A2 Media Evaluation Question 1

1. Evaluation Question 1
How does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?

2. What is our product?
▪ Our media product is composed of a music video for the Queen song
“I want to break free” as well as an accompanying digipak. Due to the
age of the song, we decided the best way to create this product
would be to modernize the music video and its themes.
▪ The original video contained three segments, a drag scene, a
reference scene and a contemporary dance scene.We included these
in our own video but chose to use our own twist using modern events
such as the current political landscape, sexuality acceptance etc.

3. Use of conventions
▪ We used several conventions of music videos in our own product.
One such use was using lyric to imagery, where the lyrics of the song
matched what was occurring in the video.The lyric “I want to break
free” occurred as a scene involving a character in detention breaking
out dressed in drag.
▪ We made a point of including a positive message to our viewers, as
we saw that this was another common theme of music videos. Often
a strong positive political or personal message and we included this
in our video to adhere to a convention of real media products.

4. Development of conventions
▪ We developed the conventions of music videos by modernising the
issues explored in our own product. Sexual orientation, race,
ethnicity, politics and activity preferences were all themes we looked
at due to their role in current society.
▪ The most obvious of these developments came in our reference
segment of the video, where we made references to various political
controversies such as Brexit in the UK and DonaldTrump being
elected US president. We felt this made the video unique to modern
times which we saw as essential in establishing an understanding
between prosumers and consumers.

5. Challenge of conventions
▪ While we used and developed the conventions we also challenged
some of the conventions of real media products.
▪ For example, rather than using females as predominant characters
and epitomising the ‘male gaze’ theory of Laura Mulvey, we used an
almost entirely all-male cast. Any females in the video were
secondary characters although we had male cast members
performing in stereotypically feminine roles.The key example of this
was our drag segment, paying homage to the original Queen video
but still deviating heavily from many other real media products.
▪ This deviated heavily to many music videos which tend to seem to
rely attractive girls performing in main roles to catch attention.