evaluation question 1

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

1.       In our video media production Grade 8 we have used, developed and challenged forms and conventions of real media productions. One of the ways we have done this is by using the artist himself, this is something you see on a regular basis in current music videos today. If you were going to compare this to a media theory you could relate this to Sven Carlson and his idea of a performance clip, where we show our artist in a number of locations for example the waterfall and the recording studio. We wanted to look at what Ed Sheeran had done in his previous videos, this helped us as we noticed that in most of his videos he had a story line to go with the lyrics. In our case we used a Romeo and Juliet story which is based on the theory by Kate Domaille in where you have to characters that seems to be in love with each other. This was good as you do not always see this in music videos made by Ed Sheeran this is why I would regard this as a form of developing current forms and conventions. We also needed other people in our video to help portray the effect that we wanted, this is where Lauren came in (the girl in our video) she helped us to create a storyline in the video. During the process of us developing our video Ed Sheeran realised his new video ‘Give Me Love’ in which there is a storyline as well as another character which is similar to our video. This shows we have used forms and conventions of real media products. Another way in which we used forms and conventions was by looking at Ed Sheeran’s videos and seeing that he is known for his use of a guitar, so we decided to include one in our video to so that we had considered current media products to inspire us. It also allowed us to keep continuity as many videos within the music industry use instruments that are played by the artist to the music. We also used the drum at the beginning of the music video that was played in time with the music to give an effect. One way in which we challenged media conventions was that in our video we had our artist walking down a street singing to the music, which is normally associated with rap music and not our genre of music. Another way in which challenged currents productions was that in our chorus our artist was just in the same place playing the guitar shown from different angles, this is unusual as normally the chorus is the piece of the music video where the most production occurs, whereas we had our artist in a simple environment without  doing to much, this challenges current media productions.