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

When creating our media product, we researched a wide variety of real music videos to develop our understanding of the typical conventions of music videos. By watching these, we could look at what the typical conventions of videos of our genre were, and gain ideas of how we could develop or challenge some of these. We think that whilst we have kept to some of the typical conventions, as these help to make the video look realistic and professional, we have also developed and challenged some conventions, which helps to make our video more creative and unique.

In our music video, our structure includes a narrative sequence, showing a deteriorating relationship, as well as sequences showing the artist playing the piano and singing along to the song. The use of a narrative alongside clips of the musician is a common structure of music videos, and below are some examples of real music videos which use this structure:







We decided to use this structure as we thought that the song that we picked had a clear narrative to it, which we thought that we would be able to tell clearly and creatively, and as the song also has a prominent piano track, we thought that it would be relevant to show the artist playing the piano and singing the track. However, if we had just stuck to either the narrative or the musician throughout the whole video, we may have had a more limited range of shots and ideas, which could have made the video a bit repetitive. Therefore, we decided to combine these two, so that the shots of the artist are used to break up the narrative, to keep the video interesting for the viewing audience. We also developed our structure by including the present narrative, of the male actor walking down the street reminiscing, aswell as the past narrative, showing the memories which the male actor is thinking about, which show the relationship breaking down. By including both the past and present narrative, we feel that we have been able to tell the narrative more clearly and as the audience sees the relationship slowly deteriorating, they are able to understand them more and develop and emotional connection with them.

Another convention that we found when researching music videos was a relationship narrative. The narrative of either the development or the deterioration of a relationship between a male and a female is a common feature in music videos, as the video is normally used to tell the story of the song. We decided to show the deteriotation of a relationship, as we felt that this fit in with the lyrics and the mood of the song. However, we tried to stay away from the normal cliche's that are normally used, and tried to show the breakdown of the relationship through subtle actions, rather than obvious cliche's, whilst still making the narrative clear to the audience.