Homework

“Creativity is always constrained by generic conventions”. To what extent did your experience allow you adhere to or subvert generic conventions in the creation of your media products?

Although I agree with the statement, generic conventions would not exist if it wasn’t for creativity as it is creativity which separates stereotypes and groups. In my own experience in video production, codes and conventions are nothing but guidelines and can be manipulated through directing to give the same effect but with added means of creativity. In my video I researched popular aspects of the generic conventions in other music videos of the same genre, similarities in them existed but each was still unique and individual. This is due to the fact that they are made to entertain and so if each was the same they would be very boring to watch, also the style of the artist is often portrayed through their image in their videos and artists like to look individual and have their own unique identity.
We challenged this in a way by wearing masks (to hide identity) which was one of the major contributes of creativity in our video. We did this as we were making a video for an up and coming group and we thought doing this would help give the effect they are being introduced. We saw a group on another video using text on the screen to introduce themselves which we thought was a good idea and so we did the same but felt it terms of creativity and originality something more needed to be done. This is when the mask idea came to surface. We found the masks and decided plain white would be most suitable as it went well with the costumes and matched the black and white colour theme for the DVD cover and advert, this is an example of creativity fitting in with generic conventions as masks aren’t a theme used often by groups of this genre but because of creativity it has been made possible and the end result was effective.
We did follow the generic conventions rather strictly as this would gain us marks and we watched many videos of the same genre, made lists of regular aspects and included these in our own video. Although we did this there were still many parts which needed creativity. Conventions don’t plan your video. It is just like a semantic field, it gives you ideas on things in which may be suitable to include. It does provide certain boundaries to an extent but at the same time allows you the space to be creative with your product.
In our preliminary tasks we had to think really creatively. Each piece had to be individual but following the style of the video. This meant that copying other pieces was impossible as they wouldn’t fit in with our theme and only certain ideas could be transferred to our own product. We watched over the video many times till we decided its style and wrote down some ideas for our advert and covers, we then created rough plans (sketches) of these and compared them to professional ones until we decided on ideas which looked both original and creative but still fitted in with all the things covers and adverts need to include and certain ways in which they should look.
When creating the inside cover I had a look at the pictures we already had and it gave me an idea to gave a band of people in masks running along the bottom of the page. This followed the generic conventions as gangs are associated with the genre. I knew the shot would hard to get as we needed around 15 people all in a line wearing dark clothes and masks. This is when I had the idea to create the image by making a sort of collage of cut out bits from other pictures and sticking them all together to give the effect that all the people + masks (as in some cases they were cut out of pictures and placed in the faces of different people from other pictures) were all there together in one shot.