Evaluation: QUESTION ONE

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge the Forms and Conventions of Real Media Texts?

'You need to have both narrative and performance, a star image, images that relate to the song and technical aspects of music videos.' - Andrew Goodwin. 

Our media product that we were asked to create was a music video. Music videos generally, as a whole, has many forms and conventions, and for every genre of music these altar. Not only is it genre's that makes music videos forms and conventions altar, it is also the time period. Culture has a massive influence on a music video, making them get bigger, bolder and much more expensive, when the demand for the music videos boomed in the 1980's, when artist such as Bon Jovi put all their time into creating something memorable. Youtube.com and music channels such as MTV and 4music has made music videos grow in demand, with most artists relying on the quality of their music video just as much as their music to increase their popularity. Most artists also hire in certain directors, who brand in their own sort of style to a music video, making their work individual but also noticably similar to the other work they film.

We wanted to choose a music video that had an appealing genre to a wide range of people. Asking around and doing some research, we decided that Hiphop/RnB is probably the most popular genre of music that attracts the youth of today. Because of the amount of people in our group we thought it would only be fair to include all of us, which also enables us to do as much work as one another, so we wanted to choose a song that was sung by 4 members. The band that we chose to base our theme and style around was 'The Black Eyed Peas'. Black Eyes Peas started off as a hip hop kind of band, who have gradually turned more dance and techno in recent years, obviously trying to reach out to a wider/different fan base, that is now growing and mainly Japan. We wanted to focus quite a lot on the performance in our music video as TBEP (The Black Eyes Peas) have a habit of performing a lot in their own music videos, performing straight to the camera, sometimes solely and sometimes as a group, which i think we varied quite well through out our own music video.
In the studio we used a variety of shots, ranging from close ups, to mid shots. Low angles were used, especially with Troy, to make them seem dominating, as TBEP are quite a confident and up front band as it is. The lack of story line in the lyrics meant that we couldn't particularly film a clear narrative, and although we have a few walking scenes in our music video, there is a lack of understanding as to where Sam and Troy are actually walking to, so i think if my group and I were ever to film something similar to this again, we would have to make sure our narrative was clearer.

I think we stuck quite closely to the RnB genre sort of video, of mainly performance and quick cutting to the beat, similar to Jason Derulo's video found to the left, however his video features a lot more narrative than ours, which makes us remember, just because an artists music is classed as a certain genre does not necessarily mean that they have to follow the conventions of music videos that are often used for that certain genre. For example, the text that was used in 'All Of The Lights' by Rihanna, Kanye West and Kid Cudi you don't see that often, especially in such a fluorescent form, things like this are often found my in the genres of music such as dance/techno, which is why we intertwined similar ideas into our music video. As even though TBEP started off being quite RnB, they are gradually altering their genre in music to follow what is becoming more popular, adding drum and bass and autotuning their voices to sound more techno.

Most of the shots that were used is ensuring that we focus on each artist, as we are aiming to make this seem like the first music video that the band is done, so it is an introduction of characters, similar to the digipak and magazine, where we are all the main focus. the characters being the main focus of the video, digipak and magazine advert is similar to the promotion of artists shown in the genre of 'Pop', where is seem what is more important is that of the appearance of that artist and how appealing they are to the public, rather than the quality of the music so much. However in most cases, a music video is to draw in more of an audience and it is used as a marketing opportunity for the artists album.

Overall, I think we have intertwined the conventions of a variety of different genres into our music video, however overall, using:
- Studio Performance
- Narrative Performance
- Textual References
- Overlays and effects
we have managed to produce quite a developed and stereotypical music video, edited effectively to the beat to show of certain scenes and making it interesting. If we had had a slow video, in comparison to the constant changing beat of the song, it wouldn't obtain the audiences interest and even if there was good shots and plenty of editing in there, it would seem quite lazy and lifeless, whereas i think with our music video we have captured a lot of movement which allows the audiences attention to be continually captured.