Thakshana's Media Blog: Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My three media products use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products in a variety of different ways, which I will be discussing in detail throughout this post.

Music Video

Band Identity

Created with Padlet

Simon Frith

In Simon Frith's theory, he believed that all music videos can be split into three different types of music videos:

We adhere to his theory as our music video falls under the two categories of narrative and performance, similar to other pop/r&b videos.

Performance

Genre Conventions

Similar music videos such as Fifth Harmony's 'Boss' and The Saturday's 'Higher' show how performance is used in a typical girl band pop music video. There is a variety of dance moves as well as lip syncing. This also fits in with Andrew Goodwin's theory that music videos demonstrate genre characteristics, and one of the main characteristic he found was that typical girl band videos include dance performance. We have therefore, used this convention.

Above is a snippet from our video
showcasing lip syncing and a dance routine.

Another genre convention we follow is fast-paced, disjointed editing. An editing technique that is commonly used in many music videos. I have provided an example of Pia Mia's 'Do it Again' where the editing is so fast it's almost garish for the audience but still works in context of the video.
I have also added an example of this technique used in our music video.

Challenging Goodwin

However, we also use, and to some extent challenge, one of Goodwin's conventions about 'the voyeuristic treatment of the female body'. This is a convention that is followed by many mainstream pop/r&b music videos where women are often sexualised and are used as 'visual props' throughout the video to attract the 'male gaze' and make it appeal more to their male audiences.

A really controversial example of this in recent times is Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines'. The video is basically a lot of scantily clad women dancing around him in a sexual nature. There was also a version of the video released on Vevo where the girl was actually topless as opposed to the censored, milder version that was uploaded onto YouTube.

Extract from article about the controversial nature of the song.

Even the meaning of the song was interpreted in many different ways and it received really negative feedback due to the connotations of 'rape'. An article released by The Guardian describes how certain student unions had to ban the song due to the implied connotations. This again, reinstates the point that music videos can be interpreted and maybe even misinterpreted in many different ways.

We adhere to this theory in the sense that we want the audience to watch the girls, however, in our music video, we purposely tried to avoid sexualising the girls in the band and broke a common convention by doing so. Instead, we tried to spread a positive message. One of the most important messages we wanted to convey through this music video is female empowerment. Therefore, we have sections in the music video, like the bit where the guys are serving us wine, which explicitly connotes that the female is in control.

Narrative

One of the biggest pop music videos that came out in 2015 was Taylor Swift's 'Blank Space'. This video has mainly narrative in it and has racked up over one billion views! The video is visually enticing with the audience hooked on the storyline and this video, similar to ours, in a way showcases a dominant female character.

We also have four narrative sections in our music video - one for each girl, showing each of them with their love interest. However, again, the girls are shown to have more power over the guys as they are controlling their every action, eg. pushing him away, pulling him in, placing a hat on his head etc.

In the narrative sections we also use Carol Venallis' theory that 'actions are not necessarily completed - they maybe disrupted or interrupted in some way', since the narrative sections are intercut with the performance sections. Also certain actions throughout the music video aren't completed on camera so the audience can only assume what happens next. A good example of this kind of music video is Taylor Swift's 'Out of the Woods'. The narrative in this video is really disjointed and fragmented as it switches between scenes and locations and there are also jumps in time in this video which hooks the audience in.

Similarly, in our music video, the audience don't really know anything about the guys in the video and apart from the few seconds that they are on screen with us, the audience can only assume the relationship between us and them and therefore fill in the gaps as to what happens once they walk off screen. One example in the video is through Angela's narrative section as she leads Mario off into the distance, the audience can only assume what happens next as it is never explicitly revealed.

Goodwin

Other conventions that we used and developed in our music video include Andrew Goodwin's theory that there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visual and the need for a lot of close-up of the artist (visual hooks).

Lyrics and Visuals

We drew a lot of inspiration from certain lyrics in the song to come up with ideas for our music video. One of the key themes that we had was the colour red, which we derived from the title of the song 'Red Planet'. I have included a few examples of the red imagery that we used on the right. We also had a consistent theme of red flashes throughout the music video.

Music video - red flashes example

There are also certain lines in the song which connote love and passion, such as, 'my heart beats', 'for you and I to explore things', 'the way you make me feel, I can never explain' etc.

We therefore chose to include the male characters as our love interests in order to be able to connote the theme of love better. We also used four heart-shaped, red balloons throughout the music video, but the use of it was significant during one line in particular (my heart beats), as it is a play on the words as the lyrics are talking about an actual heart metaphorically, but we used plastic balloons, as opposed to representing a fast heart beat in a more realistic manner in order to restrict the amount of power/control a guy can have on our emotions.

Visual Hooks - Beauty Shots

Beauty shots are a common feature that occur in a lot of pop/r&b videos, as shown below with Little Mix's 'Move' and we have also used this convention in our own video.

Little Mix - Move, beauty shots

D4MES beauty shots

Editing to the beat

Another convention that we used in our music video is Carol Vernallis' theory that 'editing matches musical phrases or beat'. We used this quite a lot in our music video as our song has quite a strong beat and since we wanted it to be non-linear with fast-paced editing, most of the cuts match up to when the beat changes.

An example from very early on in the video is when my solo starts and the word 'I' is repeated quite a few times to match the beat of the song so we edited the video to also match this by adding the effect that changes every time there is a new 'I'.

Album Digipak

We adhered to most album conventions and I have shown this in more detail in the Prezi below:

Website

We have adhered to most of the conventions of an artist website by creating a website which is interactive and works in synergy with the rest of the campaign. The website is essentially the 'hub' of the whole campaign so it must connect everything together and promote the artist and provide many purchasing opportunities for the audience as in essence this is why a record label subsidises artists', to make money.

There is also another factor that we must take into consideration when considering artist websites, which is participatory culture, an idea formed by Henry Jenkins. The audience need to be able to interact with the website in more ways than just looking at visuals or video, they need to be able to physically do something that makes them more connected to the website and the artist. Especially now, since the recent proliferation of web 2.0 and technologically converged devices, like the smartphone, the need is more of a necessity if you want to create a successful marketing campaign.

Similar to One Direction's landing page, we decided to have one for our own website as it straight away promotes not only the music video and the band, but encourages the audience to buy the album. It's making it easy for the audience to buy into us as a band. Below I have shown the different interactive features present on the landing page alone.

I have made an annotated screen recording showing the interactive and purchasing opportunities in Fifth Harmony's website, the annotations are clearer if you full-screen the video. I have also included a key which shows what the different coloured annotations stand for;