Evaluation Question 1

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

In our music video one of the conventions that we stuck to was the use of narrative. We felt that this was a big convention to include as it helps to keep the audience interested as there is something keeping them hooked.

In our video we included Todorov’s theory of balance- unbalance- balance. We felt that this would be the most effective as it is simple but gets the message across. It is also the most common in pop music videos which usually include a simple love misunderstanding. This is well illustrated in Rihanna's pop music video ‘ we found love’ as they start off happy, have an argument and end up back together in the end.

As you can see in the still to the right this was the period of unbalance. We kept each narrative in black and white to clearly portray which parts of the video are the narrative aspects. This made it even clearer to the audience so they could understand it, it also helped to keep the video consistent.

However we also kept to the convention of using performance aspects in our music video. This is so that we had a nice mix between the two as music videos rarely have just performance or narrative as it helps to keep audiences interested.

As you can see in this still from the start of our music video we have also included performance aspects. The use of this is also effective as It makes it of paramount clarity to the audience who the singer of the song is. This is important as it makes sure that the audience can easily identify the artist so they can go and buy their music.

We also placed our artist in front of a red background in order to make her stand out, the red contrasts to her plain black dress and the black and white of the narrative structure. This helps to accentuate the performance aspect as they are clearly represented by the use of colour, like in many real pop music videos.

This is much like Lordes music video where she also sings directly to the camera, this is to help establish who she is as she is relatively new as an artist.

Another convention that we tried to develop in our video was linking the videos actions to the lyrics of the song. However we did try to do this subtly so that it did not look cheesy and unprofessional. We did this is two ways, one by getting our artist to mime the lyrics and the other through the use of narrative.

The title of our chosen song is ‘waiting all night’ by Rudimental. We wanted to incorporate the link of ‘waiting’ for her love in the music video in order to link it to the song title. This is why in our video we have a section when the girl is physically ‘waiting’ for her love to come along and get her. This helped to develop the convention as we were actually doing something to match the lyrics through the actions of the characters. This happens again when she is waiting in the café for him but he lets her down by being with someone else.

We also linked our video to the lyrics by including our main artist. We took an extreme close up of our artists lips to clearly demonstrate them singing the lyrics to the song. This again helps to link the video to the song as the audience is being reminded of the song throughout. This is again very common in other music videos.

Another convention of existing media texts we followed was the use of editing to the beat of the song. For example we progressively increased our editing speed when it got closer to the chorus section.

This is shown really well in the section before the chorus when the couple are shown to be happy. They are shown in a variety of different locations and the pace of the editing gradually increases to match the tempo increasing in the song. However this is contrasted when the chorus kicks off as the girl is shown to be hitting the male with flowers and it is put into slight slow motion to exaggerate the situation, and the facial expressions.

We also demonstrate the pace of the song at then end by elongating the shots, For example there is a section when we slow down a spin of someone's feet to match it with the pace of the song. We also incorporate the narrative into this section as well, as this is the section where he betrays her and goes off with someone else. This helps to show the slowing pace of the song as it is a sadder part in the narrative, aided y the use of longer cuts.

We also used our two ancillary tasks to help and show the pop music convention with our poster and digipak. We accentuated the use of our main artist to make it crystal clear who our digipak and poster are about.

We stuck to the convention of font styles by making it fit the style of our artist. However we did challenge convention by making it a seriff font as we felt it linked to our artist better. The big swirling font helps us to demonstrate the female artist that we are trying to create, rather than the sand seriff font usually used to make the title of the poster clear.

We also used the convention of putting a mid shot of our artist in the middle of the page to clearly show to the audience who the poster is about. The use of the stars at the bottom is also a popular convention that we wanted to stick to as it makes our artist look more successful as critics have given them high recommendations.

The use of black helps to link to the digipak and the music video as that is also used in both tasks.

The use of a motif throughout the ancillary tasks helps to link them all together , this is frequent in existing texts.

Another way we followed and challenged convention was through the use of our other ancillary task: The digipak. This helped to show off our artist identity and showcase all of their music.

A convention that we stuck to quite religiously was the main title and the main artist on the front cover of the digipak. This is common on other Digipaks as it makes it clear who it is about and what it is. We wanted to make sure that we had Laurens face on there as it wold clearly link it to the video as people would associate that with her.

We also left the rest of the front cover blank apart from the title as this is another common convention used on digipak front covers. As you can see from the images on the right hand side of the digipak.

We also used a motif throughout our digipak and our poster, of the fairylights and tinsel. This helped to create a link between the two products as it clearly associated the one with the other so people would know which product we were talking about.

The various images of Lauren also help to follow convention as it constantly reminds the audience who the digipak is for. The ‘personal greeting’ Is also a popular convention to make the audience feel like they are personally talking to them.