2. For our A2 media course this year, my group and I have
been given a task to produce a music video to a song of our
choice, along with a DIGI Pack which had to consist of a
Magazine Advert to advertise the release of the artists
album and a CD Cover along with its inlays. The artist and
song we chose to do, was ‘when you’re gone’ by Avril
Lavigne. In order to have these tasks come out successfully,
we had to make sure that we are following the right codes
and conventions of Avril’s original music video.
By doing this, before we began to do any
production work we decided to go into deep
research of the ‘pop-rock’ genre. We looked at a
few amount of music video’s from artists such as
Taylor Swift, Pink and Florence and The Machine.
By doing this, we gained a clear understanding of
the genre and what codes and conventions to follow
and most importantly we learned what we would
find in these music videos within this genre.

3. When we picked our storyline, we straight away broke Avril’s
storyline in ‘when you’re gone’ since we picked only one story to
work on while Avril had about three in her music video. Our story
flows throughout our music video, and we chose our theme to be
‘cheating & heartbreaking’. We looked at different camera angles
and took a very close look on how they’re used to create an effect
in the music video. In the end, we chose to stick with the camera
angles that were continuously used in the original music video to
not break the conventions and to mainly create an effect.
My group and I decided to break away from the
conventions in Avril’s storyline, and make our story
a bit more unique. Since in heartbreaking stories in
most music videos, if it comes for anyone to pass
away, from a short amount of research we have
gathered it always turned out that its a female
character that happens to die. Therefore we
decided to break away from these conventions and
kill our male character instead of the female.

4. The story we thought to do, was about a young couple who were engaged
but the boy is secretly cheating on his fiancée with another girl. The story
throughout the music video is shown, from the beginning of the girls reaction
when she finds out he is cheating, till the part where she finds out till the very
end where the accident is happening and the boy gets ran over by a car and
passes away. We felt that we had to use different types of shots, such as low
angle ones in order to show specific scenes. We wanted the audience to have a
clear view of what were trying to portray.
Ours.
Avril’s.
The narratives in Avril’s original music video is about a husband and wife, being apart
from each other because he left to join the army, and she seems to be expecting a child
and she’s afraid her husband won’t get to see the child. Through out the music video the
wife is really worried while watching the news, because she doesn’t know if her husband’s
alive or not. The second story is about a teenage couple who are really in love, but are
torn away from each other because the girl’s mother does not agree with them being
together, throughout the music video it is shown how much the girl misses him. The final
story, is about an elder man who holds a picture of his deceased wife, and shows how
much he misses the moments the two have spent with each other.

5. Challenging codes and conventions.
Since long shots aren’t usually used in pop-rock music When we looked at
videos, we decided to challenge some of the shots we Avril’s music video, we
decided to use in the music video. noticed that she only
had a single long shot
Possibly breaking this convention, had given us a positive throughout the whole
outcome which my group and I did not expect. We were music video. Therefore
very pleased with the outcome that we got and were we decided to add a
happy that we decided to break this convention from the few from the same shot
original music video. to our music video.

6. In this following shot, the facial
These are 3 shot types that my group and I have expression I have, shows that I
used in our music video. This shows that we have am not giving away of how I am
filmed at different angles, and moved the camera feeling therefore leaving the
around in order to create different variation of audience surprised when they
shots. find out the main point of our
story. We choose to create
different type of angles in order
to create an effect for the music
video, to show the sense of
feeling sad and lonely which
worked out quite well for us,
after we decided to follow this
feature.

7. Avril uses this shot mid way through her music video. First time we took a look at
her music video, we didn’t have anything in mind yet of how our music video is
going to start since we found ourselves to busy concentrating on developing our
narrative. Since we didn’t want to move away from our performance location, we
wanted our music video to begin somewhere outdoors around our performance
location. When we saw this shot in Avril’s original music video, we decided that we
will use something similar, to not break any of the conventions.

8. My group and I decided to include a house in our music video, similar to the one in
the original music video, therefore we wouldn’t be breaking any conventions.
By using this house, it matches the
conventions being shown in the original
music video. As you can see, Avril is
wearing a white dress in the original music
video, therefore for our music video we
wanted our artist to wear something
similar to show innocence and purity, like
the message Avril is trying to portray.