A2 Media Studies - Evaluation

By Jeta Kika, TahminaMiah, Numayna and Hafsa

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

• When we planned our music video we researched on the background of pop music to get a better understanding of the typical concepts of these genres. We found that artists in the video had an innocent look to them so that young people can relate to them. Bright colours are used the video creating happy thoughts and feelings.

• The main themes in the music are love and betrayal.

Our music video and ancillary texts follow the typical stereotypical pop genre, this is firstly because of the protagonist/model we throughout the products. To follow the conventions of pop genre, we intentionally used natural make-up, and causal but colourful outfits so that she looked like an everyday teenager. We want the protagonist to have a natural look. This included the hair suiting the natural complexion of the protagonist, the hairstyles being very laid back. Our target audience is teenage girls who might in the future or already have gone through a similar situation to our music video. To reach this target audience we made sure that the video was not overly glamorised so that it is relatable to out target audience. We made sure all actors in the music video were dressed very causally to portray the typical break-up. This is similar to Katy Perry’s music video for ‘part of me’, throughout the start of the video she has a neutral outfit and make-up on, she is also going through a break up in the video. Both Katy Perry’s video and our one share the same conventions in the way the main protagonists are portrayed. Looking at existing videos in our research we found that many female pop artists have a natural look so therefore we decided to also incorporate it.

Having a love storyline in pop videos is a typical convention there is a visible relationship between the female and the male. This is made evident through the music video of Carly Rae Jepsen – call me maybe. We showed the main protagonist to have two main colour contrasts to show times when she is unhappy and times within the music video where she is happy and is over the break up. This is shown through the greyish effect used in the music video when there are scenes in the past of her and her boyfriends, all the scene with this effect connote the unhappy emotions she is feeling, and the ones without an effect show her current state of mind where she is content with the break up. This then in shown through the ancillary texts as the chosen colours of the text are black and red as red signifies feelings of strong emotions like love and passion contrasted with the black text as it goes against the love and passion. Black indicating unhappy emotions. This links to our music video as the protagonist throughout the video is faced by these contrasting emotions there is times where she is happy and in love and others when she is upset and angry. In this case we subverted/challenged typical conventions of a music video as there are not any examples where effects have been used to show the change mood. We felt that this was an original take on using the effect to show meaning rather than using it just to make a video look good.

The image shows both models on the side of the page and text on the other side, this is a typical convention used in magazine averts. The way the text is structured and contains similar information like the date the album will be released on. Looking at existing album magazine advert we found that the main information being the date of the release, name of album and artist and networking where commonly a convention in the adverts.

The image of both album covers are similar in the ways that they are both close ups of the face. Also the background of both are the same this highlights that it is a typical feature of a music video. Also wear the text are places in the same way, the name of artist at the top and album name under it. However on our album cover we added two hearts one whole and one broken to link back to the contexts of the song in the album. This we found challenged the conventions of a album cover as it was not typically done, we where influenced by the meaning of the song.