Evaluation - Question One

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

The most significant theory we looked at was Goodwin's theory, and we conformed to five significant things he said were seen in most music videos. Genre characteristics was the first we decided to conform to, having acoustic/pop as our genre we decided to stick with the expectation that there would be a narrative, so we created a narrative for the chosen song. Another common characteristic with acoustic/pop videos is to have some performance in with the narrative, so we did this as well, having In Blue Skies performing their song 'This Day Again'. 

A real media text we closely looked at was Gabrielle Aplin's 'Panic Cord'. We saw in her video the mix of performance and narrative, so we mimicked this to some extent to ensure we conformed to the conventions and expectations of our audience. This video also had a similar storyline to ours, so it was very useful to study. 

Below you can see the clips from both This Day Again and Panic Cord. There are clear similarities, and so we have managed to conform to Goodwin's theory as well as using real media texts to develop our ideas. 

We also conformed to the fact that in the majority of music videos, the artist has a close up. We did with for each band member, giving them each screen time - planning them all in through the storyboard helped immensely.

There was also the link between the lyrics and the visuals and between the visuals and the music. Each shot change happens on the beat of the music, and then parts of the music video will relate directly to what is being sung over the top. For example, when the line, 'will keep our waters calm' is being sung we have the footage of the sea on screen.

Lastly in Goodwin's theory, we have the motifs and iconography. The band In Blue Skies almost always stands in a line with certain band members together on either side of the lead singer Jade, and so we stuck to this and made sure when they were performing they were in a line with two members either side of Jade, as they have done in previous music videos. 

However we did challenge Todorov's theory as our narrative contained no equilibrium and was left 'unresolved'. We did this because we wanted to leave the narrative in a kind of loop, so that 'This Day Again' could be repeated over and over and never have an end point or conclusion.