An example of how our piece is indie is the iconography of fashion through the music video and the ancillary pieces. It is very typical for indie artists the wear certain clothing and fashion. We tried to recreate this in our video, by looking at other indie artists we gained an idea of what kind of fashion to wear. Additionally our research helped us to discover that many indie artists like to film and shoot in urban locations and almost all of their footage and photos are shot outside in urban locations. This is why we chose to film in urban abandoned location to ensure that our video and ancillary pieces conform to the conventions of the indie genre.
We chose to conform to certain theories that we felt would add further meaning to our video. The first theory we chose to follow was Goodwin's theory of thought beats. At the start of our video there are shots of our artist walking, but only his feet are visible, every time there is a drum beat the place where he is walking changes. This is how we used the theory of thought beats, it also helped us further develop the indie genre of our piece. This is because right away the audience understand that they are looking at our artist, as he is the main and only focus of each scene, but they are intrigued by the mystery we have created by only showing his feet. This is very typical in the indie genre, to create mystery either through a very rough and vague narrative of through the use of shots. We chose to create the mystery around our artist as it helps to establish the mysterious indie genre of our video and makes our audience want to watch on to discover more about the artist.
We also chose to follow the theory of Rick Altman that all videos follow certain semantic traits of their genre. This would be true for our video as we have followed certain semantic traits of indie videos, such as following a 'hipster' fashion throughout and also the fact that our video was filmed in urban and abandoned places. The reason why we wanted to follow certain semantic traits was because we wanted our video to be easily identified as being the indie genre, another way in which we ensured our video was clearly belonging to the indie genre was because we made sure our video was pragmatic. This is because our audience will be able to identify traits that are typical of an indie video and will want to watch it, additionally we ensured that our video conformed to what an institution would publish, this helped us to stay on track with what a typical indie video would include and meant our audience could easily establish the genre as being indie.
However we also chose to challenge and subvert certain media theories, as we wanted our video to be original and not exactly the same as all of the videos we researched. We did this as it once again helps to establish the indie genre as indie videos and music often goes against the 'norm' or the mainstream and provides and alternative for those who don't want to follow what everyone else is. Therefore we chose to subvert Rick Altman's theory of a syntatic approach. This is because we don't have a typical indie narrative in our video.
