personal development plans: The Gadget Show: Music Video Challenge

I've been meaning to post this all week, it was from last Mondays episode of 'The Gadget Show'. Every week the team have challenges against each other in different areas of gadgetry (or 'gadge' as one them puts it) to determine the best in terms of performance, cost effectiveness and just general overall usage.
In this particular episode they had a music video challenge whereby one member of the team, Suzi, would be directing a team using the very best professional equipment available to the big boys of the industry....and other team member, Jason, would be producing his video using affordable consumer tech.

The object of the challenge was not specifically to find out which gadgets were the best in this instance because obviously the pro kit is the best here, the challenge was to see who could create the best music video using the tools they had. After they were finished, both videos were shown to two industry experts to decide which was the best.

This was Suzi's vid, obviously the pro kit....

And this was Jason's vid, the budget shoot production....

In the end the experts had positive comments about both videos, perhaps more so towards Jason's efforts. But in conclusion they picked the professional looking video from Suzi as the winner.

I was really disappointed.
From purely a professional looking and quality perspective it's obvious that the pro kit is far superior in everyway, but the challenge was to make the best music video....not the best quality music video....and for me personally I felt that Jason's excelled as a clear winner because of this.
All I see when I watch the professionally produced video is the same tired commercial style that i've seen a million times over....."ok guys, let's get the band in an aircraft hanger, lots of random lighting, and just have them perform into the camera throughout.....winner!" ...the same format which been repeated over and over for the past 10 years. I found it boring, unimaginative and typical of the commercial music industry.

Jason's low budget video was clearly of a much lower quality and in places quite badly pixelated, which on one side is in line with the rugged tone of the settings. I felt that there were a number of shots in there which were really quite bad and I think they could have tried a little harder to get a better take rather than settling with what they had, other than this I thought that the music video was very creative....there was a basic kind of narrative to carry it through, some of the shot angles were quite nice and also some creative use of overhead views. In general a creative video that kept my interest throughout.

The judges did echo some of these points of creativity that went into Jason's production, but in the end they went for the quality.
It's disappointing to think that creativeness counts for virtually nothing in a commercial world.