1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video is one that uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products. For our song we chose You Me At Six - Fireworks, this song is of the rock / pop genre, expressed through its high tempo but sombre lyrics often expressing betrayal and anger. To conform to the 'sound' of the song in our music video, we centred the main plot around two couples involving the same girl and how she has cheated on her previous boyfriend, and has started a new relationship with her lover. We believe that this conforms to the song we have chosen as we have centred the song around a specific lyric; "when you're sleeping in someone elses bed". Looking at other media products of the same genre we found that the shots involved include, close ups, upward pans and tracking to show how the relationships in the stories are coming to an end, making it easier for the audience to relate with the story. We conformed with these general conventions of music videos of the same genre by including shots and angles that show intimacy and infatuation.
When filming our main character Tommy we focused on close ups to conform to Goodwin's theory meaning we are able to create a band identity and make the lead singer an icon, which will again strengthen the band's identity. By using close ups of the band and the lead singer the audience can decode that he is both the lead singer and the main character. By using non-verbal codes such as costumes, actors and locations the audience are able to decode the messages we have encoded the video with. Barthes outlined that media texts have signifiers that audiences decode subliminally, by using black and white the audience can automatically decode that it is in the past using these signifiers.
We also conformed to the stereotype that teenage relationships are based on lust and sex, we did this by including clips of the couple in bed, arguing and intimate exchanges of emotion between the couples. We used Laura Mulvey's theory of the virgin/whore dichotomy which outlines that women in media products are based on 'whores' or 'virigins', we chose to show our female as promiscuous, as she cheats on the male character. This challenges the hollywood view that male characters are the catalysts for break ups in on screen characters, but our music video challenges this with shots of of female character with another man.
This challenging of general conventions, also challenges the theory of the Male Gaze theory, again put forward by Laura Mulvey, that all media products are viewed through the eyes of a male, meaning the women is often demeaned in the media text. A video to contrast to ours in P.I.M.P - 50 cent which shows cars, bling and scantily dressed women which shows that men are in control of relationships but our music video we show the women as the dominant ones in the relationship.
Our target audience for this music video will be young people aged between 15-25, as the songs are about issues such as falling in love for the first time, infatuation, break ups and heartache. The audience would have a style stereotypes as 'grunge' or 'indie' , and would hobbies musically orientated. We believe that we can attract the target to music video, by the storyline, and the actors are teenagers dressed in the same our audience would dress. Our main way of connecting to our audience is by filming in London which to most would be seen as Europes cultural hub. As we have created a performance and narrative music video we believe this will mean our audience will have a deeper relationship with the band if the wish to see them live or have seen them live.
Music videos use quick cuts to keep the audience entertained throughout the music video, this conforms to Blumler and Katz Uses and Gratifications Theory which suggests that audiences of media texts must be INFROMED, ENTERTAINED, allowed opportunities for SOCIALISING , a chance to attain a PERSONAL IDENTITY and being able to ESCAPE. We believe we have managed to do this with our music video as we allow for all of these criteria, we entertain the audience by using different shots of our characters and we offer a story that will be recognizable to our target audience, the story also allows the audience to escape. As our music video is not just a narrative music video, it is performance the audience will be able to escape as they will be able to see how the band perform.
Looking at examples of digipaks, the general conventions that are used is to advertise the artist and their music. Rihanna's digipak is filled with both images of her and the name of all of her songs and the album, the name is clearly presented it shows the name of the album 'Loud'. This is used to promote the artist and increase sales figures. Our digipak features the name of the band, the artists, photos of band members, a small bio, reviews, track lists and a bonus behind the scenes dvd. We think that this will give the audience more than enough extra material and they will form a relationship with the band. Our fictional band is called 'Sinful Agenda' and the album is called 'Facing the Insecure'. The colours of our digipak and advert are black, grey, white and yellow which all contrast and represent the dark sombre lyrics presented in our music video. The blacks are used to represent the dark meaning of their songs while the brighter yellows and whites represent the up beat tempo of their songs. To give the audience more we incorporated a silhouette of the band members heads with their signatures underneath them, this is another way of promoting the band as the audience can identify with each of the band members.
Our music video is one that uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products. For our song we chose You Me At Six - Fireworks, this song is of the rock / pop genre, expressed through its high tempo but sombre lyrics often expressing betrayal and anger. To conform to the 'sound' of the song in our music video, we centred the main plot around two couples involving the same girl and how she has cheated on her previous boyfriend, and has started a new relationship with her lover. We believe that this conforms to the song we have chosen as we have centred the song around a specific lyric; "when you're sleeping in someone elses bed". Looking at other media products of the same genre we found that the shots involved include, close ups, upward pans and tracking to show how the relationships in the stories are coming to an end, making it easier for the audience to relate with the story. We conformed with these general conventions of music videos of the same genre by including shots and angles that show intimacy and infatuation.
Our genre signifiers include the style of the band, which is similar to the audiences sense of style, their hair and clothing, by dressing the band in this way, as producers we are able to to encode to the audience that the band is of the similar style to them. As we used a black and white colour for one of the relationships with a vignette which was created in Final Cut, by utilising colour to our advantage it will mean that the audience will be able to subconsciously decode that that is the past relationship, also this will make it easier for the audience to distinguish between the two relationships in the, one in colour one in black and white. In our music video we created an animation to give it a new dimension of viewing, we did this by using the same plot as the rest of the music video, this means that the audience will identify the two stories as the same, this ties in with our preferred reading, as we hope the animation will appear as 'cute' to the audience.
Our music video has four elements within them; narrative, performance, continuity and montage filming. We incorporated narrative filming, by selecting a story, the relationships within the music video, we decide to show these relationships in the same with the same locations and mise-en-scene but using different male characters in each shots. For the narrative shots we used clips short in length as they presented arguing and shouting. But for the performance parts of our music video we used quick cuts and pans of the lead singer, along with close ups of the band. We placed the band in the mise-en-scene of a garage to show that they are practising again this can be subconsciously decoded by the audience. By cross cutting between a performance and narrative we are able to conform to Andrew Goodwin's theory that suggests music videos are devices to promote band and band members alike, our video most certainly does this, as we include lots of shots of the lead singer, and the fact that we use the lead singer as the lead protagonist in our narrative video sequence.
We also conformed to the stereotype that teenage relationships are based on lust and sex, we did this by including clips of the couple in bed, arguing and intimate exchanges of emotion between the couples. We used Laura Mulvey's theory of the virgin/whore dichotomy which outlines that women in media products are based on 'whores' or 'virigins', we chose to show our female as promiscuous, as she cheats on the male character. This challenges the hollywood view that male characters are the catalysts for break ups in on screen characters, but our music video challenges this with shots of of female character with another man.
This challenging of general conventions, also challenges the theory of the Male Gaze theory, again put forward by Laura Mulvey, that all media products are viewed through the eyes of a male, meaning the women is often demeaned in the media text. A video to contrast to ours in P.I.M.P - 50 cent which shows cars, bling and scantily dressed women which shows that men are in control of relationships but our music video we show the women as the dominant ones in the relationship.
Our target audience for this music video will be young people aged between 15-25, as the songs are about issues such as falling in love for the first time, infatuation, break ups and heartache. The audience would have a style stereotypes as 'grunge' or 'indie' , and would hobbies musically orientated. We believe that we can attract the target to music video, by the storyline, and the actors are teenagers dressed in the same our audience would dress. Our main way of connecting to our audience is by filming in London which to most would be seen as Europes cultural hub. As we have created a performance and narrative music video we believe this will mean our audience will have a deeper relationship with the band if the wish to see them live or have seen them live.
Music videos use quick cuts to keep the audience entertained throughout the music video, this conforms to Blumler and Katz Uses and Gratifications Theory which suggests that audiences of media texts must be INFROMED, ENTERTAINED, allowed opportunities for SOCIALISING , a chance to attain a PERSONAL IDENTITY and being able to ESCAPE. We believe we have managed to do this with our music video as we allow for all of these criteria, we entertain the audience by using different shots of our characters and we offer a story that will be recognizable to our target audience, the story also allows the audience to escape. As our music video is not just a narrative music video, it is performance the audience will be able to escape as they will be able to see how the band perform.
Looking at examples of digipaks, the general conventions that are used is to advertise the artist and their music. Rihanna's digipak is filled with both images of her and the name of all of her songs and the album, the name is clearly presented it shows the name of the album 'Loud'. This is used to promote the artist and increase sales figures. Our digipak features the name of the band, the artists, photos of band members, a small bio, reviews, track lists and a bonus behind the scenes dvd. We think that this will give the audience more than enough extra material and they will form a relationship with the band. Our fictional band is called 'Sinful Agenda' and the album is called 'Facing the Insecure'. The colours of our digipak and advert are black, grey, white and yellow which all contrast and represent the dark sombre lyrics presented in our music video. The blacks are used to represent the dark meaning of their songs while the brighter yellows and whites represent the up beat tempo of their songs. To give the audience more we incorporated a silhouette of the band members heads with their signatures underneath them, this is another way of promoting the band as the audience can identify with each of the band members.
We believe that both our digipak and digipak advert conform to general conventions as they both promote the band and their material, and by maintaining one theme throughout them the audience can immediately relate them to the bands music.
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