1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. The use of conventions relating to genre is extremely important when creating any
form of media text such as a music video, a digipak or a magazine advert. Genre is
relevant to music as each genre has a set of conventions that are utilised within
promotional texts. For my set of texts, I was working in the genre of Indie Pop,
which includes artists such as James Bay (whose song we used for our music video),
Jake Bugg or Ben Howard. The main conventions usually consist of utilising the
main instruments that usually happens to be an acoustic guitar.
3. When researching the genre conventions of Indie Pop, I looked at many existing music videos to gain ideas
and knowledge of what to include within my media texts. One of the main conventions of this genre is
follow a performance narrative style of video that tells a story whilst featuring the lead singers themselves
lip syncing to the words of the music. We utilised this by having our video split into half performance, half
narrative with our story focusing on a broken love between two individuals. Another convention of this
genre is the editing style, which commonly includes flashbacks and filters on the overall project. We
incorporated flashbacks within our music video and changed the saturation to age these clips as we had
seen in existing media texts. We also applied a blue filter to the entire video, which again fits with the
genre conventions of Indie Pop.
When looking at ancillary texts, we again found that texts of this genre usually included a guitar within
their design. I decided against this in my texts as there was no use of the guitar in our video as the actor
could not play and it wouldn’t have worked to have him play an instrument he didn’t know and so I didn’t
include this in my texts. A convention I did include however was the use of an outdoor rural location which
for me was the woods.
4. The use of conventions aims to appeal to target
audiences who enjoy that genre. Following the
conventions can attract audiences to look at our media
texts as they are familiar with the conventions used
however its also good to sometimes challenge or ignore
certain conventions as it makes it new and interesting
as well as familiar.
These conventions that we have
included also follow that of Andrew
Goodwin’s theory, the first being the
obvious use of narrative and
performance. He decided that videos
should have a sense of repeatability
about them and that the artist acts as
both a performer and narrator which
makes the video feel more authentic.
The meaning of the song is also made
clear through the video as we clearly
illustrate a story within the song.
According to Goodwin, this is the most
common use of relating visuals to a
song. Finally, we used his theory of
thought beats and editing our video so
that it is cut to the beat such as the
bridge part of the song where we see a
flashback of the girl and boy on the
beach whilst she burns the memories
in a china pot.
5. Overall, we proved successful in
including these conventions in our
music video to attract a regular
audience of Indie Pop as well as
widening our audience through
challenging certain conventions and
following the theory of Andrew
Goodwin
