EVALUATION 1 - In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms of Conventions of Real Media Products?

For A2 media studies, we were asked to create varied media products, such as a music video, album digipak and advertisement. We had to create a band for ourselves in which the music video and digipak would be made for - our blog would essentially become a progress tracker with updates focusing on the 'band'. Our band reflected our chosen music style of Pop Rock and this was mostly due to the initial research into the codes and conventions of our chosen genre. My partner Sam and I carried out extensive research into the genre and our previous knowledge and understanding of rock music benefited us greatly. This gave us the impetus to generate our own ideas as well as sticking to the typical genre formulas that were there for us to play around with. After much deliberation and a song change midway through the process, we eventually the chose the Pop Rock song 'The Ballad Of Mona Lisa' by 'Panic! At The Disco!'.

Pop Rock Album Research Moodboard.

In the Official video for the song 'The Ballad Of Mona Lisa' the narrative appears complex but it actually quite simple but strange and unusual. It does not follow Andrew Goodwin's theory that music videos are simply an extension of the lyrics as the song has not real focused meaning and is quite broad in interpretation, however the music video is focused and is actually about a murder and takes place at the wake of the deceased. the video is essentially about discovering the deceased was killed and who killed him. This is shown through shots of the performer singing with the band and then different shots of him singing as the dead soul of the deceased character, he is shown reaching out to people and eventually finds someone and shows them he was killed. The narrative in the video is very clever and the two versions of the same character idea along with the final reveal to the videos meaning at the climax was something Sam and I really appreciated and found engaging. We knew from the start we were going to include something similar in style in our video. Of course we never wanted to simply steal the same idea as we wanted our video to be personal to us and a product of our creation and invention. We then looked into some music videos that featured similar ideas and themes such as '30 seconds to Mars' - 'The Kill' where two opposing sides of the same characters personality fight against each other until one is consumed. We felt that mixing these conventions of the ideas we wanted to use was the best possible way to balance our own ideas whilst still incorporating typical genre forms. As a result of this our narrative became the story of a normal everyday man being followed by visions of an alternative version of himself, who would be the performer of the song. As the song progresses the visions become increasingly more regular and longer until the two characters become one at the end of the video. We felt that the final reveal used in 'The Ballad of Mona Lisa' and the battle between two versions of the same character from 'The Kill' were perfect conventions to follow and use as a basis for our original narrative creation. 

Our music video balanced performance shots with narrative shots as well as having both connect with each other toward the end of the video. We studied Rock Pop narrative styles at length during our research progress and found that most of the shots were basic regular style shots seen in most projects, however some shots were more elaborate such as shots taken from above to establish the setting, and shots of parties that involved crowds of people and a huge amount of props. We have developed greatly from our AS project but the shot types we used were quite similar due to restrictions of the filming equipment we had available to us. However our execution of the filming of the shots has vastly improved over the year and the filming of these shots have become much easier, almost second nature. I Would, if I had had more time and less pressure to reach a deadline, liked to of used more advanced shot types but I feel we have achieved a final piece that although small on scale looks big in ideas and execution.