Evaluation Question 1

At the start of the school year, our teacher gave us the task of creating a media product. The teacher chose for us to do a music video, and two ancillary products.
The ancillary products that would go along with the music video are the digipak, and the magazine advert. This varied from our foundation portfolio, as throughout the creation of the thriller, we were told that we must follow conventions, however upon reaching the advanced portfolio, challenging the genre conventions was essential for us to become media producers as opposed to media consumers.

The purpose of a music video is to portray and express emotions in which an audience is supposed to feel due to the suggestions and expression a certain video is making. For example, if a music video is full of low key lighting, and is slow, with a depressing narrative, then it is very obvious that the music video is therefore meant to make you feel sad, unless it is diverse to its conventions. For example, that style music video that I just described may be put to an upbeat dance soundtrack, going completely against whatever a person may think when they see the video; therefore this would be breaking convention, and showing diversity within that chosen music genre.

A music video is something used to help as a selling product to an audience, and helps draw fans closer to their artist through the use of successful production and marketing. Music videos and their genres are broken down into different sections, as a dance video will undoubtedly be different to a rock video. This is where the real task came, as I tried to challenge the conventions of a pop/Indy music video. In order to do this, we tried splitting the artist from the narrative within the video. For example, in James Morrison’s “Broken Strings”, Morrison is shown performing within the narrative, and has evident emotional attachment to the other artist in the video. I felt that keeping the artist separate helped keep the purity of the artists image through not tarnishing his reputation at all through any negativity in a story line. I used the performance aspect as more of a reflection, therefore it may look like he is either looking back, or simply telling the story of the couple seen on screen in the narrative. This is how I challenged the convention, and I feel that this worked really well, as  it allowed more flexibility within the narrative that was ever changing.