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

Evaluation Question 1

Conventions of the Song

• The song comes under the genre of Indie pop – there isn’t a video for this song so I am going to take comparisons from other music videos

• Some of the conventions of this genre are:

Narrative alongside performance• Having a narrative along side the performance. The narrative usually

follows a theme and explains the story behind the lyrics. An example of this is ‘Love Story’ by Taylor Swift. It uses the famous story of Romeo and Juliet to explain the lyrics.

• In our music video we conformed to the convention of using a narrative to explain the lyrics. In our music video we used a real life situation (the pageant) to explain the theme of glory doesn’t come without consequence. However in our music video we didn’t have a performance part and it was purely narrative. We did this because we wanted the messages of the themes that we represented to be strong as we felt by just having a narrative achieved this.

Special effects - Filters• Many of indie-pop music videos use filters over the top of the

clips to give a certain an idea to an viewer. For example; to age it, or to show the clip in a positive or negative light. Beyoncé used this in her flaws and all video. It created the effect of it being odd and a effect of watching old TV.

• We also used this in our music video. The first shot that we use an ‘Dream’ effect on it to give it the look as if it was a flashback. This was a visual that helped the audience with the narrative. We also darkened all the shots to represent the narrative in a darker light and make it seem more mysterious. We did this by changing the colour, saturation and the exposure of the shots, as you can see on the next slide.

Here is the dream effect we used

Here is how we changed the look of the shots

Camera• In indie-pop it very common to use extreme close-ups, this is usually

done to show the emotions that the artist is feeling. Long shots are also so very common, this is important as it helps the audience understand the message behind the video and the reasoning for it. Tilts and pans are also very common this is often used to help tell the story.

• In our music to don’t have a live performance, for reasons I mentioned previously, so we made sure we used common camera techniques to conform to the code and conventions of indie-pop genre. We used extreme close-ups on important props in our narrative and also of the contestants doing their make-up as this is an important part of the narrative as it meant to represent them hiding their truth selves.

Camera shots from our music video21 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

Comments about our camera shots• Shots 1,2 & 3 – are all panning shots. 1 & 2 are close ups of props which are the

tiara and the make up. We felt it was important that these were close-ups as it makes the audience focus only on this. The panning of the judges is important because it shows the trophy in the centre suggesting it is the most important. This idea conveys the idea that the winning is more important then peoples opinions.

• Shots 4,5,6 & 9 are all extreme close ups apart from 4. These are important as it shows the contestants. Shot 4 is important because in indie-pop conventions close ups are used to show emotions. In this shot the contestant has a blank face, this is important because it gives off the impression that they are fake and pageants don’t involve personality. In shot 9 it is important for it to be a close-up as the red nail polish spilt is foreshadowing what is going to happen later on.

• Shots 7 & 8 are long shots, which set the scene of a pageant as it shows that the contestants are on a a stage. This are also important shows because this is the only time we see all the contestants together.

Our use of lighting

• Our use of lighting was important because we were trying to represent a stage light pageant. To create this spot light we used flood spot lightings, that covered the majority of the stage.

Our use of Mise-en-Scene• The use of mise-en-scene was extremely

important in our music video. Costume was a huge part of this. We created to rounds to our pageant; a black dress round and a full length dress round.

• In the full length dress round we wanted the colour of each dress to represent the seven deadly sins. To also to the idea of sashes from beauty pageant and incorporated this with representing the seven deadly sins. We did this represent the negative and the ‘gore’ of pageants. We used sashes and dresses to do this because this are two things that you would see in an normal pageant. It was important to create a clear representation of a pageant for our video.

• To continue the representation of a pageant we made sure that the judges, wore suits like in an normal pageant.

• A lot of planning went into to make sure all the costume and the make-up and props were clear to represent our pageant.

Our inspiration

• We took inspiration from Beyoncé's music video ‘Pretty Hurts’. In this video they also explore the ideas of negative sides of pageants. We took inspiration of the ‘glory’ side of our video from this video. In the ‘pretty hurts’ there are lots of shots of the pageant and the getting ready that we tried to represent in our video as well.

Links between the visuals and lyrics

• In this shot the lyrics are ‘now we’re in the ring and we are coming for blood’.

• The shot is red nail polish dripping out. We did this because the red connotes the blood. This shots foreshadows what is going to happen later on in the video.

Representation of Lorde

• This video represents Lorde as an artist as the video itself is very cinematic, which is consistent to all of Lorde’s other music videos.

• The video also represents Lorde as it involves young people, an idea that Lorde displays in her music videos as she is young herself. She promotes the idea of equal opportunities for people of all ages.

• This video also sends a social message regarding the competition of female beauty, and the extreme and rigorous extent girls go to for vanity.