EVALUATION: Notes and Ideas for Q1

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

Forms and Conventions
Vernallis' Theory
 - Camera moves in time with music - the camera is moving all through our video, it is never static.
 - Jump cuts and obvious edits  - one place in our video where we have used jump cuts is at the beginning of the third verse (Dionne's) - going back and forward on two different shots, both being close-ups of Dionne with a similar background, but it is obvious that they are different shots. There are three or four jump cuts between these two shots.  We also used slow-motion in parts of our video, which is often seen in music videos.
 - Use of base tracks - our video uses several base tracks, both of all 3 girls together and individual base tracks. In order to have a base track, we needed to film the whole song in one go - and select the parts of the base track we wanted to use or not as we were editing.
 - Rules of continuity editing are broken - As we used base tracks, the video showed the performers in different locations, but these locations would each appear again several times in the video. There is no narrative to our music video, no continuity - it moves between locations and focuses on the performers, not on a story.

Goodwin's Theory
 - Artist image - the three performers are the focus of our video - their image is created through the use of a lot of close-ups on each performers, and the group identity is created through many different group shots.
 - Style of the music video - the structure of our music video is very similar to other videos of girl group songs, and the way it is edited to the beat is very specific to the pop genre - the editing makes the video dynamic.
 - Ignoring narrative - our video does not follow a narrative structure, but focuses on the performance, and viewers are free to have their own interpretation of the video.
 - Importance of lip syncing - in our music video, the performers are lip syncing most of the time and they do this while looking straight at the camera, which allows for the audience to feel included and to relate to the performers.
 - Technical aspects - the editing is done to the beat; the colours and lighting are similar throughout the video, creating a strong and consistent mood for the whole song.



Breaking conventions
The music video we created follows a lot of the rules and conventions, but we also have a few features which challenge these convention:
 - Costume changes - one of the most widely used feature in music videos, especially in girl group pop videos, is the change of costume - girls often wear at least 3 outfits throughout the video, usually very colourful. While at first we wanted to follow this convention and change our costumes, only breaking the convention by them being monochrome, we decided to only have one set of costumes in our video, which challenges the convention.