EVALUATION: Question 1

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

During the process of learning about codes and conventions of music videos, all the media theorists and in analysing music videos I learnt a lot about how a music video is made and how they are constructed. This greatly helped me come up with ideas and concepts and objectives I wanted to reach in my own music video. Through learning about these theorists, I began to understand how the technical side of filmmaking works and I began to understand how this industry works and how it can be manipulated to suit certain agenda.

The opening scene of that addresses mental health

Learning about theorists such as Roland Barthes and Levi Strauss gave me insight on how media has developed over the years and how its still developing with contemporary theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Tzvetan Todorov. So many of these theories discuss societal issues and imbalances that we as society have accepted and failed to address and discuss. Laura Mulvey, for instance, is one of the most influential theorists currently. She discusses the male gaze and how it has affected women and men throughout society over the years. Her theory suggests that women are portrayed in the media through the eye of a heterosexual man. This means that that this construction of women creates the women every man wants and the women every woman wants to be. And the effects of this are music videos that degrade woman by having them stand around wearing revealing outfits, doing seductive poses to attract the man. This can be seen in many RnB, Hip-hop and Rap music videos, especially a couple years ago. The women in the videos are rarely fully dressed and if they are they are still portrayed in a sexy way that will attract the man. Because of representations like these many women have aspired to become like those women due to societal pressure to abide by these unwritten rules about women for women. Theories such as Mulvey’s Male Gaze oppose these rules and question societies need to have women seen as inferior. These are initiatives that I believe are quite necessary especially in the world we live in today where many more people are starting to realise the power of media and its capacity. This was important to me in during the process of creating my music video. I wanted to do something that, regardless of its entertainment purpose, taught my young audience something. The song my partner and I chose was about a man drinking his problems away. Throughout the song, he explained how all these people have taken advantage of him and how so many people came back to his life after he became famous and successful. This song I believe was written from a broken man perspective. It’s also about how all these people now care about him now that he has something to offer them. I wanted to communicate this point and how things like this can turn a person crazy. The beginning of one of my mockup music videos, it opened with the model/character turning her head around and the scene flashing between two angles of the same head action. This scene was created to display the escalation of ones’ mental health. The reason I chose to tackle mental health in this music video is because I wanted to reach our young audience and transmit this message of care to them. considering our audience varies from 16 – 21 year olds we considered the fact that our audience, around this age, tend to be making some of the most crucial decisions of their lives and with this comes a lot of stress, anxiety and unnecessary pressure. Mental health is relevant here because most of the time mental health is ignored in situation such as these, and in these circumstances mental health tends to be one of the most important factors of progression. In saying this, using the techniques that the theorist taught me I constructed a music video that helped portray that message that I thought was important for my audience to hear. Barthes, Strauss and Goodwin helped me tremendously in constructing this effective music video and I believe helped me clearly set my point across. Goodwin’s theory of the 6 key aspects of a music video helped me create a convincingly professional music video that was more than just a message but an entertaining, satisfying watch. This also made it easier to digest the message and bring back recurring watchers and viewers. It sparked interest. This mock-up video taught me a lot about constructing subtle messages in music videos. I took this knowledge and tried to implement it into our final music video and tried to construct it in a way that both I and my partner agreed was the best decision for the group. I believe we could have done better with embedding a message using theorist and real media productions. I believe our video was effective but could have included a deeper message and more inclusion of some of the theories.

In the process of creating the digipack, we referred to many advertisement and marketing theories, such as the bigger the writing the more important it is; the date and the most important information must be legible from a good distance away; the advert and digital package should be eye-catching and interesting. We took these theories and implemented them into our final productions and got many good responses. In the process of exploring digital packages and adverts, I created many experimental pieces that I thought my partner and I could refer to during the production of our final digipack. I created about 4 potential digipacks, 4 adverts and a couple fully completed digipacks. During this experimental phase, I learnt a lot about marketing and how that works. As I analysed digipacks and looked at some other digipacks for inspiration I found out a lot about why designers colour the texts that they colour in a certain way and why they use a different font and even why the fine print is so small and insignificant. After acquiring this knowledge, I took this information and created all of these digipacks and adverts and tried to add these ideas to our final product but was a little to late to be able to fully implement it into our final production. Regardless, I did notice my partner did include some of the techniques I used in my edits. Overall, I believe we were quite successful in the production of the Digital Package and the Advertisement as we used real marketing and advertisement theories and techniques.