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

A music video can be categorised in terms of style:

·      Performance – Band/artist featured

·      Narrative – includes story

·      Mixture – Both performance and narrative

·      Cameo – Band/artist feature in the narrative but doesn’t perform

To gain an understanding of the forms and conventions of chosen genre (romance) I did a lot of planning and research, particularly by looking at past music videos. For example Taylor Swifts ‘Mine’ (mixure), Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ (miture) and Benjamin Francis Leftwich’s ‘Atlas Hands’ music videos. Through this exercise I discovered key trends and patterns that demonstrate the romance genre, for instance montage scenes, sepia tones, pretty female protagonists, strong narrative lines and romantic scenes. These common key conventions inspired me to construct my storyboard. I also came to decision to use a narrative style on our music video as it proved to be successful and popular among our audience and the videos we deconstructed.

Here are some examples of my media product compared with real media products:

I am both a producer and audience member in the postmodern age; I want to challenge the norm. I then discussed with my production partner, Emma, about how we could do this and came up with the idea of subverting the narrative and characters characteristics. I would describe the narrative of my music video and a “twisted fairytale” – It starts with a classic once upon a time, but ends in a breakup, not a ‘happily ever after”. Are character selection also reflects our choice to challenge and subvert as our male protagonist, Steve, who falls under a quirky category or stereotype, however these characters rarely featured within media text, let alone as a protagonist who ‘gets the girl’. I observed the public to see what a quirky man might wear and act like and discovered some key trends; unbranded clothing, musically motivated, ‘pump’ shoes and unkempt appearance. I took this into consideration when casting our male protagonists and we ended up selecting Steve for the role. Hannah (female protagonist), however does conform to societies stereotypes. She falls under the label of ‘girl next door’, connoting a down-to-earth persona and natural appearance. Although I would argue that this is not a typical casting for a female protagonist, as normally you would expect to view a girly girl who is involved in her appearance, however we have chosen a less obvious or classic stereotype to feature in our music video as we wish to challenge our targets audiences perception about what a ‘real person’ is.

Our song choice is perhaps another subverting convention featured. Within media today there are very few re-released music videos, making our product unique as it challenges this as we attempt to ‘re-vamp’ and bring old classics back to life.

To conclude in order to create a successful media product I understand that there and key conventions that a producer must follow as the audience to read the genre correctly and with ease, however to challenge and add a fresh take on a genre is something that can better a product as it’s innovative material for the audience to digest and respond to. I wanted to create this effect with my media product and I would say I have been successful in doing so.