Evaluation 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We chose to do a R&B song which usualy are about love/relationships. In the music videos there is normally a main female and males singing about each other or to each other. Or if the artist is female the normal conventions of the video will be girl looking glamorous and wearing high fashionable clothes with main props such as phones. If the artist is a male they tend to show guy with his friends and have main props such as cars etc.

Looking at our media video, we had a variety of music videos we chose from and also different genres for example hip hop, R&B etc. But out of all these videos we narrowed them down to only one type which was just R&B and the whole of the music video and every idea we got came from music videos from this genre, especially one video in particular which was 'Easy' by Paula DeAnda. We took almost all our ideas from this video mainly because it perfectly suited the music in which we had chosen, which was Long way to go by Cassie. The music video to Easy is sort of the perfect video to our idea and music we chose in some ways but looking at the choreography and some other things, we had to turn to a variety of Ciara’s music videos for the dance routines for example Like A Boy.

These videos produced us with a very good understanding of how to choreograph the dances in the video and the timing and also gave us some different ideas we hadn’t come up with in the first place. Looking at Ciara’s videos gave us a lot of new ideas and innovation. Although we lost our lead act because of timing and had to change to someone else in the dying minutes, Ciara’s videos shows us that there can be more than one dancers as long as the main act is still going to do a little bit of her own act, this is why we came up with the idea of using people from the dance department.

To do some of the dances in the video and since dancing is what they do, learning the routines and adding to it and dancing it perfectly was a normal thing for them so in a way, losing the lead girl and dancer kind of made it a bit better and easier in a way.

The final video came up with what we had planned, instead of looking at one good video and using it as our idea for the video we looked at different parts of different videos and picked different bits of each to come up with a combination of it all. This helped us a lot as instead of picking one video we thought was good enough but lacking in some areas, we had come up with a way of putting everything together and choosing the best bits of all the videos as u can see from all three videos they are very good but one video is better than the other in a particular way. What I mean is if you look at the Ciara video of Like A Boy, she had the best dancing and choreography but her story line isn’t as good the Proper video of Long Way To Go by Cassie or the story line in Easy by Paula DeAnda. If you look at Paula DeAnda’s video of easy on the other hand, the videos storyline is very good but the dancing and choreography isn’t half as good as Ciara’s Like A Boy. Finally looking at the original video of Long Way To Go by Cassie, she’s got an ok choreography and storyline compared to the two other music video and we couldn’t use a lot of her ideas because since were using her video we wanted a slightly different approach, which lead to the result of our video.

I think our music video for 'Long Way To Go' follows the conventions and stylistics of contemporary music, the narrative of our video consists of a relatioship between a girl and a boy, but our main purpose of the video is to show that there isnt a relationship because the girl is not really interested in the guy she's playing hard to get. As a group we feel that we have given our video our own personal style to it with original narrative and also used slip screen shots, also our CD/Digipack cover challenges the genral conventions of covers for original music videos. The front cover of our CD cover shows the artist and her name and song name is on aswell.

This is all part of the marketing plan to draw in the customers into the product so that they can hopefully fall into the trap of buying the product. Another thing we are looking at a type of psychological pricing, this is using the word ‘only’ and also making sure that whatever the price, it ends in £0.99p, as this shows its under the next price for example buying a meal for only £9.99 or for £10.00, more people will buy the food for £9.99 because the first number they see is 9 instead of 10 so they’ll think it’s less and will go for it when really there’s only a penny difference, this is a major psychological effect on marketing and could help profit a lot more than just normal pricing. Being a consumer myself, I know the way in which buyers think and this is a big way to draw in a lot more customers and sell more products and at the same time for a little bit more while they think it’s for a little bit less so really, it’s a win win situation for the seller.