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

Music Video:

After a lot of research, examples and discussions we decided to create an urban/funky music video with the song created by Carl Carlton called 'She's a bad mama jama'.

Real media products were used as an example and as a relation to what we wanted our music video to look like in terms of camera shots and codes and conventions. For example, we used Diggy Simmons music video called 'Do it like you' as one of our examples, as the rap video was rather similar to the type of music video we wanted to create, it target a young niche audience and used a range of camera angles showing their unique styles. Also the main artist was able to convey his charms openly to win over the girl, this links with our music video as our production is attempting to portray similarly to Diggy Simmons music video by using a range of camera angles and using charms and charisma to get the girl

We then decided on our narrative after watching a range of different music videos, most urban/funky music videos have a lot of exhilaration and fun in them with some mixtures of young love. Therefore, we came to the conclusion of creating a skating and rollerblading music video, where a young girl is a 'bad mama jama', this clearly conforms to the lyrics of the song as we are making a young girl a bad mama jama in our music video, which conforms to the codes of the music video.

Since we decided to create a music video based on skating, rollerblading and young love, we started to look at different shot types, urban dress codes and videos that had skating shots in them, for example, the Far East Movement was able to show a model skating in time with the music, it also shows emphasis the urban environment and what people do to express how they feel for example, graffiti art. 

The background images of graffiti in our music video empathize and express the urban atmosphere, this conforms to the forms and conventions of real media as a lot of urban landscapes/environments tend to have graffiti around which makes them recognizable and rural.

Our media products show a bit of male dominance, as it shows our main character approaching young women and attempting to woo her. This conforms to conventions of real media as it always tends to be the male figure approaching the young female to try to woo her. On the other hand, our media product subverts and challenges forms and conventions of real media products because we didn't use a conventionally dressed young woman that is provocative.

Close up shots conform to the codes and conventions of real media products, as all music videos have at least some sort of close up shot as they may want to make something recognisable, for example, in our music video we had a vast number of close up shots, this allows the target audience to recognise our main character,  show his importance and promote him (Richard Dyers Star Theory), the close up shots also allow the target audience to see the facial expressions to tell what type of song it would be e.g. sad or happy.

Through our editing we challenged and developed our music video, the slow motion added the effect of professionalism and it emphasised on what the music video was partly about (Skating and Rollerblading). One of the transitions we used challenged the way other real media texts have edited their music videos as we had the screen split in half, one side showing our main character skating and the other side showing the him singing. This was very effective as in one shot we summed up the whole narrative and one side was of our main character and the conventional women together rollerblading looking like a couple and on the other side him singing with the background image of graffiti which is empathising on the urban environment.


Our mise-en-scene uses the same types of codes and conventions a real media products, as music videos can be shot anywhere around the world and they tend to conform to the type of genre to make it effective and realistic. Our camera angles do not challenge the conventions of real media products, as all types of camera shots have been used before.

I believe as a whole our music video conforms to the forms and conventions of a real media product as it has a recognizable urban look to it and a funky atmosphere to it. Nevertheless, it conforms to the postmodern genre; however, the way it subverts from the actual code and conventions is through the use of having a clear story line, in which our music video continually creates. Therefore, it subverts to postmodernism because it postmodernism doesn’t follow the codes and conventions of a narrative and our music video does.

Website:
Artists get very creative in terms of codes and conventions on a website, as they need to make it as attractive as they can so that the target audience would engage init.
By using pre-existing websites of other artists and using them as an example, we made our website very easy to access and understanding for viewers, however, we made it attractive by the colours, which we kept consistent with our digi pack, as soon as someone enters the website our music starts playing, this develops the codes and conventions of real media texts because the websites we viewed didn’t have that, therefore, we decided to put it on, this makes it recognisable to our target audience and plays them the main song that our artist has, which basically promotes our artists song. Within our website we have a page for our artist ‘Alex Jones’, for our production company ‘Cloudkickers’, a gallery full of pictures and a contact section. We made our website conventional.

Album Cover:
Our album cover didn’t really challenge codes and conventions real media texts, however, it used and developed them. We used adobe Photoshop to edit our pictures for the album cover to make it look sharper and to change the colour to make it look more professional and attractive. Many artists album covers had their pictures at the front to make them recognisable, therefore, we done the same by putting our main character at the front of our album cover. However, at the back we have a close up shot of rollerblades, this would make the audience aware that rollerblades is our symbol.