Evaluation- In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms of conventions of real media products? (How does it fit or not fit the genre)

For our A2 course within media this year, we has to create a music video in whichever genre we liked and also create a CD cover, inserts for the album and a magazine advert that would accompany the CD. Both the music video and ancillary tasks had to be based around the same artist/band. Our group chose that we were going to research the typical codes and conventions of the 'pop' genre and look carefully at different artists that are already in the charts.
I worked in a group with Romy and Olivia who were who I was going to work with throughtout the duration of this project. Before researching any further into which artists and song we wanted to create our music video too, we did some further research into Pop music videos, to see the typical codes and conventions that are followed within music videos of this genre. By researching this further it meant we had a much better understanding of the 'Pop' genre and to see what you would typically expect too see within a music video in this genre. We then sat down together as a group to discuss what we would each like to include within our video and think of the best ways we could represent and reflect the genre within our own music video. After having this dicussion we came to the conclusion that we were going to re-create a music video for the song 'Who's Laughing Now' by Jessie J.
Ancillary Tasks Using, Challenging or Developing Codes


I further researched into other Pop music videos and could immediately see there was a balance between narrative and performance shots, especially in the official Jessie J's video- 'Who's Laughing Now'. The narrative continues throughout the video but always cut back to perfomance shots of just Jessie singing in the classroom scene on her own, so we could see that it stuck to the same narrative throughout; which showed a young girl being bullied within a school setting.

By analysing the lyrics of the song further we can soon see that the young girl has proved to beat teh bullying and this is really emphasised within the lines ''Who's Laughing Now'' when she talks about her class friends that were bullying her in the beginning. We found this narrative to be something that we would be able to capture quite well within our own music video and create a high standard music video to fit the codes and conventions of pop music videos.

We filmed a number of shots of our main singer, Olivia, singing in the classroom and made sure we included shots from different angles and showing both mid shots and close ups. We then went on to film Romy, which in our video was the younger Jessie being bullied, in corridor scenes where she was showing that she was 'fighting back' and being 'rebellious'.

PHOTOS OF ANGLES OF LIV
SCREEN SHOTS OF ROMY

We found it quite easy to film what we wanted to show within our music video as we were already in the school setting and the had the props and locations to be able to produce something that showed the narrative very similar to the official music video.

EMBED OFFICIAL
EMBED OURS

We kept the idea of the on-going narrative throughout the video which really fit in with the codes and conventions, but also slightly challenging them at the same time.
By analysing different shot types in other music videos it gave us a much clearer understanding of what we wanted to include within our own music video. By analysing videos within the 'pop' genre I feel we did really well capturing different shots, developing and using the codes and conventions of the genre within our video.

Within my Foundation portfolio, video was something that I didn't chose to produce as I felt I was more confident with producing something using photoshop. Therefore my knowledge was very little of shots as it was something that I brought through with me from my GCSE Media. Therefore I didn't have as great of an advantage as some people may have had within my class. The people that I chose to work with however did have a little bit more knowledge than I did. We attempted many shots that were similar to the official Jessie J video which really challenged the conventions because it was typical shots that we would expect to see. I feel with the shots that we did get to use we really used the codes and conventions well.  

Another way we used the particular conventions of the 'Who's Laughing Now' music video was by using the same amount of actors as what was included within the original video. We found this a bit difficult to achieve as it was hard to get a large amount of people in the same place at the same time. Luckily we managed to arrange a day where we could film some shots with everyone within our media class which really made our first scene in the video look well.