Evaluation by Sophie Pritchard

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Our media product includes a music video, a digipak and a magazine advert, all of which that follow music video forms and conventions and also Goodwin’s music video theory. The music video that we created is a conceptual video as it does not follow a narrative; instead it involves random different ideas that have been combined together to create a comical and interesting video. The style and genre of the music video is a comedy as we have created irony within it by taking traditional stereotypes of an R&B music video and playing with these ideas to create something funny.

The way we were able to make sure our music video followed the forms and conventions of a professional music video were through Andrew Goodwin writing in ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’ (Routledge 1992.) The first point Goodwin creates is music videos demonstrate genre characteristics. The music which we used for our video is ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis ft Mightyfools which is an R&B/ dance song. To portray this within our video we decided to use the characteristics of an R&B music video and a dance music video however to create it to be comical. The characteristics we used are sexual elements such as the washing of a car in a bikini, female dancers and eating of strawberries.

The reason why we did this was that within our genre of music videos, many of these elements are used often for example in the music video 'Candy Shop' by 50 Cent. They have become traditional within that genre. So to create our music video to be professional we decided to include them. If we were to copy each element exactly like how the professionals have done that would create our music video to not be unique so therefore we created it to be a comedy by making the stereotypical sexy females washing the car to be males wearing bikinis washing a car.

We gained this idea from the video by Aphex Twin, ‘Windowlicker' as this includes horrifically, ugly men being portrayed as women.

 The second point Goodwin makes is if there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. We accomplished doing this throughout our music video mainly by involving milkshakes. We included this in various parts of our video as by involving milkshakes makes the lyrics relate to the visuals.

  This was the only way we could relate the lyrics to the visuals because with the song being a remix there is no established lyrics within the song.
Third point stated is if there is a relationship between the music and the visuals. Are video definitely follows this point as the music for our video has a range of paces throughout, so we have fitted our visuals to go alongside the beats of the song. An example that shows this well is a part of the song where the pace increases dramatically, getting faster and faster, so to relate the music to the visuals we made the visuals cut to the beat and tempo which is where you see the morphing of a female into a male. 

Within our video we do include elements which involve frequent notion of looking, which is the 5th point Goodwin makes. We have many parts in the video that portray people in the video in a sexual way. For example the female dancers are dressed in a way that creates them to be sexy as they are wearing a leotard and high heels.

There is also camera angles that enhances this and shows voyeuristic treatment of the female body such as low angles, close ups and tilting to reveal the body this being a male gaze. The dancers in the video where also given a sexy choreographed dance which on its own gives the sense that they are on sexual display to the audience.

The last point made my Andrew Goodwin is if there is intertextual references made within the video. Within our video we did not use exact intertextuality however we did include common characteristics that are seen in many famous music videos such as 'These Boots are made for Walking' by Jessica Simpson which has a classic car wash scene in it.

The forms and conventions if our music video does however indicate our influences for certain parts of the video like as mentioned before The Aphex Twins - 'Windowlicker' was our main inspiration for the video as we liked the way the video created irony around the sexual elements within R&B music videos.

http://www.wix.com/sophielouise_1994/music-video-evaluation#!question-1