Question 1

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

Our media product uses several conventions from real music products. We focused specifically on the theories of Andrew Goodwin and to an extent, Carol Vernallis. Goodwin's theory of 'The Structure of Music Video: Rethinking Narrative Analysis' was something I looked at heavily, and which I think can be seen within the music video. Our music video would be categorised as under 'amplification' or 'illustration'. We also used the very obvious conventions of a music video such as the artist being the lead character within the music video.

A few songs we were influenced by were 'Aluna George - Attracting Flies', 'Azaelia Banks - 212' and 'Estelle - American Boy':   

                                                                                                                       

I was influenced by these videos as they all had a female lead, which our group also had. We also were originally planning to use 'Estelle - American Boy' as the music video we were going to perform. However we still decided to take some aspects from the video. We decided to use the theme of classiness or sophistication, Estelle had in her music video as you can see in a side by side here:

Influenced

Also influenced

However the music video created was more inspired by 'AlunaGeorge - Attracting Flies', and this can be seen in our music video. Both take place inside and outside, and the mannerisms adopted by our performer are fairly similar:

Both walking at the camera

Establishing shots

The camera work of AlunaGeorge - 'Attracting Flies' were the main things that influenced production of the video. We were somewhat inspired by the camerawork of the video, but MES-wise were more inspired by the MES of 'American Boy' as we felt more it applied much better to the image we wanted to give our artist Deseree Diamond.

We couldn't really challenge or use the conventions seen within the genre of the music video as the song comes under multiple genres of music. If I were to specify which route we went with, I would argue we went with a more R&B route, as we had a male lead and the story was more focused on a romantic sort of plot. The use of a male lead or in general another person other than the performer being  a main character within the music video is often seen in R&B videos more so then in electropop and dancepop which were the other two genres the song was classed under.

Ancillary Work

Ancillary wise my digipak and advertisement are very conventional. Both link to each other, through font, picture of the artist which was used or the general theme which linked all three pieces together. Certain conventions I decided to use with regards to the ancillary products  were mentioned earlier, use of the same font, theme, and picture are conventions of ancillary products as we can see here by Katy Perry's recent album 'Prism':

'Prism' retains every characteristic apart from the specialised outlining on the album cover.. Font and general theme stay the same.

 We can also see ancillary conventions used here by Miley Cyrus 'Bangerz':

'Bangerz' features a covered Miley Cyrus. The general theme stays the same although Miley has switched poses. Album font and general theme of the album stay the same.

In conclusion our media product uses forms and conventions of real media products in a lot of ways. Production wise we used similar camera work, and theme. We also applied the theories of Andrew Goodwin to the music video produced. Ancillary wise we followed the general concept seen in Ancillary works. Synergy was prevalent between all three pieces of work, whether it was through font, the artist's image or theme.