1) The document discusses a music promotion package created for a soul music band called AKS that includes a music video, digipak, and website. 2) The music video uses conventions of the soul music genre like soft lighting, narratives about love and relationships, and close-ups to convey emotion. It challenges conventions by depicting the relationship between a transgender son and his accepting mother. 3) Symbols like a pinwheel placed subtly in the video bring awareness to issues like child abuse affecting the transgender community in Pakistan. The video aims to highlight gender identity and child abuse issues through its narrative.

1. CRITICAL EVALUATION Q1
By Shahrukh Yousaf

2. How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or
issues?
Ans. For our Advanced Media Portfolio we created a Music Promotion Package for a Soul Music Band
‘AKS’. This Promotion Package includes a Music Video, Digipak and a Website for the band. Our music
video has a linear narrative and was a hybrid between performance, narrative and concepts. For the
digipak we made a front page, inlay, CD and a back cover. The website that we made was using WIX
and had several different pages such as Home, Music, Bio, Contact, Shop and Tour.
The genre for our music video ‘SOUL’. Soul music was the combination of R&B and jazz. Soul music is
very common and it lends itself to many emotions. The tone is very smooth and gentle which helps in
expressing those emotions. Repetition plays a major role in soul music. A variety of instruments are
used together in soul music such as a guitar, piano drums etc.
To understand our genre better I did research on it and looked at the many codes and conventions of
soul music. We looked at music videos specifically based on this particular genre which were Love me
now by John Legend, I'm not the only one by Sam Smith and Hello by Adele. Some of the many codes
and conventions that we looked at were that in almost all of the videos and those were that they had:
• Very soft lighting
• Colors are used to show sense of reality
• Videos are aimed at younger generations
• Medium Close ups and Close ups will be used to show emotions
• Most of the music videos have a narrative or our concept based

3. We discussed how to portray these codes and conventions and in what way we could
challenge them. One of the most important convention followed by every Soul music
artist is that in the videos a concept and a narrative is being shown and the video is
about loving someone and caring about that person. These two people can be anyone
for example husband and wife (as seen in John Legends music video), a mother and a
son or between any two people.
Our video follows the same convention of showing love in the video and showing a strong
relationship between the son and the mother and shows how the mother accepts the
gender of her child.

4. Another convention that we followed was the use of Medium close ups and Close ups to
show the emotions of the characters and by looking clearly at the emotions the audience
can feel what they are going through and can relate very easily.
Soul music artists are mainly shown wearing casual or semi-formal clothing. The artists
in our video follow these same conventions and both wear white shirts but one wear
formal black pants underneath and one is wearing black jeans and scarf. No makeup was
done as it looked more natural and the lighting made them look better. To show the
artists Medium Long shots or Medium Close ups are used and we have also used these
type of shots.

5. Another key convention that videos based on this genre
have that there are symbols which have a very significant
meaning. Different videos have different symbols and
sometimes they are out of the focus but still hold
immense importance. In our music as we were already
focusing on intersexuality we wanted to show how child
abuse is also increasing but we decided to keep in
minimal. We researched and found out that the symbol
for child abuse is a pinwheel and decided to place a
pinwheel somewhere in the video where it wouldn’t be
prominent but still shows that child abuse is something
that we should prevent. We placed the pinwheel in the
bag that our protagonist is packing when he decides to
leave the house with his mother.

6. Recent studies show that Approximately 20 million children in our country needed attention from
mental health practitioners. This is why it becomes so critical to raise awareness.
Locations play an important role in telling the narrative. After looking at the videos we decided
that our video would be shot at a home as the narrative demands it and it gave the audience a
more sense of reality.
With the help of the narrative and the concepts in our music video we wanted to highlight an issue
targeting a specific social group in Pakistan; Child Abuse and Gender Identity/ Being transgender.
In our society transgenders are those people who enjoy the least amount of respect or rights
in Pakistan, due to the controversial Nature and typical mindset of people. Transgenders are not
considered a part of the community. 2% of Pakistan’s population is affected by transgenderism.
Many Pakistani families become aggressive towards them therefore resulting in child abuse which
is another issue highlighted in this video through placing a pinwheel (symbol for child abuse).
Our male protagonist brings these issues forward as he is shown confused about his own gender.
But we showed that the mother is completely fine with him being a transgender. This eliminates
the stereotypical factor from the mothers nature and shows that she cares about her child no
matter what his gender is. However the father is against it and beats the kid and is shown
dominant which most men in Pakistan tend to be as that is what the society demands from them.