In my main ancillary text the music video narrates the Song 'Ain't no rest for the wicked' by 'Cage the Elephant' which is one of the main conventions of many music video, especially because i then used a band member as the main character who acts out the narrative and goes through all the situations the song contains such as encountering prostitutes and being mugged, we also used other band members as characters in the story which is another commodity in other real music videos. where our narrative does not use forms and conventions of real music videos is that our main character does not become better off at the end of his journey, in fact they end up worse off as they have to go through several unpleasant experiences and the only slightly positive thing they come out of their journey is knowledge, the knowledge that people will do absolutely anything if it means not having to do an honest days work for money.
In my music video the band shots i used challenge real music video conventions by using fake instruments made out of cardboard, this was done to fit in to the strangeness of our song and band members that appeared in the video, it was also due to the fact that none of the people involved in my music video could actually play a musical instrument. we also wanted the cardboard instruments to carry a hidden moral value that you shouldn't judge something on its appearance as in the world our music video was set in the band consisted of a prostitute, news reader, gangster, vicar and a normal guy down on his luck who all use poorly constructed cardboard instruments, yet where able to produce good music (in their eyes).
The idea of using fake instruments was also inspired by watching a real media product, as the other people in my group and myself are all fans of the American T.V. show 'Flight of the Concords' and in one of their music videos the characters use fake instruments.
The band shots in my music video also go against Andrew Goodwin's 'Star theory' as the main character of our music video is the drummer in the band so he is at the back of the stage and the band shots, with the main focus on the guitarist and bass player at the front. The fact that we do not solely focus on one band member or try to promote the main character more than the other band members symbolises the unity of our group and that together as a band we are better than individuals on are own.
This symbolism is further represented in our digi-pack cover which is the members of our group (Band) dressed in their characters costumes. They have then been cut apart using Adobe Photoshop and rearranged as 'Monsters' using the head of one character, the torso of another and then the legs of the last character, which again creates this notion of unity within our group which is what we see as one of the main qualities about music ; that it brings people together and allows people to be as creative as they want in all aspects of music.
The creation of the Monsters also runs with the theme of our music video which is crime, the ugliness of the Monsters symbolise the ugliness of crime and the effects it has on people whether they are the victims or the criminals.
The camera work in our music video used conventions and forms used in real music videos such as using a mix of close ups, mid shots, wide shots and action shots like in music videos from bands such as Bowling For Soup who in the music video of their song '1985' also have the band members playing lots of different characters ( The characters are actually a selection of different bands from the 1980's) one of which involves several of the band members dressed as women like in our music video. Despite our use of fake instruments we did try to keep in line with convention of the band being able to play there instruments and look professional while doing it in the music video, as Steve Archer said "But it is the lip-sync close up and the miming of playing instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band can really kick it."
Although we used conventions from used in other media products we also challenge them and reality by manipulating time by slowing down, speeding up and reversing time in areas of our music video this suggests that the characters have no control over what happens in their world, it can also act as a symbol that people wish that time could be altered to make up for things they have done that they regret linking in to our crime theme.
We also used and then developed forms and conventions from Film, Television and society when it came to creating the costumes for our characters, for the priest and news reporter the costume design was fairly easy, with the 'Gangster' we used what we had seen from films such as 'Alpha Dog' giving him baggy clothes, a hat, jewelry, a gun and fortunately one of our group members had a tattoo which fitted with the image. when it came to the character 'Champagne' (the prostitute' we went against normal conventions by having a male play a female character, the reasons we did this was firstly because we didn't want to offend any female audience members by representing them negatively we also didn't want to make any female actresses feel degraded for having to be a prostitute, the other reason we did it however was to add a slight comical aspect to the music video by having a male dress in drag like the dame in pantomime productions.
Another convention that we used and developed from other music videos was having several different locations in our music video, the way that we challenged it however was having such big contrasts in location, going from an urban setting, to a rural one then finally finishing in a house. We had such different locations because of the availability we had for example the river was an easily accessible location as we live in Lincolnshire a predominately rural county so we made use of our surroundings.
We also developed and used the convention of collectibles when we created our playing cards that had pictures of the band members dressed as their characters from the music video. The cards would be given away with the purchase of the digi-pack, each pack containing different cards allowing fans to trade and collect the cards, much like 'Pokemon' cards.
A convention that our music video challenges unlike some music videos is that our music video has a completely linear story line, where as other narrative songs often have lots of complex and different non linear narrative fragments making the story hard to visually understand, ours is a start to finish performance of the characters narrating the song's lyrics we decided that this would make it easier for all audience members to have a clear visual and audible understanding of what the song was about.
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