Forms And Conventions Of Media Products

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

Our music video uses the same forms and conventions as real music videos. We did this by researching real music videos on a user generated website, such as, Youtube to have a look and get some ideas of how music videos from different genres of music are constructed to suit the style of the lyrics. To do this, we focused our research on music videos that our chosen band, Paramore, have to see how they have constructed their performance, whether it is just band performance or whether they have included a narrative into their video.

We were able to establish a pattern in many music videos as there is a link between the lyric and the narrative on-screen to support the band playing the song. we decided to follow this pattern for our own video as it was a clear way to present it and makes the video as a whole easier for the audience to follow.

We broke our video up into narrative and performance sections, making it easier visually to understand what is going on. Introducing narrative into the video also helped the audience to make sense of the lyrics. Earlier in my blog i have gone into more detail about this process, from the 17th September onwards.

Going on to the aspect of narrative theory, Althusser, focuses on specific target audiences. For our video we have tried to make our video similar to the bands previous videos but also unique in that, the song is a different style to the rest of their songs and if the song videos are too similar the audience will lose interest.

Encoding meaning of the video, we have specifically produced our video so that it is very clear for the audience to make meaning of it, we want it to be easy for the audience to understand that the song is about a young girl who is torn between whether she wants to be with her boyfriend or not anymore and through out the song it is her trying to make up her mind, her final decision being made at the end of the song.

Challenging forms and conventions, we have done this with our magazine advert.



We have produced our magazine advert in a completely different style to most advertisements. We have made our advert seem like it is a picture within a picture, as you are looking at the information on the screen of an iPod. The picture is an iPod hanging out of a jean pocket, so this is more likely to attract the attention of a younger audience rather than older as this generation is more up to date with new technology and that is what we are aiming for.