Evaluation - Question 1

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

My A2 coursework consisted of a combination of both group work alongside individual work.

My A2 brief was to re-create a music video which was at least up to 5 minutes long; followed by creating ancillary products in order to promote my artists.  For the ancillary products, I was asked to create a magazine advert and a digipak by using particular software such as Photoshop.  As a class we then got ourselves into groups of 4 to 5 people as it was a group project. My group consisted of Jagoda, Jamie and Lauren. As Lauren and I worked together last year on our AS media project, which was creating an opening sequence of a thriller; we thought that we would work well together this year as well to create a piece as successful as our first one was. Together we decided to pair up with Jamie and Jagoda as all 4 of us has a similar idea on what sort of genre we wanted to follow and what kind of music video we wanted to re-create.

My role within my group mainly consisted of filming and editing. However each of us had input of how to co-ordinate the mise-en-scene within the music video.  This consisted of us coming up with ideas of what locations would be effective to use and what costumes and iconography would be conventional to the pop genre.
As Jagoda and Jamie spent much of their time acting within the music video, Lauren and I were each taking turns filming in our own ways, so we both got to film and use the camera shots that we thought would look better. Therefore we got variety of different shots and from many different angles and when it came to editing we had a selection to choose from.

Overall, I feel that as a group we all worked very well together seeing as it was the first time us 4 came together to work as a team. From the beginning of our project it was very clear what everyone's strengths and weaknesses were seeing as we spoke about them as a group, then it was also mentioned who would be doing what within the production, therefore seeing as well all had our own allocated duties there were no confusions or disagreements on what everyone would be doing throughout the process. We regularly held very productive group meetings to take some time out in order to listen to everyone’s ideas and give everyone set jobs on what they need to work on. This included story boards, filming schedules and editing.

A music video is usually referred to as a 'short film' that is created for many different reasons. Some of these reasons consist of representing an artist, to attract a particular audience, to show conventions of the different music genre and to build a relationship with the artist. To me, a music video is something that is created to help the audience understand the song more. This represents Goodwin's theory as his theory mentions that lyrics said by an artist usually relate to what the audience can visually see on screen. 

As a group, the music genre we decided to follow was pop which stands for popular music. This just means that the music will be aimed at a more mainstream audience. We decided that this would be the best genre to use as it will be targeted at a broader audience and also we already have quite an understanding of the genre as all 4 of us in the group enjoy listening to it. Pop music videos have many codes and conventions.  Some of these codes and conventions consist of the artists coming across as happy and content with life. The song lyrics used within the pop genre normally  tend to be based around love or relationships and usually remain in a time limit between 3-5 minutes. An instrument used a lot in the pop genre usually consists of a guitar, therefore the artist we decided to do was James Arthur as he is very well known for winning X-factor in 2012. The song we decided to do was impossible and which is about love so the song and artist we chose convey generic conventions of the pop genre. 

We decided to re-create a music video to James Arthur’s song Impossible and overall I think our music video turned out to be quite successful. The music video we created was based around love and a relationship which conveys the generic conventions of the pop genre. Within the music video we show our artist, named Callum Blake singing in various locations as the performance aspect to our video. As for the narrative part of it, we decided to show a girl going through a box full of memories of her past relationship. Within the video we show flash backs of her and her boyfriend going from happy to breaking up. This was effective as it shows a breakup which is something that would intrigue our target audience. 

We used lots of interesting iconography to help our video look more effective. We used a pack of cards within our music video as significance to show the breakdown of the relationship. We showed many clips of the boy and girl both playing cards together and we shows a full view of a pyramid of cards. Towards the end we decided to burn the cards down within our music video to show the breakdown of the relationship. This was extremely effective. I believe that our Ancillary products turned out to be more successful than our music video as we spent so much time changing the music video narrative, so in result were very limited for time when filming our actual narrative for our music video. As for the ancillary products we spent a lot of time and effort creating our digipak and magazine adverts so therefore they turned out very successful.