In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge of real media products?

Prior to creating our music videos, we did a lot of research into music genres and conventions, enabling us to associate certain themes, colours and styles with a particular genre. We were then given a list of songs in which we had to choose one, create an idea for  music video and then pitch it to our teacher and class; we chose My Little Haunting by UK band 'Hot Club De Paris' with our simplistic idea of having a group of masked people chasing and 'haunting' our lead singer -which would be played by Matt- with performance shots of the band intertwined and were awarded the right to create a music video for it as a part of our A2 coursework.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGmv4c6CNjg
This is the original music video which Hot Club De Paris created for their song; we felt that though it was quirky, it wasn't a very effective product as it only consisted of one scene of a ouija board. We wanted to create a music video with the same feel but decided to do it in a different way with more movement and pace to fit the song better.
It is evident that this song as regarded as 'indie' due to the nature of the guitars, the vocals and the light hearted nature; we decided to conform to these conventions and make the genre obvious from the music video.
We managed to do this through:
*Costume: Making the characters who were gong to appear in the music video wear stereotypically indie clothes, such as browns, knitwear, denim and quirky accessories such as bow ties. This enabled the target audience (indie people) to relate to the band as they were dressed similarly and acted in a similar manner.

* Mise En Scene: using quirky props such as masks to give the video a light hearted and humorous feel to the video as they were chasing the lead singer throughout; also relating the product to the song as it's called 'My Little Haunting'.

* Lighting: Using motivated lighting to give the video a low-budget 'indie' effect such as the day light we used and the fairy lights. The lighting also made it humorous as it was apparent that it wasn't suppose to be a scary video just because it used scary masked, so we juxtaposed the day light with the props to give it this effect.

 

* Location: Using natural and normal looking settings like a kitchen, garage, the woods and the park to again add to the fact that this is a low-budget music video; also again creating a humour as it's obvious that the concept is unrealistic and how the characters are just annoying to Matt, rather than scary, both of these ideas link to the 'indie' genre.

We decided to conform to the 'indie' genre in order for our music video to be an effective product as we wanted it to be comparable to a real media product : other indie music videos, whilst also attracting a typical target audience that Hot Club De Paris would have. In using all of this mise en scene, along a variation of bright colours with wide camera shots to show the importance of the band and close ups of the instruments to show the saliency of the music, I feel we were able to create an effective final product which represented the 'indie' genre well.