Evaluation Question 1

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

During the research stages of my video, I quickly found that the music videos in my songs genre were almost always concept with unusual and controversial images to keep the audiences attention. Examples of these are Voices by Disclosure, King by Years & Years and Storm Queen - Look Right Through (MK Remix) I also found that a lot of Electronic Dance music videos often featured a representation of the audience dancing to the video's song such as Sigma's Nobody To Love and Freaks by Timmy Trumpet. I realised this was done so that it related more to the targeted audience which is young people in clubs, and they do this by resembling the scenes that you would find at the target audiences favorite place. This in turn reminds the audience of the enjoyment they have at similar scenes such as clubs and beaches, the audience then subconsciously recognise the video as a reminder of the good times they had. Keeping this in mind I decided during the planning process to keep this concept theme in order to appeal to my target audience who were already familiar with the music video conventions in this genre of music, however I wanted to make my video stand out to my target audience with a fresh and unique style of various dance types all performing their own dance to my song. I found that sticking with the typical stereotyped music video for electronic dance allowed my video to fit in with other professional videos but it also offered a alternative new concept of dance video that differs from others since at no point does it show the artist or any other actors, where other similar dance videos do, such as Michael Jacksons Black or White video, this has the same idea of different dance types dancing to the same song. And for that it was considered a great video as it was far from what was considered a typical pop music video. However mine differs further as Michael is present through much of the video and my artist isn't. I believe this keeps the audience interested and stands out from other videos that offer the same style and images that are stereotyped with my target audience. This I hope challenges the usual conventions of my genre, and offers something new to the audience.

However many parts of my video did include conventions of an indie music video, Going back to my blog post detailing the conventions of an Indie music video I found that some of the typical conventions were similar to my own. For example a large part of Indie music is not following conformity, and by using concept music videos to express this. I felt my video did exactly that with its concept style of just dance. Indie music videos often express the lyrics of their song through the visual images of the video, the video I produced had a complete focus on the dancers and the equality of them together, this I felt did exactly that of visualising he lyrics. Also my locations which I intentionally chose to be urban and more easily represent locations that my audience could recognize such as small dance studios, school classrooms and town halls which is a typical trait of Indie videos. I also utilized handheld camera movements which followed the dancers so that the audience felt they were watching in real life. It also made the video feel more exciting, the handheld technique is often used in dance music videos to represent the energy in the dancing. These techniques reached my goal of making the whole video feel more indie. And the dancers performing live in my video follow the usual characteristics of a pop music video or boy/girl band.

Following Goodwin's Theory allowed me to follow the conventions of professional music videos. For example Goodwin suggests that most music videos visuals relate to the lyrics of the song. So for my video I made frequent reference to the lyrics DANCE by displaying imagery of dance. As well as creating a link between the visuals and music by editing the cuts between shots to sync with the beat as well as the falling editing shot with the dropping sound in my song. Lastly I used Goodwin's theory, notion of looking to replicate the typical genre characteristics found in electro music videos with my belly dancers. By using voyeuristic visuals in my video I hope to attract a larger male audience which resembles the aims of professional artists videos. In conclusion I think the use of dancing throughout my video both conforms and challenges the usual conventions of an electro music video. It conforms as electro music videos often use a lot of dancing to better relate to the young target audience that are sterotypically viewed as enjoying dancing at clubs. And I think it challenges the conventions of professional music videos as mine is purely dancing with no narrative, images of the artist or instrument. Both of these factors allow my video to appeal to the target audience while also offering something new that I hope stands out.