Evaluation task 1 – In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before starting the production of our music video we had to research other media products Link: Digipak covers by similar artist  and develop it into our own ideas, either to adhering to a convention or if we wanted to go against it and the two specific element that is needed to make a music video is the performance and the narrative which could be connected to the song or not. But there are more specific conventions that will relate to the media product, Keith Negus argues that there are 13 common generic conventions of popular music some of them listed below.

• The explicit and unashamed promotion of the artist’s “image” (aesthetic/generic/ideological) as a specific product with a brand identity, ready for mass consumptions
• The featuring of the artist (almost without exception)
• A wide and extensive use of shot types, camera angles and movement

So to create our Pop video we will need a star image of the artist and a approximately 3 minutes long video, the use of many different camera angles: close-ups establishing shots etcetera. We will have to construct a narrative story, in our case the use of conventions seen in the movie stormbreaker (Link: Stormbreaker) but also connected to features of James Bond. A performance element must also be included often seeing the whole band with the focus on the singer, it will also include the construction of a mise en scene that will fit together with the track that in our case for example having suits and metro sexual hairstyles going back to the representation and conventions often seen in British James Bond movies. 

screen grabs from our music video

These conventions can then either be used or subverted to make the audience interested in the media product. We could either choose to give the audience the expected like cutting according to lip-sync and a regular cutting back and forth of performance and narrative shots. But we could also give the audience the unexpected by subverting the conventions, this is also what we did by instead of cutting back and forth between narrative and performance we decided to create a more film like narrative by having longer periods of narrative to introduce the audience to the actual movie and the synergy between the two products. We ensured this synergy by the use of green screen so that the narrative and performance were taking place on the same location this was later done in after affects. 

an example how a green screen can be set up