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

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

2. Our advanced portfolio project was to create a music video for
our chosen song. Me and my group chose to create a video for
Ariana Grande’s ‘Santa Tell Me’, taken from her 2013 Christmas
EP ‘Christmas Kisses’. We chose to create a music video for this
song as we started filming before Christmas and continued
during and after Christmas, therefore we felt that we could take
advantage of the Christmas period.
Before creating our Music video we conducted research into real
media products and the conventions of a real media product. By
carrying out this research it enabled us to draw ideas from
various music videos as well as from digipaks and websites in
order to create a successful artist with a successful image.

3. Conventions of music videos
According to Goodwin music videos work around
three codes: music, lyrics and iconography.
His theory is broken up into 6 key factors:
• Music video demonstrates genre
characteristics
• Relationship between lyrics and visuals
• Relationship between music and visuals
• Lots of close ups of the artist
• Notion of looking and voyeuristic treatment
of the female body
• Intertextual reference

5. Relationship between lyrics and
visuals. We filmed some scenes to
reflect the lyrics of the song. I.e "I've
been down this road before" and "It's
hard to tell if this is just a fling" Thus
representing the use of a convention
of Goodwin's theory.
Slight voyeurism. We used slight voyeurism
in our music video as this is another
convention of Goodwin's theory. To
represent our use of voyeurism we had legs
showing and the chest and shoulders, as
shown in the images.
Our music video has intertextual reference of both
Christmas and the Grinch. In our green screen scenes
we opted for Grinch illustrations as the background,
as well as the background the artist is also wearing
Grinch pyjamas in some shots. The intertextual
reference of Christmas is portrayed through the use
of the Santa hat as well as the Grinch backgrounds
and PJ's and also through the reindeer teddy and
reindeer ears.

6. Music genre conventions
As the genre of our music video is POP we knew that our video had
to be very bright and have a fun and happy atmosphere in order to
reflect that it is a pop music video.
In order to represent the pop genre of our music video we made
sure that our mise en scene was bright and consisted of
events/activities that were relatable to our target audience of teens
to young adults.
As the theme of our music video is Christmas and has a romantic
storyline/narrative, it meant that we had to portray a joyous
Christmas atmosphere.
Due to the theme and genre of our song it meant that we had to
make use of bright lights and colours and to make sure that the
picture quality was very high so that the artist doesn’t appeared
washed out. It was also important that our artist was dressed in
bright colours but also was dressed well and in fashionable clothes.

7. A lot of music videos, especially pop ones tend to have a
narrative. For example Taylor Swift, there always seems to
be a narrative in her videos, and mainly about romance. If
you look at her 'Bad blood' music video you can see a clear
narrative, which is portrayed throughout the whole video.
Our music video challenges this convention as we opted
not to have a narrative in our video. Instead wed decided
to focus on the star image.
For our music video we
took inspiration from a
variety of pop music
videos. For example
Paramore's 'Still Into
You' and Selena
Gomez's 'Hit The lights'
inspired our use of the
balloons

8. The use of polaroids stemmed from Bridgit Mendler's
'Ready or Not'. Whilst she takes the polaroids in her
music video we decided to use the polaroids as a
backdrop for when our artist is singing. The use of
the fairy lights also stemmed from the video and we
used them as a backdrop alongside the polaroids,
this created a bright atmosphere and a clean scene.
We looked at Natalie La Rose's
video for 'Somebody', from this
we adopted the use of teddy
bears, which we incorporated
with the balloons. Whilst Natalie
uses big teddy bears we decided
to opt for more Christmassy
teddies. Therefore we used a
variety of 'My Little Pony' teddies
and put reindeer ears on them,
we also used a mini reindeer
teddy.