Question 1 - In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When we brainstormed our ideas for our music video we decided that we wanted to do a music video that was not of the typical type. Once we had put our final idea together, we thought that the use of the politicians masks would satisfy this as it is different and not what you would expect from a student film.
We also deviated away from the typical structure of a music video and used performance, narrative and concept, something which is uncommon in a modern day music video (normally only 2 of these are used). As well as this, the comedy of the video is also unusual as a lot of the time a music video tells a story in a more serious way. The comedy side of our video we feel really makes it stand out amongst others which are perhaps of a more serious tone. Therefore by doing this, we feel that it will attract a wider audience too.
We feel that our music video complied with that mentioned in Andrew Goodwin’s theory featured in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (1992). Our music video complied ironically with the genre characteristics, for example, we tried to show a kind of rebellious side to the politicians because the punk genre normally consists of quite unruly personalities and we wanted to show this in our video, but in a less obvious way. As well as this, there is a relationship between the footage we filmed and the lyrics of the song. We purposely did this because we wanted to include the narrative aspect to our video, for example the footage at St Pauls showed the political crisis that our country is experiencing and the footage we filmed at Abbey Road matched the lyrics “phoney Beatle-mania has bitten the dust”, this also explains the relationship between the music and the visuals and has an intertextual reference. We used close ups on during the performance part of our video, in particular David Cameron as normally, a record label would insists that this was required in order to promote the artist(s). This is done to create a visual style/motif which will appear across further work.
We feel that our music video complied with that mentioned in Andrew Goodwin’s theory featured in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (1992). Our music video complied ironically with the genre characteristics, for example, we tried to show a kind of rebellious side to the politicians because the punk genre normally consists of quite unruly personalities and we wanted to show this in our video, but in a less obvious way. As well as this, there is a relationship between the footage we filmed and the lyrics of the song. We purposely did this because we wanted to include the narrative aspect to our video, for example the footage at St Pauls showed the political crisis that our country is experiencing and the footage we filmed at Abbey Road matched the lyrics “phoney Beatle-mania has bitten the dust”, this also explains the relationship between the music and the visuals and has an intertextual reference. We used close ups on during the performance part of our video, in particular David Cameron as normally, a record label would insists that this was required in order to promote the artist(s). This is done to create a visual style/motif which will appear across further work. 
Mise-en-scene was a big factor which we in-cooperated into our video because we feel that this too makes a video more memorable and different to others. The use of masks and props such as tea cups & saucers, magazines and newspapers which help to describe aspects of London we feel were effective in doing so. We used tea cups as we thought that because they are a typically British object, that it would further support the British idea that we were putting forward in our video.
After looking at videos similar to this one such as Blur ‘For Tomorrow’ and The Smiths ‘Panic’ we liked the way they had portrayed the cities, which is what we intended to do with London. The Blur video visited landmarks in London which we also did, although by doing theirs in black and white, it gave a more vintage quality to the camera work, portraying London as it used to be seen. We intended to use some black and white footage in our video, for example where it says “a nuclear error” we were going to use a piece of footage from archive.com of a nuclear power station in black and white. We decided not to do this in the end however, because we thought that the old footage wouldn’t fit in with the modern style of our video. Another influential video is The Verve's 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'. Set in London, the video follows Richard Ashcroft as he walks through busy London streets, ignoring everything around him including people and traffic. In some ways, this video resembles ours with the idea of walking through London and disregarding the general public. Lily Allen's original, low budget music video of her song 'LDN' which follows Lily around London and also features some footage of London landmarks such as the London eye, Buckingham Palace, a park overlooking the city and the underground again is similar to ours. The video was low budget like ours and I feel that this video shows that even for such a well known and influential performer, a video like this can work. 
Before we began to film our music video, I looked at some other videos and director Hype Williams' work (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/hype-williams.html). I found it fascinating through researching and analysing videos the amount of work and money that goes into a large budget video. Williams only tends to work with hip hop/r n b acts and therefore has a recognisable style throughout his videos spanning over his 20 year career. This includes frequently flicking between the artists in the song, also putting them in different locations throughout the video. As well as this, I found that he regularly uses close up shots on the performer, something which is often required on the brief from the record label as a promotional tactic. 
A video which particularly interested me was the iconic 'Vogue' video by Madonna (directed by David Fincher) (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/vogue-madonna-video-analysis.html). Fincher chose to portray Madonna in a sexy yet sophisticated way, also featuring famous icons from the past. The video fascinated me, not only because of its journey through The Golden Age of Hollywood, but because of it's representation of both men and women and equality though the lyrics 'it makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl'. I feel that the inclusion of all 3 main political leaders for the UK, that this too shows equality. Our video relates with the audience through it's normality of just walking through London and going to the tourist attractions and therefore this shows similar traits to Madonna's 'Vogue' video.
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