Evaluation Q1

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

The advanced brief was to successfully create a music video. My media product, the music video and the ancillary products -  the digipak and magazine advert - is in the musical genre of R&B. In order for me to have successfully realised my music video media products using conventions typically associated with this genre. It was necessary for me to conduct research to understand what is associated with the genres. Because the artist that I had chosen (Kaneo Rees) had a relatively universal sound I had to no trouble conducting the research into the roots of the music, looking into artists like Ne-Yo, Chris Brown and Kanye West. These artists are similar because they can both sing and rap. Kaneo's sound is dominated by piano and the sounds that they create. Although the song of his that we chose to use (I Can't Do This Anymore) has roots in electronic, I only know this because of contact with him via Facebook, so may not be apparent in the final cut. The location below were an initial inspiration for setting.

The inspiration that this video created was to do with the urban setting creating a desolate and dark place to reflect the nature of the song's messages and values.

Illustrating the Gunther Kress theory, meaning; R&B "audience's need/feel comfortable when visiting a common/favoured or appealing text" (Narrative) This is a natural situation of the genre of having a couple that the song is centered around.

Also the lack of coherent dress sense between the couple shows that the genre of R&B appeals to the masses nowadays whereas that wasn't so, when the genre was formed in the 1940's. Then the genre was created by African-Americans so for a large amount of time, until the genre was metamorphised into what we know nowadays 'Contemporary R&B', the genre was exclusive to them with few exceptions.

The use of black and white to represent the past isn't necessarily associated with the genre of our artist but with such performers as: The Script

The genre of this group is another one that has become largely popular so an amalagmation of the two's conventions could potential result in something that could cross boundaries and appeal to many different people.

In my video to make the narrative of the video performance based like a story or journey (montage), where the lyrics and visuals are the focus of the video captivating the audience; utilising Andrew Goodwin's theory that audiences find interest through a clear relationship between the lyric and the visual.

The concept of genre is something is very hard to adhere to in the media text of music video with what seems to be every other video seems to take what we know as certain conventions and invert them so the very idea of 'conventions of music videos' is a lucid term.

This being the first video from the artist there are certain rules that are supposed to followed, and the fact that we aren't being managed by record labels means that we don't necessarily need to adhere to them. The main one is to feature the artist to make him apparent to the audience, we couldn't do this, so we inverted this to create a hugely narrative based piece.