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

We chose to make a music video For our media production. When Making a Music video the aim is to promote the artist and boost record sales. Music videos are played on channels Specific to music, like MTV, and therefore act as an advertisement for that artist. A music video needs to be able to catch people’s attention and Stick in the memory. We started our reasearch by researching into the conventions of standard music videos so we could try and replicate these in our video. The form of a Music video tends to depend upon the genre of the song. Music Videos use a wide range of film making techniques that can be portrayed through various different styles:
• Narrative
• Abstract
• Animation
• Live Action
• Documentary
But you don’t have to just stick to one style you can also have a mixture of a few of these key styles, through this you are able to explore lots of different stylistic features in a music videos. Also dependant upon the genre of music the styles may vary. Live action footage from concert gigs may be used in a video but this is more by acoustic artists, narrative story lines tend to be more for r 'n' b and rap videos.
After our initial research we researched into popular artists from different genres of music and watched videos from each artist either from there website or on youtube.com:
• Rock – Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA
• Hip Hop – Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby
• R 'n' B – Rhianna – Take a Bow
• Blues – Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven
• Country – Johnny Cash – I got stripes
• Acoustic – Jack Johnson – Breakdown
• Metal – Iron Maiden – Holy Smoke
• Indie – Jack Penate – Second, Minute or Hour
• Easy Listening – Jason Mraz – Im Yours
The most common features that were used in videos from different genres were:
• Slow Motion
• Mixture of performance and narrative
• Black and White
• Performance - guitar shots
• Close Up, Panning, Tracking, Establishing
These are therefore things that we shall attempt to include in our music video.
When we chose a song we decided to chose from a genre we all knew well and felt would be easier to create a music video, the genre we chose was easy listening acoustic. It is also helpful that the target audience of this style of music is of our age group upwards (16 - 24) mainly students still in education. We feel that the audience would be mainly female because of the appeal of the artist. Due to the target audience we are able to easily retrieve feedback and know ourselves what needs to be included in the video.
In the easy listening genre the main convention is the presentation of the artist. When we watch videos from this genre we notice the artist was the videos main attention and there was not a lot of story line. Locations are very casual, low-key and suburban in the videos, for example in a backstreet or park. This matches the style of the music and keeps attention focused on the performance, which is the main aspect.
In the song we chose the lyrics did not create a clear narrative, this is because there is only one verse that repeats, we decided we would develop the narrative feature and create a thematic collection of images/symbols to reflect the idea of the song (The City). This way we are still holding a sense of direction but aren’t actually telling a story. The conventional genre features we chose to replicate were:
Man & Guitar – this appeared in most of the videos we researched – e.g. Jack Johnson, James Blunt, Jason Mraz - we decided to cast Josh Embury, the singer/songwriter as our performer. This was not only because he knew the song but also as his style matched exactly the image we were looking for, laid back casual.
Editing Techniques – change of colour in a shot or perhaps speed
Locations – usually set in quite a isolated place
We used all these conventions within our music video to replicate the genre and match the style of music. We used such Editing techniques of ghost trails, time reverse and slow motion, within our shots of the traffic to create a busier and more interesting scene. We placed our actor in an isolated place combining the two features of Man & Guitar with Location. We found that sticking to these conventions helped us keep within the chosen genre helping us to link the song and video together.
We decided to reflect the lyrics less literally than in other music videos this was by using a selection of symbols (-> + <3 = ?) this was to show the confusion of choosing between love and heading somewhere new this helped give our video an individual identity. This is a strong continuing motif that we use throughout the video and is clearly recognisable feature that could be related to our song.
I believe we have achieved a professional standard as throughout the editing stage we have been very precise with how we cut and put our footage together. When adding the music we made sure that the lip-syncing was as accurate as humanly possible on the software we used (iMovie HD). This means that hopefully when the audience are watching they aren't constantly frustrated at the song not being in time with the footage and can just view the video as if they are just watching a performance. Overall our music video generally followed the conventions set but we did develop and challenge a few of the features, for example the use of symbols to reflect the lyrics instead of a clear narrative.