Media A level work

1. I looked at the conventions of Slow Pop Music during my research because for
my filming I wanted to get it on point so people are able to identify it as a
Slow Pop video. I wanted my video to clearly represent my chosen genre so
the conventions my video includes are:
 Location (Staircase, Tank room, Park)
 Lighting (Soft, varying from dark to light)
 Character types (Stressed, Depressed and not looking her best)
 Props (Masks)
I also learnt that in soft pop songs its very common for them to represent
emotion and connection with an audience. I made sure I did this in my own
music video through my camera work with close ups of my actress looking
directly into the camera singing and the audience being able to see the
emotion for closely. Another convention of soft pop is back/side lighting and
shadows to create suspense, mystery and an emotional atmosphere which I
really wanted to use but couldn’t figure out how to. I think it would have
added more of an effect to my video as the lyrics were so meaningful.

2. Another convention I used was a lack of characters. This makes my actress the
main focal point and will make the audience want to find out more about this
individual. I think this convention is very powerful because the effect my
video will want to make on the audience will never disappear because its
about her and only her. Whereas if there were multiple people in it then the
effect will be lost because you’ll be watching a video about a number of
people going through the same thing and it wont really interest the audience
as much as it would being 1person.
Soft Pop music tend to have slow, and sad music throughout until it builds up
at the chorus. This is what made me be able to distinguish my chosen song
from regular pop to soft pop. This sort of sound can trigger the audience to
be emotional as the instruments used will have the audience on the edge and
even feel as if they are responsible for the actress. They also have Parallel
sounds which means the music is in sync with what’s going on in the video. I
did this by cutting my editing to the beat to keep the audience’s
concentration on the sound as well as the images.

3. The Mise-en-scene of Soft Pop music videos normally have a lack of colour or the
colours used are very dull and gloomy. I applied this convention to my own video by
filming it in places where light wasn’t much but was still able to give off a sense of
suspense. This was effective because the dark and gloominess works alongside the
lyrics so there is no need for a bright surrounding because it will ruin the emotion
needed to give out to the audience.

4. My target audience for my video was teenagers and above. I don’t think the
conventions I used clearly showed that this was my target audience, apart from my
lead singer/actress. So I think next time it will be smart of me to do more research
on how I can target that specific audience, and look at other music videos of this
same genre to the same audience.
At first most of my shots were in the park with a lot of brightness, this was before I
researched the type of lighting needed for soft pop music videos. So after putting it
all together, I had to delete a whole lot of those shots and re-film in the Tank Room
as I needed a dark atmosphere so that the visuals matched my lyrics seeing as it
wasn’t working before. My teacher pointed this out to me.