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

At the beginning of our coursework, we wanted to create something that enabled people to make their own assumptions from our media product (the video)

 using their own thoughts and their own experiences. From that, we needed a brief storyline and narrative, in order to not outline it bluntly to our consumers. From this, we also didn't want to make the narrative too clear, so we decided to not make the obvious obvious. Our storyline was a prostitute/escort, who was alone and stuck in a cycle of routine and loneliness. We decided upon this after choosing our song, which was something we both really liked, and were familiar with, also something we beleive that the video didn't match the so

ng aswell as it could have done (click to view video).

Using existing videos and looking at artists that were based in a similar genr

e, we textually analysed them to see what narrative, mise en scene and editing techniques they used. The plain white t's, hey there delilah has a similar song, as it is acoustic, so we anaylsed the video and decided to make our mise-en-scene simmilar, by using simple colours and soft lighting to make things look subtle and to create a calm atmosphere. This can also be seen in Coldplay's video Fix You. Our media product (video) resembles these forms in the ways of mise-en-scene, but also develops them as it uses different sets of mise-en-scenes, as we have 3 different locations, unlike the video listed above, of which one, has one location.

The types of camera work we used enabled us to develop existing ones and also use similar ones that we thought were particulary effective in order to understand our product. Close ups were a common occurance, which meant the audience could clearly see the actress and using Dyer's theory of stereotypes, they will decode the meaning of our music video, understanding then that the actress is a prostitute. The editing we used needed to be similar to that of existing ones, so that the audience was able to decode the meaning of the editing techniques we used. We used a sepia effect :

to show the past tense of a dream, and also made this sharper to make it more outstanding, compared to our other content. We also made an emphasis onto the colour red,

as red represents lust, danger and sex, going with the red light district, and also the tradition of a red light being on in a prostitutes room. This colour red also helps the audience to decode the story of our intended, more than any other colour.

Andrew Goodwin's theory states a number of key features which distinguish the music video as a form. A relationship between the visuals and the lyrics is shown, as the lyrics resemble a lonely person's life, and how it's "not good enough for me, no.", and the visuals show a lonely life of a prostitute, they amplify eachother. The second feature is that genre's ar

e complex and diverse in terms of music video style and iconography, the genre to be decoded needs the audiences' social and cultural experiences, meaning the story may be differently understood by different types of audiences, however, certain aspects such as the costumes and props make emphasis on our main character. For example what the character wears is an icon to what she is. The third aspect is that record companies will demand a lot of close-ups: 

of the main artist or vocalist. However, because we didn't use the artist in our music video, as the song is quite emotional, we beleived it would be extremely cheesy and would label our music video as not artistic and different, this is why we chose to use an actress which had no relevance with the artist himself, as they are totally different. Instead we used close ups on the main character as shown in the picture above, this helps the audience identify her. 

In conclusion, different social and cultural experiences mean that they will decode our storyline and narrative differently to others and therefore the music video will be a different experience for different people. Our choice was that our music video represented the song, but also was quite controversial in concern of social context, as we wanted to create something that people wouldn't be used to seeing, but using editing techniques and such in order for the audience to understand.