Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Throughout the production of our three media, the music video, album cover and website for our Electropop artist we both conformed to and challenged typical conventions. We stuck to the essential conventions in order for our products to be accessible to our audience and gratify their needs, and to fulfill their purpose. However we also challenged some conventions in order to keep our products original and entertaining for our audience, especially as our artists genre is Electro-pop and so our audience are expecting authentic content.

First I am going to evaluate the use of conventions in our Music Video:

Below are slides outlining Andrew Goodwin's Music Video Theory.

Andrew Goodwin Music Video Theory from latymermedia

Genre Characteristics

I have created this mind map showing the genre characteristics of Electropop music videos and how we have conformed to or challenged these conventions in our own video:

Mind Map created by Latymer Media2015 with GoConqr

Relationships Between Lyrics, Music and Visuals

I have created this video to show when we linked the lyrics in the song with visuals within our video:

Visual Motifs, Inconography and Voyeurism

We stuck to Goodwin's convention by including some visual motifs and iconography within our video. We included a lot of close up beauty shots of Mira, and shots focusing on different parts of her body in a voyeuristic manner. We created a repeated section cutting quickly between close ups of Mira which is seen four times in the video:


via GIPHY

Goodwin states there is a need for lots of close ups of the artist and visual hooks and so we included this sequence to keep the audience hooked on the image of Mira and to focus on her styling.

Carol Vernallis on Narrative

The Kindest Cut- Functions and meanings of Music Video Editing on Editing

Carol Vernallis talks about conventions of music video editing and we conformed to most of these editing conventions:

1. "The narrative is not always complete- it may be a partial, fragmented narrative."

We followed this convention as our narrative opens in the middle of an argument between Mira and Jax which throws the audience straight into the action with a lack of explanation. 

via GIPHY

The ending of our video is also not entirely clear and although there appears to be some resolution when Jack finds Mira, the audience aren't given clear answers as to what happens.

via GIPHY

2. "The structure of the video may appear disjointed"

We followed this convention by breaking up our narrative shots with studio shots so that the narrative is not continuous. We did this to keep the video visually interesting for the viewer.

via GIPHY

3. "There may not always be a clear resolution at the end"

Our video breaks this convention to an extent as at the end of our video their is some sort of resolution when Jack and Mira find each other, however the viewer does not know whether Jack and Mira actually resolve their issues or not.

via GIPHY

Todorov's Narrative Theory

Todorov's Narrative theory states that a narrative has three stages, an original equilibrium, a disruption and finally a resolution resulting in a new equilibrium. Todorov's theory is normally applied to film narratives, however some music videos follow the theory in the narrative, for example Maroon 5- She Will be Loved:

Mind Map created by Latymer Media2015 with GoConqr

Our music video loosely follows Todorov's structure, however the disruption happens very early on in our video. . We took more inspiration from the Mount Kimbie- Carbonated video which focuses more on an abstract representation of an open ended journey and this inspired our long middle section which follows Mira and Jax's journeys.



This video inspired our structure of having a short disruption at the beginning of the video before showing Mira and Jacks journey to find each other for most of the video.

Carol Vernallis on Editing, Camera and Framing

The Kindest Cut- Functions and meanings of Music Video Editing on Editing

Carol Vernallis also identifies conventions of music video editing, camera work and framing, and below I have created a table showing if we have conformed to these editing conventions in our music video:

I have created a Prezi identifying the typical forms and conventions found in artists websites and how our website develops of challenges these conventions:

When creating our album cover we researched into existing album covers to identify the forms and conventions that are widely used. Below I have annotated the AlunaGeorge- Body Music album front and back cover to identify the forms and conventions:

Below I have created a slide show describing how we conformed to all the conventions of album covers:

Album cover conventions from latymermedia