Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The media products that I have created are a music video, digipak, and advert. Within these products I have both followed and opposed genre conventions. The genre that I have chosen, pop/punk/alternative, is a hybrid/subgenre. This has allowed me to be much more flexible when looking at codes and conventions as it provides me with a broader spectrum of options.

As I have six actors within my products that each have an individual style I have used this to my advantage. I asked each actor to dress in their everyday clothing in order to create a more diverse feel to a song that is usually stereotyped as simply being ‘pop’. I did this to show that audiences don’t have to be limited to just one style of music, people won’t be judged for liking contrasting genres. There is a mixture of dark, light, and brightly coloured clothing as well as various styles of jeans, jumpers, tops, and footwear.

Various settings have been used within my music video for different parts of the narrative. The band shots were all filmed indoors in a theatre to make the gig scenes look more professional and realistic. When doing this I used the lighting rigs to adjust the house lights as well as stand alone studio lights aimed at the band. However, I also focussed on the instruments rather than the band in quite a few of the shots. As for the narrative shots I filmed at; two different houses, a bungalow, and at two separate outdoor locations. For these locations I tried to film mostly during the day in order to use as much natural sunlight as possible, rather than using prosthetic lighting. As I had to re-shoot these shots due to a change in actress, I had a limited amount of time, and therefore had to film most of these shots in the same day. Unfortunately because of time constraints, I had to film the outdoors shots in snow, but I believe that this makes it look more believable as a lot of music videos are set in perfect, sunny weather, which is not always the case in real life.

A common aspect of pop/punk/alternative music videos is the camera focussing on the band to artist through the use of close-ups and extreme close-ups. I have done this within my own video as I felt that it was an important aspect of the gene that is popular with my target audience. I have used some close-up instrument shots to showcase the musician’s abilities and talent. I have also used a few medium shots of the band to show both the skills of playing their chosen instrument (drums, guitar, bass or vocals) as well as the individual themselves. Within the narrative sections of the video I have included some close-ups and extreme close-ups of the lead singer whom also plays the leads role in the narrative. Rather than focus on the lead singer through the performance shots I chose to make him the lead male character throughout the narrative side of the footage, only using a few select performance shots.

One of the ways in which I have followed a genre convention is by having two threads to the video, one being the narrative part of the video, the second being the performance side of it. I felt that it was best to stick to this style of video as it popular amongst, and expected by the pop/punk audience that this is aimed towards. It is also a structure that I personally prefer to see within music videos of any genre.

Throughout the video I continuously used Andrew Goodwin’s theory on the use of thought beats to cut and edit the footage together so that the cuts matched up with the beats of the music. I have kept most of the performance shots quite shorts in contrast to making the narrative shots slightly longer. Bot of these techniques are often used with real media products and are conventional throughout many genres of music.