Evaluation Question 1

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

Through representation, language, genres and styles, media conventions are used to construct meaning in order to reach a certain audience. Choosing the target audience for our task, therefore, was something we took very seriously. As a group we agreed to create a music video which would appeal to a vast majority of people, rather than a small audience. We particularly wanted to attract the teenage and young adult audience as statistics highlight this age range to have the highest rates in regards to listening and purchasing music. We researched popular trends and interests within this age range, through media conventions such as music, magazines, television, advertising, radio and fashion, in order to create a music video which would successfully reach this specific target audience.
We wanted to use a conventional piece of music for our video in order to reach our target audience successfully. We therefore researched popular music genres for the teenager/young adult age group and discovered in official statistics that the ‘2009 charts show that Pop, House and Electronic dance music is gaining popularity’. As a result we decided to use Electro-pop band ‘Soft Toy Emergency’ and their song ‘Critical’ for our project.
Although the group ‘Soft Toy Emergency’ features five band members consisting of a woman singer and four male musicians we decided to change this and use only one singer. We made this change because after looking at recent music charts it was obvious that the majority of talent was by solo artists who had a greater success rate compared to bands. We followed a mainstream approach towards choosing the singer who would appear within the music video, eventually deciding to use a young and attractive female to play the part. In connection to the target audience, young female artists are able to reach a vast majority of age groups and other group genres compared to bands and male singers. Young female artists are usually enjoyed by teenagers and young adults who enjoy their music as well as females who aspire to look and live like them or even the male population who find them talented and attractive.
As most upcoming female artists have a flavour for fashion, we decided to research pre-existing music videos and television series’ featuring female artists who attract our specific target audience which could give us some inspiration for the appearance of our singer. Esmee Denters and Madonna are female singers who have a similar song genre and are frequently featured in media conventions in the latest fashion wear. In their music videos they are seen to be wearing a variety of elaborate, classy and up to date outfits which are appealing to the audience.








A new television programme we took particular interest in was ‘90210’, which has become branded for its popular fashion style. The main stars in this series are always seen in classy, sexy and appealing clothes, an image which we wanted to mirror on our female singer in the music video. After researching, we discovered that our target audience also has the highest rates affected by the hypodermic theory in relation to magazines and television programmes. Therefore the more the target audience watches programmes such as 90210, the more they want to look like the characters.



We linked this theory to our music video through the belief that if our singer looked like the characters in these popular programmes, then people would find the music video much more appealing. With this ideology the audience would feel drawn into the new community that our music video creates, and so we used this concept as the basis for the images that we would portray in our music video.
Again, we followed themes of existing music video conventions in terms of choosing representation of the narrative, through researching a number of different music videos. We looked thoroughly at our chosen song ‘Critical’ which describes a woman who wants her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone and ‘get over’ their old relationship. We therefore researched songs with relationship related narratives such as Katy Perry ‘Hot and Cold’, JoJo ‘Get out, Right now’ and Beyonce ‘If I were a boy’. One music video we took particular interest in was Mariah Carey ‘Touch my body’.






We really liked the way in which producers took the narrative and linked it to the video which featured a ‘computer nerd’ dreaming of a relationship with the beautiful singer. We found that the music video was humorous and exciting to watch, which inspired us to bring in a male ‘nerd figure’ for our video and to add a humorous narrative as well as featuring the glamorous singer.
To sum up our music video in relation to other conventions, we didn’t develop or challenge any existing music videos, instead we chose to use cliché trends and techniques to create a typical pop/dance genre video in order to ensure that we reached our target audience.