Task 1

 Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Reasons for following or breaking music video conventions

It is important to follow the conventions of music videos as:

• allows the audience to become familiar with a particular genre, as they get use to recognizing the different conventions within a genre.

• provides a structure that the audience can understand.

• Ensures that the lyrics of the song fit in with the video, of how we’d expect it to be.

In our music video our performer is seen wearing urban clothing to echo music genre of grime. Numerous of other artists relating to grime genre such as Dizzee Rascal, Skepta and N Dubz are usually seen wearing hats, hoodies or heavy jewellery to reflect their music genre, as otherwise drastically contradicting wardrobe choice to the music genre could seem confusing and off-putting to the audience as they are familiar with seeing a particular style set to the specific music genre.

CostumeThe costume choice is one of the key factors in music videos as it reflects on the music genre of the artist and influences the viewer’s own dress choice, as they look up to artists as their role models. Therefore the costumes need to be on trend so that they appeal to the target audience.

The performer in the music video is seen wearing snapback just like the original artist of our chosen song track.

Location

We followed the convention of setting a house party location as it is tendency in hip-hop and grime

music genres.

The setting of a music video allows the viewers to decide on the music genre but to may also be carefully chosen to reflect the mood of the song.

Meek Mill- House Party ft. Young Chris

JLS- Do You Feel What I Feel?

Selena Gomez- Birthday

One of the reasons of why we chose to do a house party setting for our music video was because our target audience is relatively young, ranging from teens and upwards, basing the video around a house party would allow the audience to make personal connection from the video to their own life.

Ways in we followed the conventions of a typical house party to make it appear as realistic as possible was by shooting by:

• setting the lighting lower and shooting in the darks hours- typically most house party videos are shot at night-time

• cramming people closer together into the shot- creating the illusion as if there is actually more guests

• having props such as balloons, party poppers and drinks- things that the viewer associate with a house party.

Colouring/LightingColours are shown through almost everything in a music video, lighting, costumes, hair, makeup and locations.

The type of colouring may sometimes be used to represent a feeling or mood or to signify a certain thing.

Ed Sheeran- A Team

The use of black and white in this music video, assists in portraying the overall mood of the music video and allows the audience to express sympathy towards the female protagonist.

One Direction- What Makes You Beautiful

High key lighting is used, the video is bright, sunny and warm - creating a positive feeling.

To follow the conventions of a house party, we used minimal lighting in the room where the video was shot, this is because most party videos are shot at night- creating a ‘party atmosphere’. However we did not want the shots appear to dimmed. Therefore we used party props such as bright coloured balloons and glow sticks to contrast the rest of the room setting and to create cheerful mood to reflect the light hearted theme of our music video.

Camera MovementsCamera moves to follow the artist or to show the performance of the artist. These movements include panning and tracking. A director may choose to move action along by telling the story as a series of cuts, going from one shot to another, or they may decide to move the camera with the action.

In our music video there is constant quick cuts between the narrative and our performer- acting as a narrator and a participant at the same time. We had included variety of different camera movements such handheld- camera following either the story protagonist or the performer, creating irregular camera movement to purposely make it look amateur as to make it look more realistic- creating an illusion as if one of the party guest was filming the shots. We combined these shots with smooth camera movement, this was achieved with the use of a tripod.

Camera Shots- Demand Record LabelThroughout our music video there is quick cuts between the narrative and the performer, we had included a number of close-up, mid-

shots and long-shots of our performer lip-synching and performing various of tasks. We also wanted to show a clear connection to one of Goodwin’s Six Points, of which the record labels demand close ups of the artist as means of  highlighting  the star’s image.

Close-ups are often used to sell the artist and show emotions. Being close to someone suggest you are comfortable with them, a close-up of the artist is personal and allows the audience to build a close relation with the artist shown on screen.

Rihanna- California King Bed

Justin Timberlake- Tunnel Vision

Many mainstream artists today have consistent amount of close-ups of them shown.

Narrative A Narrative music video follows a story line, there are two types of narrative Linear and Fragmented A linear narrative starts a story at the beginning, goes on through the middle, and ends at the end. A fragmented narrative is one that does not.In our music video the narrative focuses on our protagonist- an unsuccessful womanizer. Our narrative is fragmented as there is an introduction to our protagonist, followed by three scenarios, however his fate is uncertain at the end of the music video. This provides a cliff-hanger, allowing the audience to make their assumptions of what had happened to the protagonist.

Erykah Badu- Other Side Of The Game

An example of fragmented narrative used in a music video.

We had decided to go against the typical convention for grime genre style video, in which the protagonist is usually portrayed as someone very successful with women. We wanted the visuals to contradict the lyrics of the song therefore creating a light, comical feeling to the music video. Dizzee Rascal- Dance Wiv Me

We had added the title ‘The Womanizer’ to make it even more clear to the audience that the protagonist unsuccessful with girls.

Reference to Voyeurism (the act of sexualised looking)

Tyga- Do My Dance (Explicit) ft. 2 Chainz

Notions of looking and voyeuristic treatment of female body is often taken advantage of in many music videos in order to appeal to specific target audiences, in particularly young males.

In our music video we did not include any notions of looking or voyeuristic treatment. We wanted to break the stereotypes shown in particularly in many hip-hop/grime music genre music videos where the females featuring are dominated over by males, females are objectified in ways such as displaying extreme close-ups of their body parts. In our music video we reverse the roles- making females dominant over the male protagonist by showing them each reject his advances, contradicting the lyrics ‘got it in the bag’.

SoundSound consists of two main forms diegetic sound which is already present in the film and non - diegetic sound which can be edited in (the music itself is non-diegetic sound).Our music video also has diegetic sound at the beginning of the music video just before song track begins playing. This includes sounds from the surroundings, such as footsteps and voices, that make the video seem more realistic and also provides a short introduction to the protagonist and buys us time to put in text such as the song title.

We had also included rewind sound effect when the splay button on the iPhone is pressed to illustrate the relationship between music and visuals.

Katy Perry- Part Of Me

Diegetic sound is used predominantly in narrative based music videos, as a way of providing the audience with a short backstory or introduction to the characters.In Katy Perry’s music video ‘Part Of Me’ there is a small exchange of dialogue at the beginning, giving audience clear understanding of what is happening.

DigipackWe follow the conventions for a Digipack as we included images that represent the theme of the album- cartooned in black and white images of the artist . Linking back to the inter-textual reference to the Godfather film franchise.

Front:Has a picture of the artist along with the name of the album and the artist.

Tracks listed and numbered.

Magazine Advertisement

For our music advertisement, we wanted to look continuous by setting almost an identical style to the digipack. This way the album theme is developed which the audience associates to the artist and the specific album, allowing easy recognition and individuality.

Magazine adverts are usually just the front covers of the digipack in a poster with messages underneath it saying when the album is out for release and the ratings certain artists and news papers gave the music album, these are the conventions for digipack magazine adverts. Digipack magazine adverts function is to make audiences aware that the artist has a music album coming up, trying to persuade the audience to buy the album.