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

Before producing our music video we carried out a significant amount of preproduction work; one of the key features of this was finding out what the conventions of the medium and the genre which we had chosen to work in were. From this we could begin planning our product to ensure it looked professional and more importantly that it met the needs of our target audience. Now we have completed our project and produced what we feel is a professional and engaging music video, we can assess how well we incorporated these conventions into our text.

1. Conventions of the medium

The conventions of the medium consisted of making the music video look professional. To do so we used short shot lengths in our editing to keep the target audience involved and wanting to carry on watching it, we also used montage editing to engage the audience and follow the conventions of the medium. The close up shots of Roger is a convention of a professional medium making the viewer aware who the artist is, this refers back to Goodwins theory as the record label would want to promote the star in the music video. Our video used performance, narrative and conceptual ideas. There is not a clear narritive , more of a conceptual idea revolving around the Alice in wonderland theme, to keep them entertained and also relate to our conventions. We felt this was appropriate for our target audience as it would interest them (a fact which we found out from our primary research- see earlier posts)

2. Conventions of the genre

The genre in which we were working was quite unique in the sense that it was a hybird of pop, dance and rap music. Therefore we had to incorporate elements from each of these, however we did end up focusing a lot on the rap aspect of this through our representation of the lead singer.

I learnt that one of the conventions of a real music video consisted of signifiers to represent the type of genre the music video is by costume choice which we included in our music video. We focused on this convention because we looked at the forms and conventions of a real media product and recognised that this was a major part in letting our target audience decode this. Another thing that i learnt from looking at real media products was the locations that were chosen. We have used this media convention to signify not only what target audience we are aiming at but to portray an idea of drugs and imagination can be anywhere you want ti to be, as long as you frame every shot correctly.

I have learnt that real music genre conventions are the building blocks of creating a target audience, and the music genre conventions we have added in our music video are using a attractive black male which can relate to the the genre of hip-hop and rap. The image (right) is of British rapper Dizzie Rascal, reasoning behind this being shown is too portray how the clothing we have chosen Roger to wear makes the viewer make a subconscious decision that this artist relates to hip hop, which is a convention of music genre.

We also have incorporated the pop genre to the music video due to the controversial topic of drugs and living a party lifestyle. This has helped us grab a wider audienece and also i feel has interested the viewer into a more exciting montage music video.

Finally, we have used a fairytale theme to relate to a younger range of audiences. Not only will it capture these types of age groups but young adults can relate to this convention because they can reminis, look back, as fairytales was a big part of a majority of people younger lifes.

I felt any additional conventions towards genre would not make it specific enough and would loose a target audience. If we started to add lots of dark filter and blacks then it could relate to rock/ metal which i think is too much.