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

Below you can see my script for my directors commentary:

In the following video I am going to be exploring the ways in which my A2 media product does use, develop or challenge conventions of real music video's and ancillary products. In order to do so, I will use Andrew Goodwin theory on key aspects of a music video, speaking about how I used these key aspects (as well as my own elements) to create my music video. 

According to Goodwin there are around 6 key elements of a music video:

A music video will demonstrate characteristics conventional to its specific genre

A relationship between visuals and lyrics

A relationship between visuals and music

Intertextuality references to other media texts

References to looking and the voyeuristic treatment of the female body

and Conventional for a music video to feature a lot of close ups of the artists itself, which would create a star motif or style, a famous example of this is Daft Punk's robots, this is often regarded as the demands of the record label. 

When I link this back to my own media product, the music video for Lester J Allen's 'Emma', I can see that I have conformed in many instances and even developed a few key aspects, such as the relationship between the visuals and the lyrics and music.

Goodwin identified that to make an artists music video more appealing to the specific target audience they would relate the video to the viewer and to the songs specific genre. So I began to research into the folk genre and some of it's most popular characteristics, the first that I found was that most of the video often have an overtly hidden meaning behind their narrative and contain ambiguous meanings, this is clear with Foal's Spanish Sahara and all of Bon Iver's music video, in particular 'Towers'. Bon Iver, like many other folk artists have used a very shallow aperture in their video to create a cinematic look and feel to the video, along with this, it is clear that in post production there has been some colour manipulation to create a often desaturated look. 

A relationship between the lyrics and visuals can be described by Goodwin as illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics of the song. The lyrics play the key role in understanding the narrative in my music video since it all spawns from the story that is behind the lyrics. Although the music video isn't a performance based one, the characters still respond to the lyrics, for example the scene where the lyrics say "she liked me more than three years" and then the girlfriend character responds by looking down at her feet as if not true. 

The relationship between the visuals and the music is an important area in post production and early planning stages, however is mostly seen in cuts on beats of the song, which I used toward the end when the tempo of the song began to speed up slightly and to give the impression of flashbacks from the point of view of the boyfriend thinking about 'Emma' (the girlfriend character). However, often this relationship is seen in music videos that feature dancing instead of a narrative, although obviously for my genre and song it was not appropriate. 

Intertextuality is something that I had planned on using in my video and believe although it is subtle, I did manage to achieve a few references. The first reference can be seen in the bedroom, it is a small Saint Raymond poster, an indie rock band artist that would likely appeal to the target audience of my music video and therefore it's incorporation is key, Again, there feature many artists on the wall of the bedroom, notably Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) who is a very popular indie folk artist. Finally, I incorporated a Nirvana mug into a scene that is dotted around the timeline of the music video and it adds a lot since the band has become part of popular culture and their lyrics talk about similar issues as my artists and therefore it's placement is in tribute. 

Throughout my video, there are numerous times in which the girlfriend character stares directly at the video, as if she's addressing the audience, however I wouldn't say that my music video ever includes voyeuristic treatment of the female body, since it doesn't include any nudity or intimacy between the character and the receptors of the video. If it did, I would be inclined to say that my video wouldn't conform very well to the folk genre of music videos, it would however begin to conform to other genres such as Pop, Hip Hop or Rap, e.g. Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball".

The demands of a record label is another area that Goodwin explored while researching, He found that often they will ask for lots of close ups of the artist and that the artists developed motifs which recur across their work, essentially developing a visual style, allowing the audience to relate to their work and recognise their style. This of course didn't happen in my music video because I didn't want to use my artist as the character but rather preferred to use a younger actor to present a relatable age to my audience, who potentially my be going through something similar to that detailed in the song. I did create a star motif, which was a theory by Dyer, through presenting my actor as the main character in my music video. 

Goodwin claimed that there were three types of music video, performance, narrative and concept. I found when researching the genre that most were either narrative or concept based. I decided to incorporate elements of the two both concept and narrative. 

For my digipak and magazine advert I looked at existing examples for the genre, looking at for example Passenger's digipak and it's design since his music conforms to the folk genre and began to notice the importance of synergy, both his digipak and poster utilise the same logo on his album. The other digipak that I analysed was that from Nirvana's 'Nevermind' album, although grunge is a very distinct genre from folk, they too utilised their iconic baby underwater image on their posters for both their tour and magazine adverts for the album. 

With this in mind, I began planning my digipak, knowing that what I designed was going to influence the poster design. I wanted to present the folk genre through it's visual design, so I looked toward artists like Damien Rice whose album designs are iconic of the genre and present simple drawings as the album design art as seen with the album 'O' and 'My Favourite Faded Fantasy' and these really influenced my design, I looked toward a simple natural design, I found myself using a deciduous tree since it represents the love, loss and instability themes that are in the album itself. Inside the digipak, I used stills form the music video which I haven't seen being used before however I believed it was relevant and advertised the music video to the audience of the album. 

Since I had this design, I knew I wanted to create synergy and so therefore I used the same design as on the artwork since the purpose of the poster is to directly advertise the album's release. I believe that I did conform in both the digipak and poster designs to the genre conventions.