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1. EvaluationQuestion 1
In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
The media products that I have created are a music video, digipak, and advert. I
chose to use the song ‘Heartbreak Girl’ by 5 Seconds Of Summer. Within these
products I have both followed and opposed genre conventions. The genre that I
have chosen, pop/punk/alternative, is a hybrid/subgenre. This has allowed me
to be much more flexible when looking at codes and conventions as it provides
me with a broader spectrum of options.
As I have six actors within my products that each have an individual style I have
used this to my advantage. I asked each actor to dress in their everyday clothing
in order to create a more diverse feel to a song that is usually stereotyped as
simply being ‘pop’. I did this to show that audiences don’t have to be limited to
just one style of music, people won’t be judged for liking contrasting genres.
There is a mixture of dark, light, and brightly coloured clothing as well as various
styles of jeans, jumpers, tops, and footwear. For example, through the video I
have the main actor wearing a pair of red straight-legged jeans, I felt that this
would serve as a staple piece of clothing for him throughout the video. By
choosing to keep a diverse range of clothing I have chosen not to stick to 5
Seconds Of Summer’s usual clothing style. Typically they would wear baseball
shirts, singlets and/or plaid shirts with skinny jeans. This has helped to turn my
video away from the typical overuse of the bands star image.
Various settings have been used within my music video for different parts of the
narrative. The band shots were all filmed indoors in a theatre to make the gig
scenes look more professional and realistic. When doing this I used the lighting
rigs to adjust the house lights as well as stand alone studio lights aimed at the
band. However, I also focussed on the instruments rather than the band in quite
a few of the shots. As for the narrative shots I filmed at; two different houses, a
bungalow, and at two separate outdoor locations. For these locations I tried to
film mostly during the day in order to use as much natural sunlight as possible,
rather than using prosthetic lighting. As I had to re-shoot these shots due to a
change in actress, I had a limited amount of time, and therefore had to film most
of these shots in the same day. Unfortunately because of time constraints, I had
to film the outdoors shots in snow, but I believe that this makes it look more
believable as a lot of music videos are set in perfect, sunny weather, which is not
always the case in real life. This footage has been used during the second verse,
mixed with some band shots.
A common aspect of pop/punk/alternative music videos is the camera focussing
on the band to artist through the use of close-ups and extreme close-ups. I have
done this within my own video as I felt that it was an important aspect of the
gene that is popular with my target audience. I have used some close-up
instrument shots to showcase the musician’s abilities and talent. I have also used
a few medium shots of the band to show both the skills of playing their chosen
instrument (drums, guitar, bass or vocals), such as during the last chorus of the

2. song, as well as the individuals themselves. Within the narrative sections of the
video I have included some close-ups and extreme close-ups of the lead singer
whom also plays the leads role in the narrative. An example of this is at the end
of the first chorus where the lead singer is singing ‘to’ the main actress, thought
you only see the singer in the shot. Rather than focus on the lead singer through
the performance shots I chose to make him the lead male character throughout
the narrative side of the footage, only using a few select performance shots.
One of the ways in which I have followed a genre convention is by having two
threads to the video, one being the narrative part of the video, the second being
the performance side of it. I felt that it was best to stick to this style of video as it
popular amongst, and expected by the pop/punk audience that this is aimed
towards. It is also a structure that I personally prefer to see within music videos
of any genre.
Throughout the video I continuously used Andrew Goodwin’s theory on the use
of thought beats to cut and edit the footage together so that the cuts matched up
with the beats of the music. I have kept most of the performance shots quite
shorts in contrast to making the narrative shots slightly longer. Bot of these
techniques are often used with real media products and are conventional
throughout many genres of music.