Evaluation Question 1 : By Daniel Morton

1) How does your media product use, develop and challenge the conventions of real media products?

In comparison to other real media products, our Music video both develops and challenges the ideal conventions. This is because, despite only being 8 principles as suggested in Goodwin’s Theory, music videos heavily vary dependant on genre and the style of artist within them.
Not all of the points proposed in Goodwin’s theory were relevant, and therefore not used, during the production of our music video.
However we did attempt to use some of them to help with the process, the key points we focussed on included:

- The Link Between the lyrics and visuals, we did this by :

• Using specific shots where people held up placards with the lyrics written on them.

- The Link Between the music and the visuals, we did this by:

• Making sure that the band shots fitted with the music as it was playing in the background.

- Genre characteristics, we did this by:

• Making sure that the shots we filmed would fit in with the general conventions of a pop/punk music video. This ensured that the video looked more official.

- Narrative based, concept based or performance based music videos, we did this by:

• We mainly used performance based shots, which included many different shots taken of the band playing the song. This was done because it is more conventional with this genre/style of music. However we also used some concept based shots with the placards.

We stuck to these key conventions because it helped make the video more official looking and therefore maybe recognisable as a real media product. We developed an idea used by The American Rejects song “Dirty Little Secret” which has shots of different people holding up placards with their supposed secrets on. We liked this idea and therefore chose to use it in our own way, however instead of the secrets written on them we chose to place important lyrics from the song. We then edited these shots in time with the music so that the people holding the placards were shown in time with music so that people could read the lyrics as they were sung. This therefore linked the lyrics with the visuals, which is one of Goodwin’s points.
Other similar conventions used in pop/punk music videos would include the shot types, and very often within band performance videos, many close ups of the band playing their separate instruments are used, to collaborate with and develop this idea we used a wide variety of different close ups. This included shots of the singer at the microphone, the guitars during the solo, and the drums during key parts in the song.

We focussed heavily on the genre characteristics of the artist so that we could incorporate similar ideas into our music video. After doing research into other real media products we noticed that similar pop/punk artists used a mixture of both narrative and band performance shots. Therefore we had planned to use a similar mixture within our own video. However due to complications we were unable to film any narrative parts and therefore our video ended up having to be solely performance based. We took into consideration that having a completely performance based video would get tedious for the audience watching and therefore added some concept based shots, the placards.

Also we noticed how similar artists had very fast cuts in between different shots and to make our own video effective we had to do the same, because at first with slow longer shots of the band the video seemed really boring and took forever to get interesting, we had to change this.