EVALUATION - Challenging Codes & Conventions

"In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge the codes and conventions of real media products?"

For our A2 media project we were to produce not only a music video but also CD artwork for an accompanying album and a campaign poster. All three would fit together to form a promotional package. I think all three product are effective with the way the challanege the codes and conventions of media products by existing artists in the same genre that we have been working in.

The main focus of our music video is a guy who has been hurt in love by his girlfriend and throughout the video he is haunted by her and despite the fact she is remorseful, he finally has enough and does something that he may live to regret. This story plays out whilst we are presented with many different performance shots in different settings. When looking at the codes and conventions of existing music videos you can see that we have followed the mainly the same conventions of male pop/R&9B singers in the performance shots of our video.

Here you can see the variety of different shot types we used for the performance part of our music video.

Clicking here will take you to our storyboards which were created using existing music videos from the same style of genre. As you can see what is notable is the variety of different shot types for just one scene, in doing this it makes the singer the sole focus of the music video allowing the viewer to follow him completely without any distractions. We also tried to replicate they way movement and dance is used in the existing pop/R&B videos through the use of long shots. Therefore in our there is a great amount of telling the story through the hands and through dancing. It also came to our attention how in existing music videos lots of sharp, striking poses which are pulled especially in male music videos. For example skip to various points in the original Cry Me A River video (1.50, 1.57, 2.16) Timberlake jumps in the video and it looks impossible. Therefore we tried doing this within our performance as you can see above in our screen captures, we slowed down the jump and reversed the playback to make it look impressive like in Timberlake's original video

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Where we feel we challenge the codes and conventions of existing music videos is with the narrative within our production. Many pop videos also feature very cliché and predictable plots, even within songs which hold darker meanings. The male in the video is always seen as the dominant one whilst the woman is seen as the vulnerable one who relies on the man. We deliberately decided to challenge this convention of music videos. Below you can see how.

In the video the guy's love interest almost haunts him throughout the video, yes she may be sorry but when it comes to a dangerous situation she stands with her head held high as the car comes speeding towards her. It's as if she's challenging him and calling his bluff. We did originally film some lower angled shots to make her seem more dominant but ultimately it didn't look right with the rest of the shots we had. We also had quite a controversial ending in the video which is left on a sort of cliffhanger. After the guy speeds towards her, just as he's about to hit her the screen goes to black, leaving us with the question of her did he kill her or not. To make the male lead (the singer of the song in fact) the bad guy who has just done something terrible, is not typical of most music videos and gives the video a level of controversy. 

For our ancillary tasks, our CD cover & artwork as well as our poster I also felt we challenged the codes and conventions of posters advertising music products. We originally had the idea of the title 'Stop The World, I'm Getting Off' in our minds as we thought it was a clever use of words and we had an idea of what the artwork would look like. However when it came to researching existing album covers and posters everything we found was relatively plain and simple. A flattering picture of the artist against usually a plain coloured background. In terms of following the codes and conventions we kept the clothing plain black and white, the colour scheme dark and the artist as the main focus of the cover. However super-imposing him on top of the world and having him almost climbing off makes a clear link between the title and the image. Something which is not always apparent in lots of album covers. 

Despite the image being very original and artistic, we do think it has similarities in with existing media products such as this album by Justin Timberlake.  We created a logo which identifiable and used a clear yet distinctive font similar to many album covers in the existing genre. I also think that both covers have a very distinctive dark ambience to them. 

When researching posters we discovered that the majority of posters were just extended versions of the album covers. We felt it was essential to be different therefore we used a different image than our album cover but kept the same theme and the same clothing. The only exception we found was the Britney Spears poster you can above. The name of the album is Circus and the poster is different than the CD yet still has a clear relation to the name and theme of the album