Q1: IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

Andrew Goodwin Theory

Andrew Goodwin was a director of Music, and was an Organist for thirty seven years at Bangor Cathedral. He states that there are five key aspects of a music video we as the audience tend to look out for.

Here I have discussed the ways in which our music video has followed or challenged his ideas...

Narrative and performance was high key in planning and constructing our music video. Within my research into Goodwin’s points and general viewing I

found that we tend to only get a gist of the meaning of the song, which enables us to make up our own idea if what it being told.

Goodwin explains that music videos should ignore common narrative as it is important in their role of advertising.

Our quirky video follows this conventional role as it is emphasising its surrealism. He also comments on the fact that lip synching remains the heart

of music videos, as the audience need to believe it is real. I am glad we followed this convention as the performance parts would not have been as

respected. Below are examples of how we made our products ‘quirky’.

The birds are a great touch to the magazine advert, making it different but highlighting her natural nature.

The fake clouds and sun with the bright blue ‘sky’ sits well with our stop motion

We did have our artist lip synching, but we varied it by adding lyrics to this brightly coloured sheet emphasising the lyrics.

1.       Lyrics relate to visuals

The lyrics relating to our visuals were very illustrative. ‘we have only ever touched, when there is no one else around’ the idea of touching but them not knowing as it is seen on split screen only by the audience.

Fitting together ‘like a make shift puzzle’- split screen also represents this, and the green screen. There are lots of words within the lyrics that relate to them being in a bed, for example; ‘waking’ ‘lying down’ ‘still lay here’ ‘when I stayed the night’. We conventionally related the lyrics to the visuals as this, included with our performance section, was what our audience looked for in this narrative genre.

2.       Music relates to visuals

We related the music to the visuals by a visual representation of the guitar, and by cutting on the beat. The song has a continuous beat and is very snappy, so this is why we used stop motion, which challenged the convention. Stop motion was also used to illustrate our artists quirky character which is unconventional in her genre.

We agreed that it made the video more visually interesting. As a guitar is used in the song, we decided to bring this feature in to the performance part of the video with our artist, which is very conventional for the folk genre. This connotes how she is still focussed more on the music, even when she is being shown.

As the guitar has strong references in the music video, we decided to use continuity and bring it in our ancillary products. For our digi-pack we used three very different images of her guitar

Continuity was used to make our product professional and for our audience to easily recognise our artist and her genre- this is conventional for artists in this genre, e.g. Taylor Swift

3.       Demands of record label

We did try to sell the brand identity through close-ups of our artist, with her visual motif repeated. This was also selling her quirky personality also. This is conventional for the pop-folk genre. With these close-ups the audience are able to identify with her.

A subtle visual motif was the effect of mirroring/symmetry used across all of our products. The most obvious representations would be the music video where they are doing the same routine and Eliza Mindel mirrored on her magazine advert. On our 6 sided digi-pack we chose 3 images of guitars to be included.

4.       Intertextuality Although this is very personal to the spectator,

we chose not to follow this convention and use Intertextuality as our artist is her own person and we wanted the audience to engage with her and not other references.

Here we used layering and fading in and out whilst she is performing. The contrast is good in this scene, making our artist look bold, making the audience attracted to her persona and interesting take on pop-folk.

5.       Reference to notion of looking and voyeurism

Voyeurism is used discreetly as we watch her perform, but we did not follow the convention of getting pleasure out of viewing the female body as that is attracting the wrong type of audience.

This camera angle reflects how the audience re being voyeuristic, but not in obtrusive way. She is showing shy-ness, but we are able to identify with her.

6.       Genre of Characteristics The genre of Characteristics we used related to

pop-folk, where we were able to view her performing with an instrument, but also be lead by narrative. This also included the portrayal of love and innocence.

The guitar is a main focus across our products, purely because it has strong references to our artists genre and music abilities.

The narrative and performance used in our music video is conventional for pop and folk which is why we included both. This made our video entertaining to see both areas. Innocence was portrayed through all of the products, especially through clothing...