Hopes Evaluation

For our A2 media coursework we made a music video for a girl bands Pop song (The Saturdays). We filmed it with one girl singing with dance routine and back-up dancers.

Our music video uses forms and conventions of real media products. As it is a young female singer the conventions would be very similar to those of a girl band. We included lots of costume changes and scene changes; this meets the genre conventions of pop. The dance routine meets the conventions of young female pop artists. Take Beyonce or Lady Gaga for instance, they always have a dance routine in their music videos. Conventions were also met through the costume choices for the dance routine: the girls were wearing typically voyeuristic clothing which was quite tight and revealing.

We challenged the conventions through the costumes worn throughout the music video. Typically in female music videos the artists always wears voyeuristic clothing however throughout most of the video (other than the dance performance) she did not wear voyeuristic clothing.

The digipak meets the expected conventions in many ways including the positioning of the artist, on the front cover in the middle – this makes her the centre of attention and draws they eye immediately to her. The artists name is positioned directly under her in such a way that she appears to be sitting on it – this also makes her as a brand stand out to the audience because it is all so connected. We also included the DVD logo, a bar code, a website address, and a myspace address.

For our magazine Ad we also met all of the conventions. We included a close-up photo of the artist, the artists name, album name, tour dates, website address, itunes logo, star ratings from popular magazines, and a quote from a girl band saying ‘Album of the year’ to show that it is recognised within the music industry.

I think that the combination of the main product and the ancillary texts were very effective. From the name of the artist, to the scenes in the music video, and the designs of the ancillary texts (digipak and magazine ad) there was a clear theme used throughout. Nature. We did a couple of shots in the woods which were filled with leaves, because its Autumn (which was also the name we chose to give the artist). We chose to carry the theme of leaves throughout all of our products. For the digipak we used a photo of the artist sitting in a tree surrounded by leaves; on the back we put the songs, and extras all in three leafs.