In what ways does your media product

use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products?

For our A2 media course this year, my group and I have been given a task to produce a music video to a song of our choice, along with a DIGI Pack which had to consist of a Magazine Advert to advertise the release of the artists album and a CD Cover along with its inlays. The artist and song we chose to do, was ‘when you’re gone’ by Avril Lavigne. In order to have these tasks come out successfully, we had to make sure that we are following the right codes and conventions of Avril’s original music video.

By doing this, before we began to do any production work we decided to go into deep research of the ‘pop-rock’ genre. We looked at a few amount of music video’s from artists such as Taylor Swift, Pink and Florence and The Machine. By doing this, we gained a clear understanding of the genre and what codes and conventions to follow and most importantly we learned what we would find in these music videos within this genre.

2.

1.

My group and I decided to break away from the conventions in Avril’s storyline, and make our story a bit more unique. Since in heartbreaking stories in most music videos, if it comes for anyone to pass away, from a short amount of research we have gathered it always turned out that its a female character that happens to die. Therefore we decided to break away from these conventions and kill our male character instead of the female.

4.

When we picked our storyline, we straight away broke Avril’s storyline in ‘when you’re gone’ since we picked only one story to work on while Avril had about three in her music video. Our story flows throughout our music video, and we chose our theme to be ‘cheating & heartbreaking’. We looked at different camera angles and took a very close look on how they’re used to create an effect in the music video. In the end, we chose to stick with the camera angles that were continuously used in the original music video to not break the conventions and to mainly create an effect.

3.

The Story.Avril’s.

Ours.

The story we thought to do, was about a young couple who were engaged but the boy is secretly cheating on his fiancée

with another girl. The story throughout the music video is shown, from the beginning of the girls reaction when she finds out he is cheating, till the part where she finds out till the very end where the accident is happening and the boy gets ran over by a car and passes away. We felt that we had to use different types of shots, such as low angle ones in order to show specific scenes. We wanted the audience to have a clear view of what

were trying to portray.

The narratives in Avril’s original music video is about a husband and wife, being apart from each other because he left to join the army, and she seems to be expecting a child and she’s afraid her husband won’t

get to see the child. Through out the music video the wife is really worried while watching the news, because she doesn’t know if her

husband’s alive or not. The second story is about a teenage couple who are really in love, but are torn away from each other because the girl’s mother does not agree with them being together, throughout the music video it is shown how much the girl misses him. The final story, is about an elder man who holds a picture of his deceased wife, and shows how

much he misses the moments the two have spent with each other.

Breaking Conventions.Challenging codes and conventions.

When we looked at Avril’s music video, we noticed that she only had a single long shot throughout the whole music video. Therefore we decided to add a few from the same shot to our music video.

Since long shots aren’t usually used in pop-rock music videos, we decided to challenge some of the shots we decided to use in the music video.

Possibly breaking this convention, had given us a positive outcome which my group and I did not expect. We were very pleased with the outcome that we got and were happy that we decided to break this convention from the original music video.

These are 3 shot types that my group and I have used in our music video. This shows that we have filmed at different angles, and moved the camera around in order to create different variation of shots.

In this following shot, the facial expression I have, shows that I am not giving away of how I am feeling therefore leaving the audience surprised when they find out the main point of our story. We choose to create different type of angles in order to create an effect for the music video, to show the sense of feeling sad and lonely which worked out quite well for us, after we decided to follow this feature.

Location.

Avril uses this shot mid way through her music video. First time we took a look at her music video, we didn’t have anything in mind yet of how our music video is going to start since we found ourselves to busy concentrating on developing our narrative. Since we didn’t want to move away from our performance location, we wanted our music video to begin somewhere outdoors around our performance location. When we saw this shot in Avril’s original music video, we decided that we will use something similar, to not break any of the conventions.

Setting & Costume.My group and I decided to include a house in our music video, similar to the one in the original music video, therefore we wouldn’t be breaking any conventions.

By using this house, it matches the conventions being shown in the original music video. As you can see, Avril is wearing a white dress in the original music video, therefore for our music video we wanted our artist to wear something similar to show innocence and purity, like the message Avril is trying to portray.