In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge the codes and conventions of real media products?

Question 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our A2 media project we were to produce not only a music video but also CD artwork for an accompanying album and a campaign poster. All three would fit together to form a promotional package.

Costume Performance
My group and I choose to kept the sporty causal convention in regards to the costume during our performance scenes. This look is used by most artists such as Maverick Sabre and Professor Green from the indie/soul genre. Our costume also uses and develops the convention of inner city locations and a general urban feel which are two key conventions of the indie/soul genre.

I felt it was important to use this costume convention rather than to challenge it as I feel challenging would have made this convention hard to recognise within our music video .
I feel our project would be more successful, and I feel it has been, if we used existing conventions from the indie-soul genre rather than challenge them or attempt to create new ones.



Costume Narrative
Similar to our performance costume we used a sporty casual style but kept it fashionable and within our genre conventions.

 We used a Berghaus windbreaker and trainers for the sporty and urban aspects of our performance and narrative costumes. We used  printed t-shirts and jeans for the casual, laid back aspect of costume and to show some aspects of our performers personality.

We kept are costume relatively the same throughout for coherency and to ensure our narrative and the journey our performer goes on is easy to follow. We also choose to keep our costume causal, so that it was easy for our audience to relate to our performer and our realistic narrative. The ability for our audience to relate to our performer and narrative is a key convention of the indie soul genre.

Location

We chose to use and challenge the location convention of the indie and soul genre. Like the original song 'Look What I've Done To You' and other Maverick Sabre songs we chose to film in inner city locations. As we live in Bristol, a large city, so finding and choosing a location that suited our genre and video was an easy process.

We chose to film in St Pauls and Kingswood. We used the St Pauls and St Werburghs locations to film majority of our performance shots and used our school in Kingswood for all of our narrative shots. Our choice of school location ties in with our target audience who 14-18 years old, living in the Untied Kingdom. The school location provides our target audience with another chance to relate to our artist and our narrative.


 In some aspects of our location we challenged the conventional locations of the indie and soul genre. Some of our performance and narrative was shot in a park within St Wurburghs. The park and natural location is very atypical for the indie genre and but I feel as our song is very emotional and meaningful, the park location supports the lyrics more than inner city locations. I feel the park location worked well within our video and the shots and our performer did not look out of place.

Narrative

Similar to most music video narratives of all genres, we used a relationship as the basis to our narrative for our music video. I feel we created a good balance between performance and narrative during our music video. My group and I chose to base our relationship narrative on both Andrew Goodwin's theory and Todorov narrative theory.

Our video consists of our performer(me) being in a happy relationship with another group member Yvette.

  

The relationship soon begins to break down and the performer is then caught with another girl. Yvette tries to distract herself from their problems by trying hard in college.Yvette (his girlfriend) begins to look in magazines at other good looking girls and becomes self-conscious. 

Will is filmed walking around aimlessly in inner city locations and several performance shots. Will attempts to talk about their relationship but Yvette ignores him. In the end both Will and Yvette go their separate ways.

Andrew Goodwins theory 'He says that music videos are often constructed by the link between the visuals and the song plus the artist'.

In relation to Goodwins theory, we took a direct approach towards our narrative and our lyrics. We used shots (two shot- to show a relationship or connection) like the one above to show and act out the lyrics of 'Look What I've Done'. This lyric and the title of the song is an extension of Yvette catching Will with another girl .We avoided the metaphorical approach to the lyrics because this wasn't a traditional convention for the indie-soul genre.



Todorovs narrative theory

• During screenings it was commented on by both peers and teachers that our narrative was difficult to understand due to the pace and the selection of our shots.
•  After re-filming, we made the narrative shots more frequent throughout our music and made the relationship more obvious to our audience. 
• Creativity wise, we used a fast paced cutting sequence to set the scene of our conventional narrative and equilibrium (Todorov).
• We used a slow paced cutting sequence during the distribution (Yvette catching me with another girl) of our equilibrium to ensure our audience were aware of what was happening.
• We used isolated performance shots of the performer (me) to show the recognition of the disruption.
• We used a two shot to show me and Yvette arguing and me attempting to make it up to her( An attempt to repair the damage).
• Finally we referred back to fast paced cutting sequence during the distribution being resolved and a new equilibrium being created (Me and Yvette getting back together or breaking up?). 
• We used our knowledge of editing within Premier Pro and Todorov’s narrative theory to create a conventional and effective love story narrative.

The artist and performer
The indie-soul genre is predominantly made of male artists like Maverick Sabre, Plan B and Ben Howard. With this in mid, we decided to use this convention of indie genre by using Will(me) as the performer for our video.

 My group and I decided to use me as the performer, as we felt my personality and general persona suited this genre better than other genres. Furthermore our group is made up of 2 girls and 1 boy so choosing the indie genre was a fairly straight forward process.
I feel using me as a performer worked well and I was able to perform in a professional and successful manner.






Lighting
In regards to lighting, we decided to use and challenge the lighting conventions of the indie-soul genre. Most videos use artificial lighting and sometimes extra artificial lighting during shots.

We challenged this by relying heavily on natural lighting for majority of shots. We decided to use outdoor locations and natural lighting as we felt it gave our video and lyrics a more meaningful feel.

Using natural lighting meant we didn't have to spend money buying artificial lighting and we didn't have spend time setting up artificial lighting when filming.
One negative to using natural lighting meant that there were different weather conditions in each shot. To cancel this out we used a grey colour tint during the post production process.

Camera Shots and Angles 
My group and I decided to use the conventions of the indie-soul genre in regards to camera shots and angles.
During our video obeyed certain media rules or expedites such as:

• The 180 degree rule 
• Match the action (Match on action)
• Considering framing at every point during the video.

 As our video was predominantly narrative we felt it was vital to use camera shots such as shot-reverse-shot. The use of shot-reverse-shot allowed us to portray a clear connection between me(performer) and Yvette, even a relationship.

Shot-reverse-shot











On this peculiar shot it was vital that we obeyed the 180 degree rule our video would have looked amateur and slightly strange. Furthermore the connection or relationship that we trying to create would have been hard to identify with.

Establishing shot
During our music video my group and I decided to use establishing shots for their traditional purpose to set the scene of a video, film or television programme.

Similar to how Maverick Sabre uses establishing shots in the original video, we have used establishing shots of inner city locations to set the main location of our video and to create an urban feel.










 




Two shot
 Similar to how we used shot-reverse shots (conventionally), we used a variety of two shots to create and emphasise a connection or a relationship between me and Yvette. We used certain shot types to assist our target audience in understanding our narrative and video in general. For example





We used two shots conventionally to create and emphasise a relationship between me and Yvette.

 Following Yvette catching me(performer) with another girl, we used isolated mid-shots of me and Yvette separated showing the problems in the relationship- and the fact that we are no longer together.

Close up
My group and I used close ups (conventionally) during our videos to show and emphasis the emotions of our performer. During these close ups, we also used direct address in an attempt to build a personal, intimate connection with our target audience.

Here we have presented a modern representation of men, as we have presented our performer to appear emotional and sensitive.
  

Editing
 My group and I edited our music video to ensure that there was a balance between performance and narrative.

During our music video, we did not use After Effects or effects within Premier Pro regularly. I used a colour tinting effect within Premier Pro to create a grey scale effect on the inner city shots as I feel it made our video more conventional and realistic.

We used a cross dissolving effect at the end to our video to create a fluent conclusion to our narrative and music video in general. We mainly tried to avoid using effects in either Photoshop, Premier Pro or After Effects as the regular use of the effects is not conventional for indie/ soul music videos or the genre in general.

To create and present our narrative, we used a fast paced cutting sequence to set the scene of our conventional narrative (Todorov). We used a slow paced cutting sequence during the distribution (Yvette catching me with another girl) of our equilibrium to ensure our audience were aware of what was happening. Finally we referred back to fast paced cutting sequence during the distribution being resolved (Me and Yvette getting back together or breaking up?). We used our knowledge of editing within Premier Pro and Todorov’s narrative theory to create a conventional and effective love story narrative.