A2 Media Studies - Evaluation Q1

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge froms and conventions of real media products?

Upon planning what our music video was going to be like, we looked at several videos from similar genres to our song choice, 'Hero', to get inspiration. We mainly looked at the original video for 'Hero' and found that there were a lot of things we could take from the video and apply it to ours. For instance, we used a lot of jump cuts in our video which is also done in the original starting from 1:10. We also applied similar effects such as this fade:

Another inspiration which we acquired from another video was the narrative from 'superhuman' by Chris Brown and Keri Hilson. in the video, chris brown and keri hilson are in a situation where they meet for the first time and exchange numbers. We applied this to our media product.

Here is a GIF from Superhuman's video:

Here's pictures from our video which show the similarities with 'Superhuman':

For every genre, there are certain conventions when it comes to making music videos. RnB music videos tend to focus on material possessions such as jewelry, money, cars, clothes etc. They also tend to objectify women and show them as sources of sexual fantasies. RnB music videos tend to have fast edits and have a variety of camera techniques. We tried to incorporate these conventions as much as we can into our video. Evidently because of having no budget, it was quite challenging to follow the conventions of RnB music videos and we weren't able to include all of them. One of the conventions we followed was the focus on material possessions. In our video, there's a cut in which we show the artist's versace watch which is obviously one of the artist's material assets. RnB videos show these to show that RnB artists are able to buy things that normal people aren't able to; that money isn't worth much to them. This idea is something we took from the original video of 'Hero' as well.

From the original video

From our music video

Another convention we followed was accentuating her sexuality. We did this by dressing our artist in a sexy attire.

As you can see here, her assets (her face, breasts) are accentuated and shown as they are deemed appealing by men. not only does this follow the conventions, it also attracts men/teenage boys to listen to the song, which is beneficial to the artist because the song is mainly targeted at women/teenage girls. The artist being shown like this also makes her seem as a role model to women/teenage girls as she is shown as a strong, attractive woman. In my opinion, her being deemed this way also has an impact on the recognition the song gets.

In terms of the digipaks, I think my digipak fitted the conventions of the genre. I sought inspiration from Rihanna's new album, 'Loud' and even applied the same font (Helvetica Neue Ultralight) onto my own digipak. Rihanna's is quite simple and understated, and I applied that onto mine.

Rihanna's Digipak (Front)

My digipak

The rest of rihanna's digipak.

One aspect from Rihanna's digipak I didn't follow was the continuing image from one panel to another. What I did, rather, was that I used different images of the artist on different panels, except the back cover which I left black. 

In terms of advertisements, I think I didn't follow the conventions for it. I got my insipiration for my advertisement from a get cape. wear cape. fly cd advertisement. get cape. wear cape. fly. is an indie rock band and this genre evidently follows different conventions. 

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