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

Our media product, consisting of the music video – “Better off” by HAIM, the digi pack and the magazine article, all conform to the conventions of a real professional

media product, especially in the alternative/indie rock/girl band genre. However we made sure that not all the features in our video conformed to the

sterotype, but evoked our own creativity, to allow the product to stand out.

We were inspired to use a close up mouth shot of the three band members lips, from artists such as Azealia Banks. I thought this would help to connote femininity and sexuality without being too suggestive/explicit

We also wanted each member to have their own unique identity, similar to the Saturdays who each have their ‘own colour’ representing them and their personalities. This helped to build a unique selling point for the band and their brand identity.

Our master shot of the entire video was of the three girls standing side by side, interlinking and leaning on each other.

This was to symbolise the strong relationship between them and to reinforce the conventions of a girl band

From the two examples, I can see that costume plays a big part in the representation of a girl band, so, we wanted them to follow this convention by wearing similar style clothing (alternative), but also challenge this by including their own sense of style by not wearing matching outfits.

Landscape shots, such as the one in Coldplay “Paradise” and Destiny's Childs “Cater 4 U” play an important role in majority of professional music videos, as they can provide a visual representation of the song such as ‘paradise’. Or simply look aesthetically pleasing to the eye and give a variety of shot types between the artist.

Like the mass majority of music videos in the industry, we also had a separate narrative running through the video. In Katy Perry’s “The one that got away” it shows an older Katy thinking about her flash backs of her late lover and their relationship together. In our video we wanted to truly represent the lyrics of the song (better off) by disclosing the main members ‘dark’ relationship with her ex boyfriend.

The purpose of having a narrative, is so that the video does not bore the audience and keeps them attentive. It also helps to make the song more memorable.

During the guitar solo in our music video we added a small stop motion of a torn up paper heart mending its self. This idea was influenced by a variety of videos, mainly from alternative music genres. But our biggest influence was Coldplay’s “Strawberry swing”. We loved how effective it looked.

We added this to add another USP to the music video.

We wanted to add a theatrical aspect to the video,That made the drummer look powerful and strengthen the meanings and associations of the song lyric and band members. It also helped to strengthen the heavy drum beat running through the song, similar to a heart beat.

A range of artists have used this shot, including: Imagine Dragons (Radioactive) and Biffy Clyro (Living is a problem). The example shown was taken from Hilary Duff – Our lips are sealed

Just like the HAIM back cover we wanted to keep it really simple and minimalistic by only having the song names to one side, however, we still wanted there to be a focal point, so, inspired by Beyoncé we used an of centre shot of Jade as the background to always remind the audience about the band and main band member.