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

Our media product, i.e. the music video, album cover and website, both develops and challenges the forms and conventions of existing media products. We chose to take inspiration from predominantly R&B websites and albums and in turn combined all the conventions we saw in them and used them to create our own website and album cover which could conform to the genre conventions. For our music video we followed the forms and conventions of contemporary R&B videos, such as 'Miss Independent' by Ne-Yo, and then developed this by having a lead who challenged the usual convention of the lead artist being smooth.

Our Music Video

The purpose of a music video is to promote a newly released track from an artist and this can be done through three forms- Narrative, Performance and Conceptual:

We applied this theory by having a performance and narrative driven music video, in turn combining the elements from each form.

Music Video- Narrative

The narrative of our music video is quite simple; it shows the artist AJ looking back at his past relationship with his ex-girlfriend which ended due to her cheating on him with another man. The music video shows the stages of the relationship and is an expression of the emotions he felt and how he intends to move on.

One of the aspects of Carol Vernallis' theory is that the narrative structure of a music video may be disjointed and fragmented through the use of discontinuous editing. We decided to conform to this theory by placing in short narrative scenes/sequences in between performance shots (lip syncs and dance). The theory of a fragmented narrative is quite common in the R&B genre where music videos usually play around with the narrative around their performance shots. An example of an existing R&B music video which conforms to this theory can be seen below along with examples from our music video of how we conformed to it:

Music Video- Performance

As is the norm for the R&B genre, our music video is predominantly performance driven with most of the shots being of AJ lip-syncing or dancing. For the performance elements of our music video we took inspiration from existing artist such as Usher, Jason Derulo and Ne-Yo. In particular Ne-Yo's music video for 'Closer' which has a good mix of lip-sync, solo dancing and group dancing.

As you can see this music video is primarily performance and in turn was very useful for us when deciding upon how to film and edit our performance shots. We noted that having a selection of professional set-ups and costumes was vital to keeping the performance elements exciting.

Andrew Goodwin's theory suggests that there should be some link between a songs lyrics and the visuals that accompany it in the music video. We decided to take on and apply this theory in our music video by matching up some of our lyrics to character actions, such as when AJ's girlfriend leaves the room (leaving AJ alone and confused), the line "Why did you leave me all alone?" plays.

   Our Website


Our Album Cover

In conclusion, we ensured our media product challenged, used and developed the forms and conventions of real media products by researching existing products from our chosen genre to see what the common trends were and in turn how to incorporate them successfully