In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

Bastille Warmth

Genre – Andrew Goodwin• Bastille are a very specific genre as they are a combination of both Indie Pop and Electro

Pop therefore there are not many common conventions for this. However I can compare the conventions we feature in our video with common features found in Bastilles videos. In some Indie band music videos they focus solely on performance, an example of this is Mumford and Sons. Bastille however like to tell a story with their music videos that go further than what just the lyrics of the song can tell you. They also have an overarching story line which links between each song and its music video to tell its own larger story with hidden means, representations and intertextual views. We tried to incorporate some of this into our own video. Andrew Goodwin claims that by using genre characteristics in your music videos you help the audience to identify what type of music it features. This is quite a good point to address as because Bastille are such a unique band in a unique genre the fact that there aren’t any obvious genre characteristics suggest that they are different from other artist and bands which separates them from the competition and makes them stand out.

Relationship – Andrew Goodwin• We challenged this theory as we did not purposely make any links in

the action of the video to the lyrics and any which do match were simply by chance. However we did create a relationship between the lyrics (mainly the word warmth) with the colouring and themes of the video. We took the word ‘warmth’ and linked this to bright colours (oranges and yellows) which we represented in the video as the sun and the very ‘warm’ coloured clips. We also linked this into the narrative as he is searching for the emotional warmth which he finds with his girlfriend.

Close Ups – Andrew Goodwin• Andrew Goodwin claim that close up shots of the artist are essential in any music

video as they establish a relationship and emotional connection between the audience and the main character/artist. This ensures that they believe and buy into the narrative of the video more and this is essential for the video to be engaging. Close up shots are often encouraged or demanded by the record labels as this helps to build the on going relationship with the fans which ultimately sells more records and makes them more money. It is a common theme that is seen in Bastilles pre existing videos and we feature a few in our video. Our opening shot after the introduction news montage is a close up of the protagonists eyes. This is not only a close up but also follows Goodwin’s theory of looking. We used quite a few close shots throughout our video. This was because we wanted our video to be quite emotive so by showing close ups of the protagonist the audience could easily see the emotion shown on his face.

Looking – Andrew Goodwin• We featured quite a lot of the theory of looking in our video. After the

intro section we open onto a close up of the protagonists eyes. This strongly supports the convention of looking as eyes are the main representation of looking and he is watching the TV. One feature of the notion of look that we chose not too include is the voyeuristic treatment of the female body. This is not something that is often shown in Bastilles videos and even though we could have taken a more voyeuristic approach with the theme of Warmth we chose not too as it would have not been authentic to Bastille. We also did not as it would have been an inappropriate feature to film or include in a college music video even though it is a very common and widely used convention in music videos.

Intertextuality – Andrew Goodwin• We featured some intertextuality in our video. In the opening section

we used multiple clips from TV news shows. This gave the video a link to current world events, as well as Bastilles political links and beliefs. By making these links we established when the video was set and gave it external relevance which the audience could build their own opinions into which would help them believe the narrative.