Task 1 - In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

·      Convention of Importance of Artist Close Ups

Music videos tend to include many close up shots. This is to create emphasis on the artist and his/her emotions. Also, close ups are used not only to show emotions, but to reflect the words of the song with the movement of the lips of the artist. However, there is one more important reason, which explains why directors use so many close ups in their music video. The reason is the commercial side of music business. In order to gain profit, company should sell as much music video products as possible. Our target audience is mainly rock fans, emo people, and teenagers. Therefore, music videos include so many close ups in order to “sell” the artist and his/her image to the target audience. It is important for the target audience to see face expression of the artists in order to understand his emotions. In our pop music video we used as many close-ups as we could in order to sell our pop rock band image.

These few screenshots clearly illustrate hat our media products use the convention of importance of artist close up shots in order to cell the rock band and gain high profit. However, such a great number of close up shots were used in our pop music video in order to emphasis the artist emotions. Interestingly, Beyoncé in her “Run the World (Girls)” also used a great number of close up shots in order to make her pop music video more successfully in terms of marketing and commercial side of music business.

Therefore, this clearly illustrates that popular real artists, such as Beyoncé, also use the convention of importance of artist close ups in order to make their pop music more successful and create emphasis on the artist emotions.

·      Convention of Props and Costumes

The next convention, which our pop music video uses is the convention of props, which allow the director to set up a particular look for the artist. In our pop-rock music video, the artists wore leather jackets, black skinny jeans, silver rings and dark T-shirts. All these props and costumes are inevitably linked to the star image of our band, which is a typical rock and emo band. Therefore convention of props and costumes help to develop and illustrate the genre (rock) of our music video.

Furthermore, in our website we included lots of images with our props and costumes.

There is a great example, which clearly illustrates how the convention of props and costumes develop particular look for the pop-rock band. Paramore in their music video called “Decode” wore black skinny jeans, leather jackets ad rings in order to set up a particular grunge style for rock band, which could help them to attract the particular audience to their music video and thus allow them to gain high profit. Below you can see examples of how we used conventions of props and costumes to comply with the conventions of real media products.

·      Convention of conspicuous use of lighting

Lighting is very important for any type of video productions – from film thrillers to music videos. The use of lighting is significant for more than one reason, ranging from making it easier to see everything, to portraying a certain mood and emotions. For example, in our pop music video, dark lighting in the perfomance scenes created sad feelings, which appropriatly coincide with depressed feelings of emo people, who are considered to be our target audience. Therefore, we used very artistic and abstract lighting in our pop-rock music video in order to make the video more creative and emotional, as well as create appropriate emo star image for our band members. In other words, we were willing to convey the emotions which are proposed by the artists more precisely. Furthermore, in order to highligh rythmic editing experience we also used such conspicious use of lighting. As a result, I can argue that not only our team used lighting in order to reach these two aims. There is an example when real artists use convetion of conspicious use of lighting. Clavin Harris in his pop music video called “Think About You” also used convention of conspicious use of lighting in order to set up a particular glomour look for his music video.

·      Use of perfomance

Use of perfomance in music videos is an effective way of advertising ans selling the star image of the band. Furthermore, use of perfomance is a creative way of making music video more interesting to wathch. Our pop music video effectively confirmed the use of perfomance. We decided to include perfomance in our music video in order to meet expectations of our target audience as many of them prefer to watch “typical” rock and emo perfomance, rather than narrative story and love. Therefore, by using perfomance we created a suitable image for pop rock band, making our band member more mature and brutal. This, therefore, would allow us to attract our audience as rock and emo fans like typical image for such music genre.

Hurts is an example pf how does real music video reinforce even further that form of use of perfomance, which is made with few different purposes. First of all, it allows to show the artist effectively. It is very important to show the artists, when they are signing. Furthermore, use of perfomance allows to demontsrate grenre, which is in our case – pop-rock music. Our target audinece and istitutions definitely prefer when the rock music videos demonstrate clearly the genre. However, more importantly, it allows to create marketable star image. This will allow the artists to gain mareting benefits, such as huge profits.

·      Use of symbolic /thematic material

In our music video, we also confirmed use of symbolic/thematic material.  For example, our dress illustrates “emptiness in a soul” after a lost relationship. Furthermore, it is quite common to have a dance elemnt in this genre of music, namely pop rock music. Therefore, we used dance perfomance in order to make our video more clear for our audience, a language of dance makes it easier to understand the concept of tour music video. Moreover a dance element definitely makes our video more inderesting and creative, which attarct more audience attention. As a result, our music video have greater chance to be commercially successful if more audience wiuld like and watch it.

For example, for our digipak, we used a symbolic graffiti font in order to illustrate industrial environment of our pop music video. This, therefore, clearly implies the emo style of our music video.

I music video by Delta Rae, graveyard represents death. Therefore, our group effectively used convention of sympolic/thematic material to build up meaning of lost relationship. Furthermore, dark lighting us used to suggest tragic mood.

·      Use of three minutes long format

In our pop music video, we effectively confirmed the typical use of three minute long format for pop music video. This allows us to get audience attention, not allowing them to get bored. Almost every real artist use this three minute long format for the same purposes. There some examples.

Rihanna and Shakira – Can’t Remember to Forget You