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

Evaluation powerpoint

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Our group prepared video answers to this question, and I have included mine and Anisah's sections above. We talked about applying the theorist Carol Vernallis to our work to see in what ways our product used and challenged conventions. Below the video I have also included a copy of the powerpoint we use in the video.
Earlier on in the project we also looked at Goodwin, and I have also looked at the ways in which Goodwin's theories can be applied to our work. Goodwin claims that "music videos demonstrate genre characteristics", and so when we were constructing our character, we thought about this a lot. We refferenced artists like Lily Allen when thinking about the personna we wanted to put across for her:

Lily Allen vs. Lexi Grace

And also, obviously, we followed the usual conventions of a solo artists' music videos, like for example that she has no instruments, or band members with her. Her clothing also compliments this "Lily Allen" style look that we wanted to create for her- girly, but with a bit of an edge, such as the tight fitting vest top with the Rolling Stones logo and black skinny jeans, a nd the flowery dress "toughened up" with military boots and aviator sunglasses.

Goodwin goes on to state in his theory that there is a relationship between both lyrics and visuals, and in our case the main theme of the video is to "meddle with people's minds", as the lyrics state. The lyrics talk about her living "in a mixed up world", having her heart and the "the things that are inside" "meddled" with, and our visuals illustrate this by presenting a messed up, reversed world. I'm not sure if I would go as far as to say that our visuals are amplifying or illustrative, as we do not have a clear enough message reflected in the video - our message is quite abstract and open to the audience's interpretation, but they do follow some of the main themes of the song.


We have a very strong relationship in our video with the music and visuals, as this is partly what I think keeps our video interesting and exciting - we attempted to cut as frequently as we could on the beats, meaning that the audience never know what to expect. As the beat becomes fragmented in the middle, the visuals break up too, which we did with use of special effects like cross dissolves.

On strong lyrics such as "the things that are inside", we have used veyr precise cutting to the beat (in that particular case, four split screens appearing, one on each beat)

We include a lot of CUs of Lexi, ("money" or beauty shots), which help to really connect her with the audience. Direct address is used pretty much throughout the video.

We also attempted to create motifs for her that run throughout all of our ancillary projects as well; the necklace she is playing with as she sings appears on the front of her album cover, the jumper with two swallows on that she sings the lipsyncs in appears on the inside and back covers of her album. The same swallow design also features on all four panels of our album cover.

There is frequent reference to the notion of looking in our video, but we go against the convention of the camera following her; instead she is completley aware of the camera, almost flirting with it (blowing kisses, laughing) and it is as if it is her that as in control, giving her quite a lot of power.

We also go against the convention of voyeuristic treatment of the female body, except on one occasion where we have an ECU of her doing her lipstick, as although we wanted her to create an aspirational image, we also wanted her to be relatable to and down-to-earth.

Our main intertextual references are Pharcyde-the Drop, and Coldplay-The Scientist, for their use of reverse footage, both of which we drew a lot of inspiration from. We wanted to make sure the reverse footage didn't look tacky or like we'd tried to just be "gimmicky", so we thought a lot about how to make it work. Anisah and I did a practice shoot reversing footage which went we really well, which really gave us the confidence boost we needed to go ahead with it