Music Video Evaluation

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

When looking at the codes and conventions of music videos and more precisely our music video, we can see that our music video is from the house party/dance genre and the way we can see this is through the ingredients (codes and conventions) that we have used. We as a group were aiming to create a video that is based purely on the genre of dance music and house party music and we have achieved this by following most of the codes and conventions of this specific genre – opening paragraph could have a picture (screenshot from the music video) of all of us.

The first sign that you get that we are following  (using) the codes and conventions of music videos is the dance routines that we have included within our video. We have at least 5 dance routines in our music video as you can see here (show some of the dance routines) and as you can see they are easy dance routines to do that can be done at parties and this is using the codes and conventions showing that this song is from the dance genre. Another way in which we have used and followed the codes and conventions of our genre is by the way that we have kept with the theme of having constant fun and maintaining a good atmosphere. This is a very important code and convention of the dance/ house party genre as without the fun it makes it boring and dancing isn’t meant to be boring, it’s meant to be energetic and exciting and that what we have accomplished in our music video.

The ways in which we have gone against or developed our genre of music is through the use of costume and randomness. With regards to the costumes we have gone against the traditional party clothes that you would wear in a dance/ house party video, instead we have opted for mocking other pop videos and in doing this we have made sure to wear the costumes from the music videos in order to take the ‘mick’ and by doing this we are going against he traditional codes and conventions of this genre. The ways in which we have developed the genre is the way in that we have gone about including dance routines within our music video. Our dance routines are a different style to the usual dance routines you would see in the dance/house party genre in a way that the typical dance routine would be something that reoccurs during the chorus of a song and shows a repeat of 3 or 4 moves that are easy to learn where as with our dance routine there about 5 or 6 dance routines that have been taken from different pop songs and mocked by us. Our dance routine doesn’t repeat in an order either like the genres conventions says it should, ours just keeps going and there’s no end.

 

When looking at the codes and conventions of a music video a theorist that you should consider is Andrew Goodwin who stated that there are a set of rules that music videos follow. The rules in which we follow was the inter textual reference rule. We followed this as we had references to other dance videos, such as the 'Cha Cha Slide', 'Can't Touch This' and 'The Macarena'. Another rule that we followed of Goodwin's theory was that there will be a relationship between the music and the visuals. We have used this in our video through the pace of the music as it matches on with the visuals as we have made sure that the visuals match this too. Another rule which is similar to this one which we have also followed is the lyrics have a relationship with the visuals, we have made sure to use this rule as well as we are constantly miming through out the music video. Finally we have also made sure to include genre characteristics much like i have talked about above, these are the codes and convetions of the genre. For our genre which is dance/house music, we have made sure to include plenty of dance routines in order to communciate the theme of our genre which is dance/house music.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to receive feedback on my music video we as a group posted our video on Facebook requesting that they write their opinions on what they think of our music video. We received feedback from 4 people who are within our target audience bracket (18-25).  What was so good about this feedback was that it was a critique of our work, so there was comments of improvements that could be made and this is what helped us out as it pointed out things to us that we never noticed before with regards to our music video and things that we could do better or even change.

We was given one negative feedback which helped us out a lot as it gave us advice on what we could do better and listening to our target audience will be what will make our music video effective as our target audience is the one who wants to watch it so it’s best that we listen to their opinions as they are really the only ones that matter. The negative feedback that we were given wasn’t too negative it was more of an option to make it better if we wanted to as he quoted ‘needs a smoother ending though’. We as a group agreed on this and felt this needed to be changed, so we did edit the ending in order to make it smoother and it was based purely on the comment that this person wrote on Facebook.

There weren’t only negative comments there was also plenty of positive comments about our music video, some of which included things such as; ‘it was really funny’ and ‘I was laughing’. I think this is brilliant feedback as that is what we was aiming for and I’m glad that we made people laugh as now we know that we have accomplished one of our objectives. Another good set of comments that I got about this first draft of our music video is about the use of Goodwin’s theory and more specifically the use of inter textual referencing throughout the video as here were such comment as ‘I understood all of the inter-textual references and the worked well’ and loved the inter-textual references’. With regards to our music video it is like one big inter-textual reference as there is more than 5 of them within the video and for them to be noticed by our target audience is something that we know we have done well. Reading audience feedback like this from our target audience helps us understand what we have done right and what we have done wrong and the things that we have done wrong, we now we can improve on based on what our target audience thinks. What we have learnt is what our target audience thinks of our music video and what can be improved on the first draft on it on order to make the final draft the best it can possibly be. 

Script For My Evaluation

Journal Post 14

Final Draft Of Our Music Video

Final Draft Of Poster And Digipak

Journal Post 13

Feedback On Music Video

From these feedback sheets we can understand as a group that the things that need developing are;

• Lip singing needs to be more synchronised with the song that is going on in the background.
• The target audience should be suggested to be clubbers and why only male?
• The pace of the music video doesn't match the sound, so needs to be changed slightly.
• There should only be one parody per room.
• The structure doesn't entirely make sense.
• To adjust the pace of the video you could find a different edit of the song.

We as a group will now go trough each individual point that we have been given as audience feedback and we will make sure to develop these things so that they are better and so that it is suitable for the target audience.