1. In What Ways does your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

Our Artist, Ava

We used many of the conventions of both the indie pop genre and one-shot music videos, but the very nature of the one-shot defies many of the conventions of normal music videos. However, our video was still a mixture of narrative and performance which we felt fitted together well, and is similar to many of our reference texts such as:

1. McFly - Love is Easy
2. Taylor Swift - We are Never Ever Getting Back Together
3. Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song
4. Lenka - Caught in the Middle
5. Kate Nash - Pumpkin Soup

We tried to challenge the representation of women in the music industry in general, following conventions of indie female artists who are usually less sexualised than female artists in other genres.

How we followed the conventions of the indie genre...

We were inspired by similar artists of the indie genre, in particular British indie such as Lucy Rose, Eliza Doolittle, Lily Allen, Kate Nash and Gabrielle Aplin, although other international artists such as She and Him and A Fine Frenzy also influenced us.

Ava's Artist identity is relatively conventional as artists like Kate Nash have incorporated a retro feel into their artist identity through their dress sense and iconography such as tea/rockabilly dresses. Female British indie artists often combine quirkiness and a gritty/urban edge, often mixing traditionally feminine elements with tougher, stereotypically macho themes, most obviously seen through their dress sense.

Gabrielle Aplin and Lily Allen

Ava's artist identity:

How we challenged the conventions of the indie genre...

• Our video is a lot more bright and cheery than most indie music videos but this serves to heighten its satirical nature


• Our music video is less gritty and uses less realism than many indie videos, but this can be a convention when producing videos for a track with an ideological message such as Lily Allen's 'The Fear' whichtake place in a doll-house style mansion filled with giant presents and balloons to connote the fakery and greed of celebrity culture


• Ava's image is far more feminine than many other female British indie artists, conforming more in this respect to American indie artists like She and Him 
  

We found that there weren't many British indie artists in the current Top 40, so perhaps breaking conventions of the indie genre would help renew mainstream interest in it and fill a gap in the market.

The music video for an artist's debut single have to establish an artist's identity, their genre and distinctive style, iconography

• Ava's fifties/sixties style 
• Indie genre
• Ava's personality
• Ava's colour scheme

Pretty dresses and shoes

Retro sound - (Comparing our track with Ella Fitzgerald's 'I found my yellow basket' and Nat King Cole's 'Straighten Up and Fly Right')

We used and conformed to Andrew Goodwin's Music Video Theory: (prezi)

One-shot music videos challenge the conventions of music videos as they are continuous in terms of narrative and lack of discontinuous editing and the other features of Carol Vernallis' muic video theory. However we were still able to utilize some aspects of it for our video:

As we didn't use montage editing during our production we instead followed the conventions of one-shot music videos.

Example Artist: Taylor Swift who has a similar fanbase to our artist of teenage girls, has recently moved more into the 'indie pop' genre and whose song 'We are Never Ever Getting Back Together' has a One-Shot Music Video:

Comparing our One Shot with Taylor Swift's one shot for 'We are never ever getting back together'

However, we did not use the convention of lots of camera movement, instead having our artist move forward and backward within a static shot. Tracking or zooming closer may have made our music video more effective, allowing the audience to connect with Ava more and providing the 'money shots' Andrew Goodwin states in his music video theory as essential to the record label. As it is most of our video is a long shot, and whilst Ava comes closer in the choruses she is sill only framed in an mid shot/mid close up, with not much variation in shot type. However when we shared our idea and music video with our target audience they were very interested and excited by the one-shot concept, which gives our music video a USP essential to debut artists.

Repeated Consumption
One-shot music videos particularly encourage repeated consumption as their cleverness and intricacy makes the viewer want to see how it was done, and in addition to this our music video has lots of minor characters in the stagehands as well as interesting prop details, so audiences will keep noticing new things every time they watch the video. This would be essential is the video were to be featured on music channels or shared via social networking.

Other indie pop artists such as Lenka have made one-shot music videos, and we used both one-shot music videos and videos with similar aesthetics to ours for inspiration:

We also followed conventions in our ancillary products:

Our Album cover is quite conventional apart from our attempt to convey an ideological message with the front cover, which is unusual for female British indie artists.

We think that by challenging this convention of Album Art we would further appeal to our target audiences, and the cover is quite effective at conveying Ava's ideology.

In our website design we also followed conventions quite effectively, although recently there has been a move away from the usual website format followed by Gabrielle Aplin and Kate Nash: (slideshow)

This is how we followed conventions when creating our website: (padlet)

Created with Padlet

We also trying to incorporate as much interactivity and purchasing opportunities as we could to encourage visitors to stay longer and to spend more money.

Interactivity	Purchasing Opportunities
Social Media links and feeds Click through Slideshow Poll Lots of buttons and pages – buttons linking pages together Newsletter subscription Ability to email to ‘Ava’s team’	Links to buy the Album throughout site Buy EP Shop Links to Tickets and tickets page Links to Merchandize iTunes advertisement

Our representation was a mixture of conforming and challenging...

Even in the indie pop genre some female artists are very sexualized, for example Pixie Lott in comparison to Kate Nash.

 

This lack of sexualization clearly appealed and was noticeable to our target audience, helping Ava stand out (particularly important as Ava is a debut artist) as this girl talks about the representation of women in our music video:

In our music video women still hold power without using their bodies to get it, and we think this would make Ava a suitable role model and popular artist amongst our tertiary audience of young girls who are prolific music, merchandize and tour ticket buyers and enable Ava to stand out in the market place, as well as promoting a positive message.

Therefore our challenging of representation conventions would help make our product more competitive as it would provide our audience with something new and interesting, and by largely conforming to indie pop genre conventions we would still be able to attract fans of the genre as well as pulling in new fans who are intrigued by unusual representation of our artist in terms of the industry at large.