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

In what ways does your media product USE forms and conventions of real media products?

This video displays where in existing texts you can find some on the ideas or themes we used. Although all of the videos may not be specifically from the indie genre a lot of music video conventions are transferable across genres. You will also notice that we haven't copied them exactly, well obviously cause then it wouldn't be our video! But we did note that it's important to draw good ideas from other videos into your own as long as you put your own 'mark' on it so to say. These are all technical codes as it's all about editing, below I have written about how these techniques may be decoded by the audience (because this is what we intended when encoding them)

• Jump cuts - We used this editing technique to symbolise the passing of time and to represent him drinking his sorrows in a more humorous than serious way
• Slow motion - This editing technique was put in to make the flow of emotion happier after the believed sadness of the phone call of him expressing his love etc.. and to give the representation of the moment going slow for the girl after realising that her and Ash, the main character, were meant to be together. 
• Use of props - We really like the 'I <3 you' sign that is used in taylor swifts video and wanted to see if we could integrate this into our own work. We also wanted like a common symbol that would be used more than once in the video to create continuity. We also used this as the <3 is symbolic of love and the sign may also create connotations of love letters. This is known as symbolic coding and is used to present the audience with symbols to decode to achieve specific results
• Slow motion animation - This was used in our video as its becoming an Internet sensation! I personally have been fascinated by stop motion for some time and so always wanted to incorporate it in my work but when 'lyric videos' started to appear online in which lyrics and animations were displayed on screen using a set of stop motion clips I thought we'd be able to use it as well! So because it was becoming popular and is fairly modern we thought it a good idea to include it.

When looking at other videos I thought about how much time can sometimes be shown in as little as 2 minutes. I think this is a great feature of music videos and decided to look into it some more. I found a theory by Bordwell and Thompson that said with moving image there are often 3 different durations; story, plot and screen. In context of our video the screen duration is around 3 minutes, the plot duration could be a weekend or a single day and the story duration will have stretched to however long the couple were going out. This would be quite typical time frames for similar music videos and so this is another way we've kept to conventions.

Another convention that we've kept is the story it's self. Ed Sheeran's song is quite lovey dovey and so the story needed to represent this and not have psycho killers with chainsaws as it just wouldn't fit the genre. Instead we needed to convey a happy story. We obviously didn't do this from the start as that would be silly and the video would be boring and make people want to puke. What we actually decided to do was signify a break up the whole way through until pretty much the last few seconds in which the audience would see the happy ending. One of the main reasons for doing this is because an audience pleasure in music videos is escapism from the real world, this means the audience don't want to be left with tears in their eyes but smiling.

Something that people tend to not think too much about is the actors in the video. An extremely important convention in my eyes is to use quite attractive and desirable actors as, to put it simply, people don't want to watch ugly people. The audience will want to see people in the video that they can relate to but then also that they can aspire to be like. This is especially true with our target audience being around student again as they are influenced significantly by the media and so want respectable role models.

In what ways does your media product DEVELOP forms and conventions of real media products?

We looked into some ideas that may not actually be in music video's but in other moving images and then touched upon in music video's. An example of this is the cross dissolve that we use here..

We couldn't actually find like an exact example of this is any music video's that we had watched BUT we did see simplified versions that we developed on to get this as a result. We used this effect to signify past and present and the transition between them as this technique represents the passing of time. Removing the girl from the shot shows that the boy is now alone and represents their break-up.

Although we used the idea of the slow motion animation in how we used forms and conventions it can also go with the idea that we developed them. This is because you will normally see a video with pure animation or pure narrative/performance, not normally a mixture of the two. We decided to merge the two just to see what it looked like and to see if it worked and we and our audience believe it does. Having the animation between some of the narrative splits the video up and gives its more visual dynamics. We needed something to split up our narrative as we decided not to include any performance in the video and didn't want to bore the audience with pure narrative.

In what ways does you media product CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

This is a major convention that we went against and we decided to do this because we followed in Ed Sheerans previous ideas. In Ed Sheerans first video 'The A Team' he used complete narrative and only appeared in it himself for about a second. This video was hugely popular gaining views to date. With Ed Sheeran not being in it there is obviously no lip syncing or performance. Although we did challenge this convention we did try to include an aspect of it by having Ash mouth the words for the 'voicemail' on the song. This wasn't meant to mimic lip syncing though and was meant to signify that these were the words he was saying to Claudia. 

I tried to think of more ways in which we would have challenged the conventions but then realised why would we have? Although in my opinion challenging conventions is an essential part of music videos or in fact any media texts developing you can't challenge them too much. People like familiarity, they sometimes like to know whats coming, which seems boring but its true. If you're watching a rom com film you want there to be a happy ending cause it's what you expect, you don't want them to both get run over and die. So in this respect challenging say one convention in a video is useful because if no one ever changed anything then everything would just be the same and never modify, but simple changes is what brings about new ideas and variety.