This is my A2 media coursework blog. I will be creating a music video for the song 'Confessions' by 'We Are The Ocean'. The project also involves creating a digipak album and a magazine advert for the digipak.

I am working in a group with:

Saturday 26 March 2011

Evaluation Question 1:

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


  • The conventions that were in our music video were the stereotypical ones of the alternative rock and post-hardcore genre and I think that we followed them quite well with the resources and limited time that we had as A2 level media students.
  • We collected our performance footage from an actual gig that We Are The Ocean did in Leeds at 'The Cockpit' (Mary filmed this on her HD camera). This was so that it could have lots of verisimilitude and be as real as we could make it. A performance footage aspect is quite often used most of the time within music videos in the genres of alternative rock and post-hardcore so we decided it would be a very good idea to use it in ours and it would also break up the narrative aspect of the video a little bit more for some variety and to keep the audiences attention and also to add more depth so we don't just have the narrative part.
  • Fast paced editing was also used by us which matched the music because this is also a very key stereotypical convention to the genres that we were working in (post-hardcore and alternative rock).
  • We have also included lots of different angles within the video to make it more interesting for the audience. When we were filming at the shoot we made sure that we took loads of coverage shots so it gave us lots more scope to work with and  we could fall back on it them if we got back into the editing suite and found we didn't have enough, this would hopefully save us from doing lots of re-shooting of the material and we found that the extra shots that we took that we didn't plan actually worked really well in some places and are better than the shots and takes that we planned at first on the call sheet.
  • For the magazine advert and digipak album we looked at existing articles and digipaks to get inspiration from. So for this we looked at 'NME' and 'Kerrang' especially to see specific real life examples and what the normal layout was and what we thought did and did not work. We Are The Ocean have been featured quite a few times in 'Kerrang' before so we thought that magazine especially would be a good place for us to advertise our digipak album. 
  • We added a blue colour filter to the music video and digipak to create the social realist feel and show the grittiness of the central protagonist's life colour filters are also very common in other music videos from the genres that we were working within. We also used realistic settings and locations within our video which created verisimilitude. We featured the same protagonist all the way through and brought in a few others that were very stereotypical and stock characters (such as brother, ex, friends etc)  throughout to give the narrative more depth. Her clothing was also very typical to the genres that we had chosen to work in. She wore a white dress and had lots of black make up around her eyes. We got this idea from a 'Paramore' video for 'Emergency' in which Hayley Williams (the lead singer) wears a white dress and also has big black make up around her eyes we decided to copy this convention and use it within our video and also the target audience would recognise it as a convention and would be more likely to tell other people about the video and consume it more than just once. 
  • Overall we think that our video generally uses and develops the typical conventions of a music video from our genre but we did find quite a few limitations in making the video as we are just 17 and 18 year olds in sixth form making our own music video. We had limited equipment, resources and time but taking this in to consideration we are both really happy with the final outcome. 

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