2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
3. - Conventions and codes used in a music video are usually based on the genre of the music video because for example in a pop video the actor or actress is usually very attractive as this clearly will appeal to the audience a lot more. Also more typically the narrative is a lot clearer and portrays an actual story rather than just the artists performing. Usually the actual song is played whilst the actor/actress or the artist mime along to fit the narrative. Also through the shots and added effects things can be used to connect more to the audience or to show clear themes such as close-up’s on eyes or lips can portray sexuality or a close up on an abandoned building can show loss or loneliness. . Pop videos are also used to illustrate the meaning of the lyrics and visualize the music in a much simpler way, so there is usually a clear link to the particular narrative chosen and the meaning of the song. The video is also usually edited to the beat or rhythm of the music. For mainstream, major record company artists, the music videos are they most important tool in selling the artist. In some cases the music video is much more important than the actual song this is why the stars own personal or quirky style is usually present throughout to make them unique and special; their fashion is also usually representative of their target audience too. For example the audience care more about what Lady Gaga is going to wear or do next in her music video rather than her actual new song. In a pop video usually the shots are varied with the use of a lot of close-ups but also establishing shots. The movement of the camera is also usually very varied, with the use of still tripod shots and overhead crane shots to establish settings as well as pans and dolly tracking to follow the story. Usually the music videos are also edited to a fast pace as this keeps the audience interested.
4. When choosing our actress we decided on young attractive, photogenic female as this would appeal to our audience as the males would fancy her and females feel they could try to relate to her and aspire to be like her and so almost seen as a role model which is used a lot in music videos. We also decided to use only one actress as we felt this would relate better to our music video as it’s about memories and being alone. But through the shots and props we gave the idea that maybe another person was there at one point. We decided that we did not want to use lip-sinking or miming because through our questionnaire we realised that our audience found this cheesy and hard to make it look literal and serious, we felt that would be just too much of a challenge. We also realised that her singing the song could become too boring. The actions of the actress and the portrayal of the narrative flowed well with the lyrics of song and we also found that because of the simplicity of the actual video that people listened more to the lyrics whilst watching. The scene where the actress is running and laughing with the camera following her works particularly well as it is clear that video camera is a substitute for the other person’s eyes and so the audience feel as if they are the other person. We did not want to reveal the Actress’s love interest as we wanted a feel of mystery and allow for the audience to think up their own vision. On the line “But I don’t’ know how to feel” we wanted Amy to look as if she was falling back and by using slow motion editing this looked like a really dramatic bit the next line picks up pace musically and becomes more dramatic and almost more happier so this is the section where we had Amy running smiling and being happy. Our actress’s image is very neutral and innocent like especially with her blonde hair and white dress, we also had Amy dancing a contemporised dance as this also added to the innocent feel of the music video. The fact that the actress is perceived and presented as so innocent goes against conventions of a usual Pop music video as women are usually very sexualised and used for males to look at through the clothes they wear and the way in which they act in the video for example in Beyonce and Rihanna’s music videos all of the women are portrayed more in this way.
5. The main Convention we did not follow was the use of several locations being used and so shots being switched between this I feel if we had used could of have improved our video a lot more as it would have been a lot more varied and we would have also had a lot more material to have had the chance to choose from to put in our video. Also if we had used more than one actress we could have made the video a lot more varied and maybe more interesting for the audience. We did not do this due to time issue over cameras and poor weather conditions. A convention that we did challenge was the use of a Attractive female but not portrayed as sexual but as innocent, we feel that it did work well due to the actual song’s genre and the fact that due to feedback males still find the actress extremely attractive and so makes them want to watch the music video that females can relate to her a lot more compared to usual pop video’s.
6. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
7. I think the combination of our main product and ancillary texts are very effective. To go with our music video we created an advert for the album to go in a magazine and a CD album cover which includes the front and the back of the album. I feel that the album cover and poster related to the actual music video as the image we took to use for the front cover of the album was very simple close up of Amy’s face and through computer editing we got the effect of a much bigger pixilated image, this related to the confusion and mystery of the video, we did the same on the back of the cover but this time the back of Amy’s head but we used the same technique. On the poster our background was an empty forest which followed the naturalistic theme and looked very simple. The mise en scene also all connects well as we used the same clothing and actual look of the actress for all three of our products. On the album cover and the poster we also added a fuzzy effect to reflect the confusion of the narrative. We also chose to add a darkened tone to the photographs and so the actual album cover and poster as it makes it look a bit more mysterious and the Music video was shot at dusk so we wanted all three texts to connect in this way. The chosen font was used as it was simple and it set well against the images on the album and poster we also used the same font style and size to show the artists name as this would be used on everything produced by the band so the audience can instantly recognize it so we used this on both of the ancillary text. We decided to add reviews on to our poster to make it a lot more mainstream so we chose music magazines that were well known and that would actually feature this song or poster in their magazine.
