Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and

conventions of real media products?

The purpose of the music video

For my media advanced portfolio I needed the create a music video to match a genre of my choice. The music video is there to put an image to the song and to represent the artist and who they are trying to portray themselves as. I chose the genre of R’n’B/soul and hip hop. For this I had to create a very versatile artist represent her as someone an audience from all of these genres could relate to. In order to achieve this we had to do a lot of research into these genres and find out what type of artist it is that appeals to audiences from these genres.

Similar artists

An artist that uses music videos in a similar way that we did is Rihanna. She presents her self as almost 2 different people; the soft, vulnerable Rihanna and the crazy, sex icon, wild child Rihanna. The way she represents her self as the soft, vulnerable Rihanna through her music videos is where we got a lot of our inspiration from.

Cinematography In our video we use Goodwins theory of star image and used a lot of mid shots and close ups on the artists. Like Rihanna did in her video for ‘Diamonds’ we used a lot of close ups and extreme close ups. This was in order to help with the use of Dyers star theory as we wanted our artist to come across vulnerable in the video. We wanted the audience to sympathise with her and even feel sorry for her. This use of close ups and extreme close ups allowed us to show her facial expressions closely showing how stressed she is and the pain she is going through. This helped to make the themes and narrative of our video to be resented well and effectively. This allowed us to challenge Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, however, we did use male gaze at some points such as the close ups on the artists lips.

EditingEditing played a huge part in our music video as it played a huge role in making sure our narrative was well represented and the audience could understand it. We used a lot of jump cuts and fast paced editing, especially when the music got faster and more intense. We made sure the editing matched the music and all times, often we made the jump cuts match the beat of the music. We used a lot of black and white when editing like Rihanna did in her video for ‘Rehab’. This was mostly used to increase intensity especially on shots of the couple. We wanted to highlight certain moments to help the audience have a clearer understanding of the narrative. For example, Parts where the couple are close together and looking at each other were edited to black and white to help to highlight the love between them.

MES: Setting & Lighting/ColourIn our video we used a lot of low key lighting and used a lot of red-ish colours to help set the mood and tone. We wanted to highlight the darkness and danger of the couples relationship and create high intensity throughout the video. This was quite conventional to the genres we chose. We set most of our scenes in a couple which was represented as the couples house. This was in order to show how serious their relationship is as they were serious enough to share a home. We wanted the audience to sympathise with the artist and in order to do this we needed to make sure the audience could tell how much importance the male artist is in her life. We also tried to create a prison scene for the male artist in order to show how far the abuse went in their relationship and how serious it was. It was very hard to create a location to look like a prison and we had to research what a prison cell looks like and decided to do things such as stick photos on the walls.

MES: IconographyWe used a lot of iconography that made intertextual references to religion as well as prescription drugs. This was to show how extreme the stress was that the artist was going through as in extreme times people are known to turn to religion and people are also known to turn to drugs. The use of the drugs was in no way intended to promote drugs but it was used to help the audience to sympathise with the character as we were showing just how much of a bad place she was in and also to promote awareness as this is something that people genuinely turn to. We also used iconography such as candles, highlighting the intimacy between the couple.

MES: Costume/Hair/Make up & Body language/Facial expressions

We wanted narrative to be very clear so in order to do that we have to make sure our characters looked very natural so they both had no make up, however our female artist wore red lipstick in one scene where she is sitting in the mirror to fit the conventions of a female R’N’B/Soul artist. Our female artist had big hair as we thought it would bring out her youthfulness and make her come across more vulnerable to the audience. In terms of costume we tried not to make the artist wear anything too revealing in order to challenge Mulvey’s Theory of male gaze, however, we did want to show some male maze and to we tried to make her show some sex appeal but subtle. For example, the female artist wore a oversized baggy shirt which didn’t show off her body or show any cleavage, but it was short and there were times that the camera lingered around her bare legs.