Media Evaluation 1, Part 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop

or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

Once we had decided on our song choice we began researching the ‘Pop Ballad’ genre of music. We modelled our artist on other similar artists such as Beyonce, Pink and

Taylor Swift; all women who give across the strong independent image to their target audience; young women. We studied many pop music videos that shared the same target audience and then began drafting ideas to make our video look realistic and

comply with the conventions of this style of music video but we also wanted to challenge some of them to make our video memorable and slightly different to all the

rest.

P!NK

Beyonce

Taylor Swift

We found that most pop videos follow a narrative and have aspects of performance in them so we were keen on sticking with this convention. When studying the lyrics of the song

there were obvious chances for intertextual references ‘He put it on me I put it on’ Cinderella shoe, for example. This gave us the idea to include some intertextual references

but we chose more modern classic love films that proved more popular with our target audience – Love Actually and The Notebook. I think we were successful in adding in these references as our audience who had seen the films (the majority) picked up on them and

recognised what we were trying to recreate.

Olly Murs – Dance with me Tonight. Intertextual Reference to

‘Say Anything’.

Our Media Product Intertextual Reference to

‘Love Actually’.

From listening to the song we interpreted from it that it was all about fantasy and the ‘fairy-tale’ version of a love story. We decided to contrast this with reality similar to how Beyonce

does in ‘If I were a boy’ but in her video it’s about role reversal. By doing this I think we reached out to our target audience as every girl has the same dream of the fairy-tale like

happy relationship, and in reality its not always like that. To make this obvious we decided to edit all our ‘reality’ shots in black and white and the fantasy in colour. We were happy with our reality shots being in black and white and our fantasy in colour as we thought it really signified the difference and made it clear to our audience even though the use of the mask

wasn't that clear.

Reality shots in Beyonce’s ‘If I Were A Boy’ & Our Media Product.

Reverse Role Shot in Beyonce’s ‘If I Were A

Boy’.

Fantasy Shot in Our Media Product; Intertextual Reference

to ‘The Notebook’.

Originally we were going to use two different boys but we then decided to incorporate using a mask, so that we could just use the one boy to signify what her relationship with him is really

like and what she wants it to be, by wearing the mask we felt this really made it a fantasy as

using another boy would have been realistic and simply symbolic of a new relationship. Although

it wasn’t received very well by our audiences who watched it we still stick by our choice and a few people offered new interpretations to it including the idea that we used the mask to

symbolise that ‘Love is blind’.

By using the mask we went against the Pop conventions and made our video darker and gave it more of a ‘gothic’ effect. By using the mask we

added in more of a concept style to the music video as our intention for its use was slightly

unclear and left it to our audience to interpret what they thought it meant.

The mask wasn't accepted well with our audience, I think perhaps this was the reason as they did

not expect this to be in a Pop music video.

We chose to add in close-up shots of our fictional artist ‘Imogen Fall’ singing in a simplistic setting, this we felt helped focus the video on her more than just focusing on the

relationship storyline. This is a Pop convention and is featured in many music videos, including Lana Del Ray’s ‘Video Games’. These shots were quite neutral in our audience response, with many commenting on how good Paris’s acting is, which pleased her very

much!

With our target audience in mind we were very selective in our costume choices; we chose a party dress for the dinner scenes as many other pop videos feature the artist in party wear.

Only for one of our slight twists we contrasted the party style dress with the dreary reality of the relationship. The artist wore the dress during the argument with her fiancé and when

crying at her dressing table.