Creative Critical Reflection

Q1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does they represent social groups?My media product uses a number of codes and conventions and it also

represent social groups. Before making our final media product which is of course our music video, we did a lot of research. We searched about what kind of music video will be made? what would be the genre? Which song will be chosen? In fact we also searched about what exactly is a music video.

A music video is a like a short film that represents a song and imagery which is later used for promotional purposes. They are used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings.

Our Music Video had a genre of Pop-rock. We chose Pop rock because this genre has been famous for many many years and people are still into it. Now because our genre was Pop-rock we looked into other music videos with the same genre as our and we basically studied the codes and conventions . We followed the same codes and conventions in our music video during the our band performance.

Pop-Rock artists are mostly likely seen performing for their audience in denims jackets and casual clothing. They are always wearing light make-up and overall the representation of their music videos are performance based . Our Music video however was both ; Performance and Narrative.

Our song is eastern but our music video focuses everything in western. That’s because are target audience is within Pakistan only. The song we chose is by Maroon 5 called “She will be loved”. The lyrics of the song and the visuals in our music video has no relationship between them whatsoever . Also our version of the song is acoustic because we weren't allowed to use the originals because of the copyrights issue. The original music video though “She will be loved” includes different kinds of shots that are wide angle shots, close up of the artists, close up of the instruments. And we followed these codes and conventions in our music video. Here are examples:

The band performance for the original music video was performed my a audience whereas our music video band performance was performed in a auditorium which me made it look like a recording studio because the acoustic version of the song was performed at a studio as well

Other examples of music videos that are performed on a stage in front of the crowd is in “Closer to the Edge” by Thirty seconds to Mars. But ours was performed as mentioned before in a auditorium

We made sure that are band followed the same kind of clothing that we see in pop-rock genre music videos. Our band was dressed up in casual clothes and wore denim jackets. In the music video “Four Five Seconds” by Rihanna Kanye West and Paul McCartney. All of these three artists were seen wearing denim jackets and casual clothes. Rihanna was seen with light eye-make up. We followed these codes and conventions and made sure our music videos band performance have applied them.

Other codes and conventions we followed were making a website of our band as well as a digipak. Both of them follow the conventions of a pop-rock genre.

Our Digipak has a picture of our protagonists crush wedding dress that she wears and is featured in our music video. The written text on the front cover includes the name of the band and the albums name which is “Love & Desire” The inside of the Digipak includes a pictures of our band called “Falling Fast”.The CD is black in color and includes a logo of our record label company which is Universal Records , it includes 6 songs out of 12 on our CD. The back cover is however black and white and includes 4 invidual pictures of our band in black and white and in between we have the all 12 tracks listed from our music album

Our music video is both a Narrative and Performance based video but it has no relationship between lyrics and visuals

In our music video a very common social issue is highlighted. It shows two different kinds of people and that the rich and the poor . Our male protagonist is a domestic helper working in a rich family.. The rich girl who is getting married doesn’t know that the servant has a crush on her. The problem is that usually poor people are not allowed to say what their heart says and with this being unsuccessful they give up on their life. Same as the case in our music video. We see the male protagonist staring at the girl at some scenes and he's very sad because he cannot admit her love to her just because he is poor. In the end when the girl gets married and the male protagonist leaves looking sad.