In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video was inspired by other popular music videos of its genre, mainly previous Prodigy videos, we used the music video for Voodoo People as a prime influence for its simplicity and professional look. As we looked at different music videos in the genre we pin pointed the main characteristics of a music video in the genre. They consisted of:


A primarily disjunctuve narrative – This was the case in most of the videos with them having no logical plot, but well shot scenes.

Fast pace – The songs were mostly fast paced, and so the shots were well in sync with the song’s beat.

Dark and gritty – Now with most videos in this genre the music video’s theme’s were dark very and urban. Rarely were there any daytime shots.

With our music video we decided that we needed to do something original but still keep with the common themes in a music video of this genre. We decided very early on that most of the shots will take place in urban areas at night, or in dark places. We then decided to make the plot disjuncture but something you can still put your head around. We made it with a simple premise, of a man running from his own demons, but used a physical manifestation for this, that way we had a protagonist (played by Mohammed Adel) and an antagonist (played by Ashriel King).

In our disjunctive narrative, the protagonist is running from an unseen foe, the fact you don’t see what he is running from until the end creates an air of mystery and built up tension throughout the video.

We made the music video with a quick cut rate, the speed of every shot is determined by the tempo of the song. So when there was a sudden tempo shift from fast to slow, we would increase the duration of the shot on-screen; this is in keeping with the common conventions of a music videos of this genre where the video is manipulated by the song.

The conventions that we went against were the lengthy performance of the band that was playing. Usually in conventional music videos of this genre, the band would usually be seen performing throughout their vidoes, or at least the band would make an appearance. However, our video is completely about the narrative, apart from a very short sequence where Mohammed is freeystyle dancing in town. We had no lip-syncing, guitar-playing or anything like that. We planned to film people dancing at a rave on Halloween, but some complications arose and so we didn't manage to do so.