Evaluation Question 1. Part A

Whilst starting evaluation post 1 (In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?) I decided to come up with a spider diagram explaining the conventions I used in the video and ancillary work.

As you can see, we stuck clearly within the conventions of all music videos and genre with ours and my ancillary products were also designed with the genre's conventions clearly in mind.

When we first started studying music videos it was clear that their conventions differ to those of other aspects of film which we had studied. Music videos break away from continuity, unlike films or tv dramas, in a music video the mise en scene often changes very quickly back and forth, so often the time period indicated in the video is less set. This is noted by Andrew Goodwin who believes that music videos break away from conventional film narrative, in music videos the singer/ group members take an active role as a performer and a character throughout. Goodwin believes that there are three types of music video narrative structures, Illustration, where the video and lyrics to a song tell the same story, Amplification - when a video introduces new meanings to songs, which do not contradict those in the lyrics but simply add to those already given, and Disjuncture, where there is little to no connection between the happenings throughout the music video and the lyrics to the song. We had clearly followed this rule, amplificiation was used in our video as we followed the themes in the lyrics but didn't contradict them, however we added to them. Editing is also extreemly different in music videos, Carol Vernallis notes how edits usually take place to the beat of the music, a convention we (clearly) stuck to, it is especially clear in the rabbit scene in the film. Vernallis also talks about the heavy use of jump cuts in music videos, we used jump cuts throughout our video all the time, creating. Effects, transitions and other edits are more obvious in music videos, we used ultra sped up clips in our music video, and very quick edits which are also conventional of music videos. Feminist Laura Mulvey believes women are often 'dismembered' in music videos, where only certain parts of their body are shown at a time, and usually their heads are completely cut off. This is mainly a trend in rap videos, and I found pleanty of folk/ indie music (Lisa Mitchell, Joanna Newsome and Noah and the Whale) videos that do not stick to this convention atall. Usually the videos acompany a song that is derogatory to females and they do not look at the camera, our song '5 years time' is actually a sweet love song aspiring for a long and happy future with a woman and so we contrasted the dismembering with shots of Emily and I looking at the camera and we did not dismember either of us throughout.