Overall from the table above you can see that we followed a large majority of the conventions, our narrative followed the conventions of the indie genre very strongly, as an audience we are meant to be affect by the narrative, making us think about what we have just seen. This is why throughout we used specific scenes to create a hard hitting narrative for the audience, even though we had to create a hard hitting narrative we needed to be careful with this because our storyline of mental health and depression. The most effective part of our music video which had this hard hitting effect was the last few shots of where we see our female character committing suicide by drowning herself. This narrative we created we felt suited our song very effectively because on the lyrics in the song for example “built it up to pull it down” when we initially heard the track we all saw a falling relationship because of the mental health and depression the female character had. This is another reason why we found this song to be in the style of the indie genre because of the lyrics and the potential creation of a hard hitting narrative they had.  

To create this hard hitting narrative we followed the conventions of the genre, camerawork we followed strong with the use of all the shots above and more, allowing us to keep our audience interested in our product but also to support in bring across the emotions of the actors to the audience therefore helping us to create the different atmosphere required to create a hard hitting narrative and portray the happy and sad memories.  We also followed the conventions of pans and tilts as these fit the genre very strongly due to them being a very simple camera technique therefore creating a more interesting shot than a static shot.

Overall the indie genre is very simplistic especially with the editing, there is no use of special effects, the most common effect used is filters, we followed this convention as it allowed us to create a clear distinction between the happy and sad memories so that it was clear for the audience. We did challenge this convention slightly as we had the use of overlays which some people believe to be special effects however we felt the use would support in the portraying of the mental health through different images overlapping each other and would allow us to bring through the slowly with overlaying arguments, love letters of depression and happy memories over sad ones.

The performance element for our music video is a very strong part as we have achieved the representation of a performance/ stage atmosphere for the audience through the use of the staging and location. We used the band to break up the narrative as this kept the audience interested in the product as there was a change from narrative to a performance throughout which contained different camera angles and length. However one convention of performance we challenged was the fact that the band did not appear in the narrative of the music video. We felt that this would not be appropriate for our video as we wanted the audience to build a relationship with the cast of the narrative so that they created an emotional connection with them, if we had the band as them the interruption into the performance element would have broken the relationship between the audience and narrative down making it less effective and hard hitting which is why we decided to challenge this. We also challenged the lighting state for the performance element, conventionally the lighting is low key so that the band are not highlighted and left in the shadows as a mystery of who they are. However we wanted to use the performance element as an interruption to the narrative so that the impact of the narrative was not to overwhelming for the audience to take in and understand. We used a warm white high key lighting state to balance out the striped coloured sad memories we had thought the video.

Our mise en scene followed the conventions of the genre, we used simplistic natural costumes which allowed our audience to create a connection with the cast through the fact that it was relatable. For our makeup design we used simple effects to create different looks for a female to make her look like she was suffering because of the mental health and also to enhance the emotions she was feeling. We went away individually and researched mental health so we knew the side effects of it and what we would need to portray to represent her illness. We used the makeup designs to also enhance the lighting for example the bathroom shots, she war pale makeup making her look washed out as well as the lights creating a harsh cold white washed out effect. We followed the conventions of location for our video using low budget areas like woodlands and pounds, through the use of these types of areas it allowed us to create happy memories but also use the large open landscapes to make her appear isolated and alone.

Overall out of all the conventions we followed and challenged sound is the one in which we did not follow any of the convention of, stereotypically indie music have some sort of voice over or non-diegetic sound at the start and end of the video to create a locational representation for the audience or to concluded what the music video has just done. However as a group we felt this would lose the impact in which the audio track create. We felt that the start of our track had a very slow build up into the meaningful lyrics and the end was sharp enough to allow us to have a hard hitting impact however had a slow enough fade out to allow our audience to reflect on the visuals they have just seen.

In conclusion our media product follows a large majority of the conventions which have allowed us to create a hard hitting impact with the story line of mental health and depression without creating an unsettling video for the audience to watch. The convention we have challenged have allowed us to create this type of narrative and allowed us to bring across our underlining story line to a falling relationship.