A2 Media Studies Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Does your video meet or challenge conventions of music videos?

Our music video both adheres to and challenges the conventions established by pop music videos of the past. We used a closed structure as it is a convention of music videos and it is more satisfying for the audience to have closure. It is ambiguous in the sense that we don’t know where this boy is going with his life next, but we have the clear, definitive end to the story and closure as we know he has moved on from the breakup of his relationship.

Unlike Years and Years "Shine" our music video was different in that it actually had a narrative. It is not typical of a music video of the elecro dance genre to have a storyline as they are normally concept based. For example, the stereotypically boyfriend and girlfriend situation of where one catches the other with a new love interest. As well as having a narrative in our video challenges the conventions of a typical electro dance video as they are normally heavily concept based; however our video contains a narrative.

Another convention that I feel that we challenged was that in a typical electro dance video there is a lot of extremely fast paced shots and actions such as dancing. We had included some of these shots but also slower motion within the video for the audience to better understand the narrative. A similar aspect of our video that uses convention of a real music video is the colouring/ lighting we use. Our video is mainly set at night and early morning to show the different representations of light sources. This represents the different moods and emotions the characters may feel at the time.

The 1999 Children Now report stated that the majority of male characters in the media are heterosexual, that being associated with the world of work, and hiding their emotions. While we use the convention of the heterosexual character by showing his relationship with a female we challenge the other two as our lead protagonist has no association with work during the video and reveals his emotions to the audience.

 Laura Mulvey talks about the male appearance in the media. We however challenge the representation of women in music videos. I found out that 44%-81% of music videos contain sexual imagery or some form a sexual content. Women are often more so than men to be presented in provocative or revealing clothing to sexually objectified them. We go against this convention by having a suitably clothed female character presented in a non-sexualised way. Women in music videos are frequently portrayed as decorative objects that dance and pose and known as "eye-candy".

Our video obeys to Marx and Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society, as we only have white characters in a society where other races are few in this area and whites being dominant.

Todorov’s narrative theory says that every narrative follows this structure to matter what: equilibrium is disrupted, characters recognise the disruption and attempt to repair, resulting in a new equilibrium. Our video conforms to Todorov’s structural theory, even though it is intentionally edited in a different nonlinear structure. The story starts with the equilibrium of a young male in a relationship with a young female, the disruption is that she has found a new love interest and decides to cheat, lead recognises this betrayal by finding them, the attempt to repair is a conversation between the two in order to sort out the issue, and the new equilibrium is the lead having moved on from her and resulting in being happy with his new situation. We used this structure as audiences are used to this try of situation and can easily relate to the leads scenario.

Vladimir Propps who suggest the theory of character types in all media texts; that being that there is seven main characters that every narrative follows but ours just includes six. His characters as listed in our music video are as follows: the ‘Princess’ that needs saving which can be defined as the boyfriend being helpless and needs to be rescued, the ‘Hero’ being the same person of the ‘Princess’ as he saves himself from the relationship - this is much like Taylor Swift’s music video of Shake it Off as she too starts as the ‘Princess’ but later is revealed to be her own ‘Hero’ as she becomes her own dominate figure, this is representing the power of women even if they are alone. Other characters include that of the ‘Villain’ the girlfriend, the ‘False Hero’ of the new lover and lastly the ‘Helpers’ which are the group members who are seen singing as well.