EVALUATION: QUESTION 1

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

The forms and conventions that are used in music videos are really important because every convention means something, Andrew Goodwin came up with the theory that music video's follow the music, meaning that all the camera shots are in time with the music and they change on the beat of the song, he also claimed that music video's use a lot of repetition because the chorus of the song always repeats throughout the song and because of this the shots that follow the lyrics will repeat as well.

He came up with three types of structures that a music video may follow, one was illustration which tells the story of the song, so if the song was really slow and emotional then the shots will transition quite slowly, the shots might also be in black and white to represent the mood of the song. Amplification is another structure that music videos may follow which adds more meaning to the music video for example it may follow the stereotypes of society for example in the majority of music video out there the women are almost always dismembered to show the audience the parts that they want to see as appose to their whole bodies. The last structure that is used in music videos is disjunction which is when the images on screen has absolutely nothing to do with the song or the mood, instead the images on screen might be trying to get across certain meanings to the audience that might not be present in the lyrics of the song.        

Andrew Goodwin states that most artists in our days break the fourth wall meaning that they always address the audience that they are singing to and they always acknowledge that they are there, they do this to make a link with the audience as a way of letting them know that they are cared about, some artists do actually care about there audience but some artists out there try and take advantage of there fans by constantly trying to convince them to buy their products, if you look at any of their twitter accounts you will see that in almost all of their tweets they are promoting their products but they don't actually say anything to their fans.

As a group we all decided to follow some of Goodwin's theory because we have chosen a really slow emotional song and as soon as we hear it we can imagine images on screen, so we know exactly what we wanted to do and what we wanted to send out to our audience, we also took the idea to break the fourth wall between our artist and the audience because because we wanted them to feel apart of our artists success because she is a rising star who is new to the industry so it is important that we make as many people like her as possible.

Carol Vernallis came up with the theory that edits are used in really obvious ways, which is very different from the thriller opening that we did last year, the reason that effects are used differently is because the aim of the video is to promote the artist as well as her image and to do that you need to make the audience remember her, so as a ploy to try and do this they make their music videos look as cool as possible throwing in as many effects that they can without going overboard. She also states that jump cuts are the most used effects because they are the best way to transition between the imagery.

We also followed some aspects of this theory because we also used quite obvious effects to make our music video look quite attractive to make the audience like our artist because the main purpose of the video is to promote the artist and the artist image, because we are trying to make our audience want to buy her album when it is released. In our music video we used a number of jump cuts much like Carol Vernallis but at the same time we thought it appropriate to use some match cuts to vary the editing up a bit.

I also chose to follow most of the conventions in my ancillary work for example i made clear links between my music video and the digipak so that when the audience see my products they will know straight away that they are all linked together and they are all from the same artist, it is really important that all of the products share conventions because the aim of this was to make the audience fall in love with our artist so that they would want to buy her work.

As a group we all watched "Nothing compares to you" by sinaed O Conner, we did this because we liked the way that her emotion led up to the climax of the song where she eventually started to cry towards the end, we also took inspiration from the way that the camera was positioned in the centre making sure that all eyes were on the performer which is really important because in our music video we did the same because in all the close ups we made sure that our artist was always in the centre because we knew that our aim was to promote the artist and the artist image.