Question 1: In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before we started to make our music videos, we were taught that there were different types of conventions of a music video. The first one that I learnt was Laura Mulvery's theory which was that women in music videos are turned into sex objects for the pleasure of a man. We did not follow this theory because the person who was going to perform (Jaleesa) was not comfortable with this and it wouldn't match the music. Then theres Carol Vernallis theory which we used and she found that edits are used a lot more frequently in music video compared to films and that they stand out as disjuncture and that the editing seems to have a rhythmic basis closely connected to the song. The main points of Carol's observation are:

• Edits may be very obvious to draw attention to themselves such as special effects
• The rule of continuity editing are broken in order to bring attention to what is on the screen
• Jump cuts are often used 
• The camera may move in time with the music. 

We used this quite a bit because this made our music video more interesting and enjoyable to watch. The last one that we learnt about was from Andrew Goodwin. Andrew Goodwin feels that traditional narrative doesn't really apply to pop videos. He said that pop videos approach narratives from a different angle to novels and films. He said that are three different relationships between the music and the music video. There was 1. illustration 2. amplification and 3. disjuncture and that is the one we used.This is where there is a little connection between the lyric and video or where the video contradicts the lyric. In "Candy Rain" video by Soul For Real, it sings about how it feel to be in love and the video is 4 boys dancing and singing. 

 

What inspired my ideas to put forward for our music video was a video called "Trust And Believe" by Keyshia Cole.What inspired me from Keyshia Cole's music video is the story line in the video and the shots that were used to show Keyshia facial expressions while singing and how she felt about her boyfriend cheating on her. The story line in the video will be slightly similar to our music video because both of the videos is about the main girl/artist who has a boyfriend and the boyfriend cheats on her. The shots that I really like were the close ups and the extreme close ups of Keyshia's face.