Genre essay

Genre is a style of music or art that differs itself from other genres by the certain characteristics it has. For my A2 production we created a music video with the genre of Indie with a number of different themes used to emphasize this. This style of music is generally very in touch with the audience from the use of their lyrics and video's.

I have chose Steve Neale's genre theory to analyse my media product. This theory highlights the importance of repetition and difference to establish my genre to the audience. We have used this theory in our media product through the repetition of unknown, naturalistic locations which involved many scenes of filming in a river location with the band performing with boiler suits on for costume to help us link into our concept theme. These scenes of filming in a river link to this theme due to it being a unknown, dark location which are all themes of the dark Indie genre. Another location in our music video that uses repetition of a unknown location is shown through a mid shot of me as the lead singer barely clothed in a bath of blood, this highlights the theme of darkness which is important to this genre and relates to the audience as they would expect this theme in the genre of music. Nature is again followed in our video with inclusion of many underwater go pro shots. These varied from close ups showing the emotion of me as the singer's emotion in his face as the close up shows him screaming into the camera, this shows an angry emotion further linking into dark themes again.

Another instance of when Steve Neale's theory is apparent in our media product is when my group used inspiration from "Dry the river" music video. The idea came from a mid shot of the band laying on the floor with dark, serious looks on their face highlighting the seriousness and depth of the music video showing that the lyrics really are coming from deep inside them. We looked to replicate this in our media product through the same idea of the band laying on the floor with dark serious looks on our face. The mid shot of the band showed us singing the "lyrics" i think i'm falling, falling for you". These lyrics really build a relationship with our Indie audience as they can relate to these lyrics as love can sometimes be dark when the feelings aren't mutual. This shot is repeated numerous times throughout the video hoping to really get in touch with the Indie audiences feelings and create a relationship with them as these experiences may be relate-able to them in terms of our lyrics.

Our audience enjoyed relating to our genre as they felt our lyrics really related to the Indie audience through the dark themes shown and the dark, relate-able lyrics of a love story involving someone falling for a woman.