Question 1: In what ways does your media product use,develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (In progress)

The genre of our music video is indie rock as they both have conventions of rock such as being a 'four man' band but the music style fits more with the indie side of the music industry as it is fairly unique and upbeat. In our music video we follow a narrative approach as the purpose of it is to tell a short story which follow the indie conventions as it is often seen in indie music videos as oppose to rock conventions of having band performance.
Narrative - In our music video of the hit single 'Avalanche' we have created two binary oppositions who are the two main characters. The superhero who represents the good and the villain who represents evil. This is a common ideology that we have based our narrative upon, the ideology is based that one cannot exist without the other and therefore they have to co-exist in order to create a balance or symmetry.  The story is told through the antagonists character who is filled with jealousy, anger and hopelessness in which is expressed through the his actions such as staring through a strangers living room window, attacking and kidnapping  the superhero and of course public urination. By making the Villain the prime subject and following his story, we are ultimately giving the control and 'power' to the Villain and therefore making him the most significant character,  disrupting the equilibrium. This clearly links to a common narrative structure theory by Tzvetan Todorov who believed to be able to apply to any film narrative, he believed that all films followed the same narrative pattern. They all go through stages called the equilibrium, disequilibrium and acknowledgement solving the problem and returning to the equilibrium. However we also challenge Tzvetan's theory in our music video by using a cyclical narrative structure in which is very rarely seen in rock music videos. Our opening scene starts of in a forest in which the disequilibrium is already happening (it acts as a preview) and then cuts to the beginning of the song where the villain wakes up/jumps up from a garbage bin where the equilibrium has not yet been disrupted, we then end our music video in the same way, as he wakes up from his 'lovely' dream.
Mise-en-scene/Clothing - Our music videos location is important as we wanted to film somewhere where it is peaceful and everything is at its harmony. Therefore a quite peaceful neighborhood is a perfect location as our villain can disrupt the peace and act as a villain would do. We also used a forest as the location for our 'torture scene this fits well with the villain as this is his dream to defeat the Superhero and therefore it is quite personal and perhaps emotional for him which is why he wants to be isolated from the public and enjoy his moment in peace. We could say that we challenge the convention of a villain as they are usually portrayed to be outspoken for the public to see and hear. However these two characters are actually just normal humans without any superpowers but merely have opposite intentions. Furthermore, the use of face paint acts as a clothing, hiding the identity of our villain and acts as an enigma in our music video. It further shows how evil people are among us in perhaps everyday situation we just do not know peoples true identity and intentions. The use of anorak / hoodie emphasizes the deviant use of clothing as it further hides the face and therefore the personals identity which may correlate with criminal activities.