Evaluation - Question 1

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


To view some major conventions in music videos, we as a group identified what were the most important ones by looking at other music videos, such as the average time of a music video, whether a music video was performance, concept or narrative based, and stereotypes- with the help of looking at other music videos and identifying their major conventions, we managed to take this into consideration and we used a narrative based storyline to our music video, as our storyline is about love, and our singer is searching for her love in the beginning of our video, we use the Lavender fields pinkish colour corrected background to signify a crush, and the scene itself as it is such an attractive setting for her to search for her one and only. Brighton is also another attractive setting we used for her to search for her love, and we used clips to signify her loneliness such as her walking by the shoreline alone (use of close ups if her face, use of Laura Mulvey's male theory gaze, so more close ups of her legs- we use the theory gaze when she's on Brighton Pier, we have close ups of her face, arms and legs). We know there is a saddening storyline in our music video, but to appeal to the male audience, we use sex appeal- so close ups of our singer is necessary!

Timing of our music video was another convention that we didn't need to worry about too much, as it was the simple task of filling up the gaps of the music itself, so we never had to worry about having a 20 minute music video, as "Inna- The sun is up" is 3 minutes and 10 seconds long.

"Inna- The sun is up" is quite an up beat song, and so editing of quick shots was a must! In one of our set of time with the music, we used a cross over of two of the same setting shots but one was day, and one was sunrise, and most importantly, it followed the beat of the music, and as we found out, the simple task of following the beat of the music made the music video look really impressive if it was done correctly.

Our main focus for our music video was to give the impression to our audience that our singer is a strong, independent, sexy woman who has a storyline to follow in our music video. Not long before the process of our music video, I looked through a few music videos that give the impression of what I want our singer to be, and I found one song exactly like that:

This song and music video has a deep, emotional storyline to it; it's about a man breaking going from woman to woman, breaking their hearts, and unfortunately, Christina Perri was one of those women, and now she wants to face the man who broke her heart, and get even.

Throughout the majority of the storyline of "Jar of Hearts" it shows the man taking many hearts away from women that he has emotionally hurt, and you can see that Christina is looking onward at him. The music video not only allows Christina to express her feelings through singing, but through dance as well- though she does not dance herself, all the other woman that have been hurt by this one man, dance with him, and you can see his lust and their pain. Nearing the end of the music video, you can see all the women rising up, and fighting for her "Hearts" back against this man, and you see Christina finally face her ex lover, and get her heart back.

Christina's digipak has showed how strong and independant she is as a woman- and this tought me that a lot of other digipaks are very similar. We saw a lot of close ups and medium shots of the artist themself, and we learnt that this was important for the artist to get recognised and so for our digipak photos, we have done just this- we have included medium shots with scenery backgrounds that are used in the music video and close ups of her face. The digipaks we looked at were mainly Soulful and pop music- Adele's 21 CD shows just a close up of her face, something very basic:

In a lot of other digipaks like Adele's; they used big text and colour to stand a specific thing out- Adele here has used black and white of a close up of her face to maybe signify emotion in this album and even though we haven't created a digipak like Adele's, we have gained the same concept of using big, bold text for the title of the single on our digipak, and have used plenty of bright colours like pink, orange, yellow, and red to link to the title itself "The Sun if Up"- we have used these colours to give her a strong image of herself, and make her look very elegant with the scenery backgrounds we have chosen for the digipak that include the bright colours.