Evaluation Task 1 // Music Video

In What Ways Do Your Media Products Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products? 

"Conventions are like a language, which when shared operate by means of conventions. They are often not written down but are hidden or unspoken rules that we learn to accept and recognise"

Music Video

A music video is one of the best way to promote an artist and a brand. As our video had a solo artist we decided to use close up shots of her which would make the audience get familiar with what she looks like. I did this with everything element that we had in our music video:

I decided to use a close up for each element to keep our music video consistent and makes the audience able to recognise her face. This also is good position for the eye to focus on her because it is using the rule of thirds so therefore the eye is drawn to her face and it makes the video look more artistic because its not an obvious head on shot of her face.

In my video I used a wide, mid, close and tracking shot for each element. So therefore we stuck to the normal conventions for a music video in terms of camera angles. However, we did try and make our tracking shots more interesting by moving the camera over her body or the dancers bodies instead of their faces which you would see in a typical video.

A music videos function is to promote a specific single (or album), promote an artist and creates a star image. We were promoting a solo artist so we would have close up of her and although we did have dancers we chose to have more shots of the singer so the audience can get familiar with her. I had her lip-syncing because this is a typical convention in music videos that we decided to stick to and not go against it. 

A video that is similar to ours in terms of shot angles is Selena Gomez's "Good For You' video. She has close ups, mid shots, wide shots and tracking shots. The only aspect that she doesn't have it the dancers. Selena's video is similar to ours because you can always see the face of the artist, although we did have dancers so we had to cut back to them often, every time we would see our artists she would be lip-syncing to the camera (which is a typical convention of music videos).

A convention that we included to give our video an extra element was adding a performance where we have a boy and girl dancer. I had them in each of our elements to match the singer however, they didn't lip-sync they only danced. 

Our video was loosely based around the film The Fifth Element so therefore we had symbolic projections of the elements. This helped to give our artist a very organic star image and make her look more indie then mainstream. 

Using just projections breaks the conventions of most music videos because most videos would only have a snippet of projections in the video but to challenge these conventions and to make them stand out against other videos of our genre. 

I made the video quite artistic to enable our artist to have a organic and original look to her. The genre of music also does not really lend its self to typical upbeat colourful videos so therefore I think that our video worked well with the genre and style of music. 

I used the conventional technical codes of camera angles, sound and framing it was our lighting that was more un-conventioal because our video was quite dark and mainly lit from the projections. 

Our video is the same length as most must if a bit shorter. So I don't think that it really challenges any conventions because most music videos are around 2:30-3mins long. 

Selena Gomez's video length:

Our Video length:

However, this article "Music Video Length" states that the ideal length of a video is 3-3:30mins long so if we were to analysis our video in terms of statistics then our video would challenge conventions because of how short it is. 

I found it hard to find a video like ours so therefore this may show that our video challenges conventions and is new and interesting just how we want our star image to be for our artist.