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

Our media product as a whole - the music video, the album cover and the website - use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of existing media products in a variety of ways which I will explain below. We followed and developed conventions in order to create authentic media products and we challenged some conventions in order to make them stand out.

Our Music Video
The purpose of a music video is to help promote the song and the album and also to create an image for an artist. Our music video is to 'Cry Me A River' which is a contemporary R&B song and it is AJ's debut single. Through the music video we want to show that AJ is recovering and moving on from a break-up, which is relatable to many people.

According to Simon Frith's theory of music videos, there are three main forms of music videos: Conceptual, Performance or Narrative. 

Forms of Music Videos

We applied this theory by having a combination of performance and narrative in our music video. 

Narrative
Our music video's narrative has a basic structure. AJ is looking back on his relationship with his girfriend which ended because she cheated on him and the song is about him expressing how he felt about it and how he is moving on. The narrative is set in the past and consists of fragments of his memory that have impacted him the most, for example the happy memories of when he was in love and also the painful memories of the arguments and the discovery that his girlfriend cheated on him. 

Carol Vernallis' theory states that music video narratives may be fragmented and make the structure of the music video disjointed. 

Our narrative scenes are placed in between the performance, in a similar way to James Arthur's music video to Safe Inside which can be seen below. In addition to this, James Arthur's music video's narrative is also based on past memories whilst the performance aspect all takes place in the present.

Vernallis also says that a narrative may pose questions that it doesn't answer and that there may not be a clear resolution. For example in Amy Winehouse's music video for Back to Black questions are raised from the beginning as the first narrative shot is of a group of people all dressed in black next to what seems to be a funeral hearse which raises questions like "Is that a funeral hearse?" and later as it becomes clear that it is a funeral the question of 'Who was it that died?' is raised. 

I feel that our narrative does raise questions such as 'Why does she cheat on AJ?' and 'Who is the other guy?'.

We also applied another part of Vernallis' theory in our narrative and this was discontinuous editing, which can be seen in our mini-montage when AJ's girlfriend is cheating with the other guy and also during the argument as we used jump cuts to create a disjointed, shaky style. 

Performance

I think that our video is more performance heavy than narrative as it contains a large amount of lip-sync and a few dance shots. Our main inspiration for our performance sections came from R&B artists such as Ne-Yo, Jason Derulo and Usher.  

This video is primarily performance which was really useful when looking at how to film and edit our performance sections. We noticed that different set-ups and costumes were used throughout and so we made sure to include a variety of set-ups, lighting and costumes as seen below.

In addition to this, we made sure to film AJ's lip-sync from different angles. This helped us to both show AJ as a strong, confident character when he was directly addressing the audience, but also we got to portray his more emotional, vulnerable side when he is looking off camera. In these shots we really tried to convey AJ's sadness through facial expressions and actions. 

Lip-syncs from the side and direct

Inspiration from Jason Derulo in 'Secret Love Song'

There was a lot of variety within these shots as we filmed with a range of different framing which can be seen below. 

 

Andrew Goodwin's theory suggests that there must be a link between the lyrics and the visuals of a song. We followed this theory in our music video by picking out certain lines and making sure AJ's actions match the lyrics or by making sure the narrative matches whats being said. Examples of this are the line "Why did you leave me all alone?" where we see the girl walk out on AJ and also the line "I found out from him" where we see AJ point to the shadow of the other guy. 

Genre

Goodwin also suggests that a music video must convey a sense of genre. We did this by following and developing R&B music video conventions. Below is a mind-map explaining how we used, developed and challenged conventions of the genre. Please press play in the top left hand corner to go through it. The speed of the presentation can be adjusted in the bottom right hand corner.

Our Website

Below is a prezi explaining how used forms and conventions in our website.

Our Album Cover

Below is an Emaze explaining how used, developed and challenged conventions in our album cover. 

In conclusion, I feel that we used and developed forms and conventions of the real media products we researched in order to successfully create a genuine product which also stands out due to the conventions we challenged, making it unique in comparison to what is already out there in the music industry.