In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I believe that our music video contains many aspects that use, challenge and develop conventions of real music videos.
Key conventions that we used were generic conventions such as lip syncing, instruments and performance.
We use lip syncing less than the average music video, although there is a reason for that. In Thirty Seconds to Mars’s music video for the song, ‘This is War’, they concentrated less on performance but the lead singer lip synced as he played his part. We didn’t do this as our main character and our Jared Leto were different people unlike their videos which portray Jared as the performer as well as the main character as shown in the images to the left and right from their video 'The Kill'. To the left, Jared plays the character in the video, and to the right, the performer.
We used Zach as our Jared Leto and Sam as our main soldier. We believe this is how we have challenged this convention. Instruments were important when filming our band scenes although we didn’t include as many close ups as we could. We decided against this so that we could fully concentrate on the narrative. Our performance develops conventions of their music videos.
Thirty Seconds to Mars rarely create regular performance within their videos. Their location for performance is usually different and it is a rarity that they just use a basic performance location, such as a stage. Their video for 'Closer to the edge' challenges this, seen as it is a combination of their tour videos, therefore you could also argue that they are trying to challenge their own conventions. For our performance, we set it in a forest, seen as it isn’t an everyday location in which to play instruments. Above is a shot of our forest band scene. Below is a shot from their video 'Capricorn' where they are featured performing in an underground dirt track, with their 'followers' looking down upon them.
I believe the convention in which we develop most has to be the narrative. It is always a strong part of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s videos, therefore we thought that we needed to use and also develop this aspect. We wanted a hard hitting issue to target as Thirty' are all about conveying a hard hitting message. They had already created a war themed video for their song 'This is War', although we wanted to develop the idea of a war theme. We wanted to make it more personal, and target families and fans to draw emotion from them and make them realise the loss that comes with war. We challenge conventions using conceptual ideas. Thirty ' often use conceptual ideas in their videos but it is usually to the extreme. We toned ours down to feature subtle conceptual elements. We did this because we wanted the video to be interpreted in different ways. We liked the idea that the video could be interpreted as one giant flashback, and that their was no wild flying guns or samurais to draw attention away from the message. Our conceptual section simply consisted of Cathy over Sam as he loses consciousness, even though it is really his comrades over him.
Reality Conceptual
The first image portrays the reality of the situation where Sam's comrades are over him, attempting to resuscitate. The conceptual idea is what Sam thinks he is seeing, which is in fact Cathy over him, in army uniform shouting his name.
The convention of length was one we used, but one that was also a risk. Thirty’s videos that contain a hard hitting narrative are generally quite long some even bordering on sixteen minutes. Our song Vox Populi was 5:57 in total. The shortened version didn’t contain the sections in which we wanted the main base of our narrative to sit ,therefore we made an executive decision to use the longer version. We planned our time very carefully in order to get all our footage filmed and edited.
Quotations aren’t a typical convention of Thirty's videos but they do use them on the odd occasion. We used quotations as we believed that they were important for setting the tone and finishing the video. To the left is a quote from Thirty's video 'This is War' . This inspired us for out quote on the right.
Thirty Seconds to Mars Quote Our Quote
We created our quotation by simply using titles on IMovie. We went for the simplest font because its the message of the quote that counts and not the appearance.
This is not our only use of quotes or significant words. We conducted a photo shoot of signs. We believe this was essential to our video as it shows the losses of relatives and friends of soldiers lost in war. They didn't turn out as bright as we would have liked but we still liked the shots. We kept the lighting visible in the shots as we didn't want it to look staged like a casual white background
Something that signifies Thirty Seconds to Mars is their symbol; The Triad. It is a symbol of unity which is what Thirty Seconds to Mars are all about.
This is something that we have used a lot in every stage of our project. It links everything together. It is in Thirty's videos, on merchandise, on their CD's, it is Thirty Seconds to Mars. It is the symbol of the Echelon. We wanted to link everyone in our video together using the Triad. Below are images of our main solider and lead singer sporting triad necklaces.
This is an image of Jared Leto sporting two triads on his arms.
We marked one of our soldier with a triad also
The Echelon are Thirty Seconds to Mars's fans. The Echelon is a name created for them by the band in order to create a kind of 'cult'. In many of their videos they include fans in their videos. Our song contained fans singing on the track, therefore we thought that it would benefit us to create our own mini Echelon.
Our Echelon above
We took conventions from other music videos as well as films. A big inspiration to us was 'The Ghost of you' video by the band My Chemical Romance because of the strength of the narrative and performance. The video evokes sadness and an essence of tradgedywhich is what we were aiming for with our video.
Also in the video is a soldier kissing his necklace for luck just like Sam in our video.
The image to the left is from 'The ghost of you' and the image to the right is from our video.Narrative is definitely a dominant factor within our video. Seen as Thirty Seconds to Mars are so passionate about the narrative of their videos, they tend to be longer than the average music video. Their video for the song Hurricane is 13:13. I believe a very important part of our video which challenges conventions of our genre are our flashbacks. In many cases, we understand that they may be seen as just repeated use of footage but that simply wasn't the case. The shots which are repeated are repeated because they are the most emotive shots and the most tragic, therefore they would be the parts the soldiers would remember most.We also applied the effects of ghost trail ans black and white in order to differentiate from non flashback shots.
These are two pieces of footage which we incorporated in our flashbacks. The image to the left is a still shot of Sam and Cathy. It is her remembering the time which they've spent together. The right image is a flashback of Connor's portraying Sams resuscitation. We wanted to viewers to decided for themselves who the flashbacks belonged to.
In this particular shot we cut between flashback and reality within a split second. The black and white represents the flash back then we used the effect of wash out in order to flash back to colour. This was to represent that the soldiers are remembering the things they've just done.
Call of duty radio sounds
War Sounds
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