Bicycle Safety in Focus: Preventing Fatalities and Seeking Justice
Media Evaluation Question 1
1. Question 1: In what ways does
your media product use, develop
or challenge forms and
conventions of real media
products?
2. For a successful music video to be made it is
encouraged to follow certain codes and conventions.
In my music video, I made sure that I followed some
of the conventions of my genre and at least 3 of the
6 guidelines put forth by Andrew Goodwin. This
made my music video easily recognizable by the
target audience.
Andrew Goodwin’s guidelines to a music video are;
• Relationship between lyric and visuals
• Relationship between music and visuals
• Must demonstrate genre characteristics
• Reference to the notion of looking
• Voyeuristic treatment to the female body
• Intersexual references.
3. The genre of my music video is Emo Rock and the
song is ‘Crash’. In terms of the conventions of an
Emo-rock music video I used costume. The costume
of the band members and the costume of the
depressed girl fit perfectly with the genre of emo
rock.
4. Also the props used were also part of the emo rock convention. I used
pills that had depressed words hand written on them, paper with a
smile drawn on, a note to the audience telling the audience how the
girls feels “no one cares about me” was also part of the emo rock
convention and part of the idea of “emo” as a whole.
The note that says “no
one cares about me” is an
intersexual reference.
And it references the way
Amada Todd (suicide
victim) told the world her
story.
5. There was also a relationship between the music and the
visuals and that was established through the pace of the music
video. I used effects in Final Cut Pro to give some scenes as
shaky feel. I used the earthquake effect on the instrumental
scenes to give it a feel of chaos and that chaos communicated to
the audience that the band members are as unstable as the girl
in the video in a sense feel her pain. When editing the scenes
with the girl I changed the colour of the scene to highlight the fact
that it’s her story.
6. Throughout the music video I demonstrated the genre
characteristics. In any rock music video it is very music expected that
there is a performance scene. There are a lot of performance scenes
in my music video, however most of them where done in a studio
which also adds the conventions of an emo rock music video. There
are also close up of the lead singer but I made sure that the close ups
were very minimal because I wanted to make sure that it is expressed
to the audience that the band is more concerned about their music
than their image. So in other sense the band sells their music to their
audience and not themselves. This also reflects on the fact that they
target niche audiences.
8. My music video reference the nation of looking through the use of
mirrors. I made the girl tell her story by demonstrating suicidal
behaviours in front of a mirror like she’s asking the approval of
herself.
9. The notion of looking was also
reference through the girl
watching the band through her
laptop. The scene showed the
band playing through the screen
of her laptop.
That scene was also an
intersexual reference to
“knives and Pens” by “Black
Veil Brides” when the character
in the music video was
watching the band through his
laptop.
