysterious and that it would be a bit uneasy as some of the lyrics touch on mental health; in my opinion. For example one line is 'Who are these voices ringing in my head?'. I think that this is suggesting that the main person in the song has or has had either something like multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia which is why we used the masked conscience as it's there to reinforce the character's guilt and shame about the accident as it won't leave him alone and follows him around. This links to the film Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). Fight Club consists of a person who has a created a person himself as a result of his depression. this links directly to our video as the conscience is created directly through the character's guilt and grief at what they've done. Fight Club's non linear narrative also inspired us too. This is because the beginning of Fight Club is actually the end; or the begining of the end! We wanted to use this technique as our video is based on similar themes to Fight Club. The factor of bringing the story full circle is highly ambiguous as it's difficult to understand whether the sequence is the actual beginning or the actual end. This is also why we put the beginning sequence in reverse so it was esier for the audience to understand which part it was.

Screen shot

In our music video we have used both narrative and band footage which is quite a common convention especially in the rock/metal genre as it's heavily instrument based. If we had done a pop video then we might not necessarily have had band footage because that's genreally not a convention of the pop genre. We wanted to stick to the conventions of the rock/metal genre as we wanted to make it as professional as we could. We edited the band footage to be in black and white as we thought that it would look more interesting and be more immersing for the audience to watch. The rest of the footage is in colour because we didn't want to lose any attention away it so we left it as bright as possible.

We have used an inspiration from the film V For Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005). The inspiration we used from this film was the idea of the mask and at one point we did actually talk about using this particular mask. We used it for both the CD cover and advert too. For example the V For Vendetta film poster is centrally based around a creepy mask. We used this idea in our poster as we wanted it to stand out. This mask makes it memorable and we wanted the audience to be able to remember it and aybe even be a bit creeped out by it as it would definitely stay in their minds then.


We realise that our main influences for the narrative are from filmic products; we wanted to make a post modern music video so we wanted to use filmic and cinematic products such as these films for inspiration in story line and filming techniques.




For inspiration for our music video, CD cover and magazine advert, we also used other videos from our chosen genre. An example of this is a CD cover from the band Saviour Machine. This is the cover of one of their albums: 

We feel this relates strongly to our CD cover but we also got the inspiration for our magazine advert from this too. 

We used a lot of conventions from metal/rock videos. For example, the biggest one we could use was having a performance and narrative based music video. We split up the time of the video into our story of the conscience and footage of As Gods playing a live set at local a venue in Bristol.