Evaluation Question 1

 1. In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In order to understand our genre of indie Pop/Rock, we sourced music videos from artists ranging in the genre. Both Kate Nash's music videos Mouthwash and Foundations included key ideas that we would use in our own. We got key ideas from Kate Nash's 'Foundations' such as the idea of using toothbrushes, using a doll to represent her body image and a setting if her own home showing how she is in a natural state. The song ‘The Fear’ by Lilly Allen inspired us to feature an element of comedy into our coursework through our artists silly persona. We used a lot of stop motion throughout our music video, we were inspired by the Lenka video for her song ‘The Show’ which features special effects similar to ours.

Using Andrew Goodwin's 7 must have conventions; we’ve analysed our music video and concluded that we successfully included all seven conventions whilst still creating a video that is new, interesting and entertaining for the audience.

Firstly, we linked the lyrics to the song to the visuals in the video throughout the majority of its duration; this helped to amplify the meaning of the lyrics to the audience. 

Our genre of Indie Pop/Rocks conventions consist of being unconventional. This is seen in the way the artist dresses by wearing formal attire in a forest which is unconventional for the environment. This idea is further exemplified through the comedic element of the artists persona, for example she is characterised as cheeky as she skips about the forest and regularly smirks at the camera. We used woods, although audience research showed an urban environment with derelict things, but that doesn’t fit with the song so we decide to break that convention but use one that is commonly used in other types of music videos, because we wanted to show her freedom, being her natural self.

We didn’t use may intertextual references in our video, but through the stop motion of vinyl records, the video was connected to 80s music and artists, and a wide mixture of different types of people, something that inspired our artist. We featured numerous magazines in our video to display how society views women and how they are represented in magazines like ‘Home Woman’ and ‘Women’s Health’, however the artist uses these magazines ironically to suggest that she doesn’t care about being like these women and is more interested in being herself.

Using the Goodwin's convention of the notion of looking, we broke the fourth wall between the artists and the audience by having the artist look directly into the camera throughout the video, creating a relationship between her and the viewer. The notion of looking is seen in the shot of the artist looking at her reflection in the mirror, furthermore, we included so many close ups of the artists to meet the demands of the record label, another one of Goodwin's conventions.

By displaying the artist in her natural home environment, it gave the audience an insight on the way in which she lives, showing them how relatable she is to the ordinary viewer, as she leads a very normal life; exemplified by her relaxing at home on a Friday night, and by seeing her family photo albums.

We created a relationship between music and visuals by changing shots in time with the music at important points in the song to influence the mood of the video.

We portrayed iconography n the recurring image of the sky and her chic mushroom bob, unique to her personal style. These elements helped to make our video and artist recognisable to her audience easily.

Aside from Goodwin’s conventions, Voyeurism is not a convention seen in our genre and doesn’t link to the songs theme, furthermore we didn’t want our artist to be representative of they way in which today’s society sexually views women.