music video vocieover
Our media project uses many of the genre conventions of a music video but subverts many of them particularly the modern music videos with their narrative structure and their strong sense of realism. In contrast to these modern techniques, our music video is based around the main stage performance and most modern design elements.
Firstly, the elements of the music video genre conventions that is used in our media project. The stage band performance is largely conventional: the lighting and equipment is usual for a music video, in particular, the soft lighting on the parts of the stage without the band and the harder strong light on the members of the band that are performing . Equally conventional is the way much of the footage is shot with close ups on the guitars, drums and performers. Furthermore, the style of performance is what would be expected of a indie band like the Maccabees with cutting between drumming/guitar playing and focus on band unity in the performance. A particularly important convention is the front-man's performance which is very typical of this genre: audiences expect to see their front man performing and the way we use this convention with convincing close-ups showing lip synching is very successful in achieving a genuine look of a music video. This is how we used genre conventions to create our music video and make it fit in with expected video techniques.
The Maccabees were described recently as "seemed like a band purpose built for undergraduates: a bit cooler than Coldplay but undemanding enough to play in the background during revision sessions" (The Times, 6.01.2012 . This view of the Maccabees as conventional but pretentious indie pop was one that we were trying to challenge with our music video. This we did with the post modern elements of our music video. Firstly, the lack of narrative in our music video breaks the convention of most modern music videos to not even have a simple or implied narrative but too concentrate fully on design and performance. The highly stilyised playfully elements of our music video are also to make a more visual interesting, less pretentious video in contrast to the student style of the maccabees music as mentioned in the article.
