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

·         Through our research that we carried out when beginning our project, we were able to map out the conventions of acoustic music videos which is the genre of the song that we chose.

·         We found that a lot of the music videos had a very basic narrative allowing their audience to make their own interpretations on what they think is going on in the music video and to what the message that is the artist is trying to put across. In our music video, we did just this. We put the couples together looking happy in scenes that people associate with couples and friendship such as firework displays, wedding, first dance, friends being together, sitting close to each other, holding hands, talking and laughing etc, ending in the artist being with someone in the end.  This narrative was not too in depth as we wanted the audience to make their own minds up as to what they thought was meant by ‘better together’ and who and how you can be. This allows us to show the feel that acoustic music has in that it is relaxing and the nature of the lyrics of this song are not too in depth so that too much thought is not having to be put into it.

·         We made links with the lyrics and the visuals so that when ‘better together’ was sung, there was a couple so that the audience get a hint as to what message we were trying to put across.

·         Due to the nature of the song being relaxed and easy listening, we decided to use soft cross fade transitions rather than jumping from one clip to another in order for it to fit the sound. This makes it easier for the audience to follow.

·         The idea of a music video is to sell the artist as you cannot see them when you listen to their song. In order to do this, we made sure we established him as an acoustic artist. As soon as the lyrics come in in the song, we can see him on the screen. The close ups we use also highlight his key features his face such as the colour of his hair and the nature of his face. The use of his guitar was essential for the selling of him as a singer songwriter. It helps the audience with the visuals matching the music in that they can hear the guitar and see him playing it as he sings with it.

·         We did not have a dance routine as it does not match the genre of the song as dance routines are commonly found in pop genre music videos. We did pay attention to the beat of the song and ensured that discrete details such as the pace that he walked, couples walked etc. matched the beat of the song.