1. In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms of conventions of real media products? (How does it fit or not fit the genre)

For our A2 course this year, we were asked to create a number of practical pieces. This consisted of a music video, an album, including insets and finally a magazine advertisement advertising that album.
These all had to be based around the same 'artist' or 'band' we had created. This in our case was ‘Jessie A’. It also had to reflect our chosen genre, of indie pop.
Before beginning any kind of production work we had to look carefully in to the typical codes and conventions of the 'indie pop' genre. Myself and my media partner Jess, had to perform a mass of research in to existing music videos for this.
By doing this it allowed us to gain an understanding of the genre, and to learn what you would ‘typically’ find in any music video within that genre. This then allowed us the ability to consider our own ideas for what we wanted our own music video to look like, and the ways in which we could represent and reflect the genre within our own work.
We chose to re-create a music video to the song ‘Teenage Dream’ by Katy Perry; this is an artist whose music would be categorised as ‘indie pop’.

In the official Katy Perry music video for the song 'Teenage Love', the narrative is quite simple and basic and continues on one level throughout. The narrative and the lyrics together, suggest and express a story of how a young woman is experiencing 'love' for the first time and how happy this is making her. It expresses the feelings that come with your 'first' love or your 'teenage love' as a young person. This is shown through a number of shots of the artist and an actor spending time together and how happy they are in each others company. I and my partner Jess really loved this narrative and felt it was something we could both individually relate to in our own lives as teenagers now, and would therefore be able to capture this better when making our own music video. However when working alongside the narrative of the original song, we found it very hard to show this narrative visually. We did not want to simply use very stereotypical basic shots of the artist and the actor acting 'in love', and wanted to be more creative. As a result of this we developed the story we wanted to portray as our narrative alongside the song. We chose to make it more about the stages of the artist and the actor and how they try to begin their relationship. We felt this would be much easier to show visually, and it would be clearer to an audience what the story was. We also felt it would be easier upon our actors to act being 'in love' with each other, without feeling embarrassed, as we wanted the performance to remain realistic and believable. We filmed Jess showing her trying to get the 'boyfriend' to notice her, and continued this story throughout the video, the actor eventually notices her back and this leads to the beginning of their relationship. We found this a lot easier to portray visually. However we considered the research we had found from looking at other music videos. For example we had previously looked at 'Starry Eyed' by Ellie Goulding, this had a narrative of a young couple in love, and its narrative was similar to Katy Perry's.  Therefore we feel we have challenged this narrative convention slightly, by having a strong narrative develop throughout the video, rather than just having one repeated theme story.

The music video consisted of both performance shots and narrative shots. Through looking at our research we have presented on our blog you can see how we analysed the different shot types used with music videos of the 'indie pop' genre. We feel that we really captured the typical shots well. Our understanding of shot types was forced to develop from our quite basic understanding that we had in the AS part of the course, but this was a great advantage as it caused us to try to create more creative looking shots to try to attempt similar shots used within similar music videos. Although we partially succeeded in doing this, I do not believe that we fully captured the conventions and shots that we had been aiming for. We instead used more basic shots as a result of not having the elaborate sets and camera equipment that would have been used to make many of the video's we had looked at.

Within the original 'Teenage Dream' music video we found that she used alot more people/actors within her shots. This was something we did not do as we found it a struggle capturing the shots with larger numbers of people in, however in other music videos of the same genre it is very popular to find either single people in the shot or a two shot, and this was something we were much more comfortable doing as we were able to do it well.