Evaluation - Question 1

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

My group and I's finished music video uses and develops a lot of the conventions of a pop video. We have a lot of bright colours and high-key lighting throughout our video which is quite common in pop videos however, we have also challenged these conventions as towards the end the video it loses colour and our last few scenes are completely in black and white. 

 In our music video we have also followed the narrative of the song however we have interpreted it differently to how the original video did. Instead of looking at a passing love we looked at the friendship between three friends that then go down different paths and wanted it to give the affect of a fading memory. We thought that this worked very well for the video that we have chosen as we are all going to university as the end of the year. We tended to look at young girls for our music video as a lot of pop videos feature teenage/young adults who are female.
I think this will also help relate to our audience as they are mainly teenage girls and young adults, to see that in our video these are the kind of people we are featuring it will be relatable and i think will be received and interpreted in the way we wanted it to be.
With all of the different of places we went to for the video we saw lots of different cultures and people from completely different walks of life. I think that this will attract more people as they are able to look at the video as well rounded and isn't just based on one idea and one convention. 

Our attire throughout the video was constantly changing showing the passing of time and locations. In some of the more rural locations there was a different feel for the area than in the industrial areas as they are less tourist based and especially the shot of Jasmine sat alone started the video well and added a new interpretation of the video as she almost looked sad while she was alone. This gave the start of the video a bit more depth in my opinion as it is such a contrast from most of the other shots, there was also one similar of Paige when she was standing looking almost unfocused when we were in Rochester. At the end of the video all of the events that lead up to last couple of seconds of the song to show the suitcase scene.


All of the characters that we had in our video were different in their own way for example: Paige was almost a bit more reserved than Jasmine and my character as she was in a way more distant as a character. She also showed quite a stereotypical teenage girl as she wore fairly girly clothes and was always well presented. Jasmines character was pretty similar in what she wore but as a person she was more open and involved in being in front of the camera. I think my character was a mixture between the two as i wasn't quite so reserved but i wasn't as open as the other two. As a group we are quite unconventional as we are all very different from what we wear to how we present ourselves and act, but you could still see the friendship between us all in the video.

Although we focused on mainly teenage girls and gender in general we looked at the theory of 'the male gaze' by Laura Mulvey, this is the theory that the camera is shown through a mans perspective. This is why in the majority of music videos sexualise women as it is attractive to men and opens a wider audience instead of what just appeals to our main target audience. For example: Candy Man by Christina Aguilera. This video is every much based on women in a small amount of clothing dancing and performing for entertainment which is very typical of a pop video. As a group we didn't to sexualise our characters in anyway as the audience we are looking at and our age it is highly inappropriate to be short clothing that doesn't cover a lot. Also with the time of year that we filmed in this type of clothing was unpractical as the whether throughout was cold and was nearing winter. We were very lucky to not have any rain whilst filming as this wouldn't have worked with the lighting or setting of our video.


We used a lot of wide shots and close-ups throughout as we wanted to get up close and personal with the characters and their emotions in the video. Also we used quite a few wide shots because we wanted to show the background as well as the characters to emphasise when we had changed location and time of day. At times our lighting didn't work as well as we may have liked it to but we found Final cut very helpful when editing any imperfections we found. We did find that after we had placed most of our filming in to our filming that we had to go back through and re colour all of our shots as they were too raw and natural. At the time we didn't understand why we needed to do this as it was feedback that we had received on multiple occasions so decided to go through with it. When we had finished editing the colour we could definitely see what our audience was saying as this made a massive difference to our video and helped link our shots a lot better as it made our day to night theme flow a lot more smoothly.

Stereotypes are heavily emphasised by the media and are generally unrealistic as a very small minority of people actually fit into these categories. We wanted to show this in our video, as all of our characters are happy and generally full of life whereas the main stereotypes of teenagers are moody, lazy, disrespectful etc. We wanted to challenge this as teenagers ourselves because although we can not speak for all people our age group, but mostly of the people we surround ourselves are actually productivity and look at life positively rather than being negative and upset all of the times. I myself can not understand a lot of these stereotypes as they are very pushed out of proportion and aren't any where near as bad as what the media continue to go on about.

To conclude, i personally wanted to show that not every convention and stereotype are as exact as they are made out to be, as i am quite a diverse person, i recognise there are some that are not motivated and would rather be lazy and not do much but there are plenty of people of all ages that are that way inclined. Our music video was to represent teenagers from a different perspective and not what we are forced to believe by the media as in a lot of cases that is not a reality. We developed some of conventions such as high-key lighting and colour but overall we wanted to challenge these conventions and interpret the lyrics in a different way than the way in which they were written.