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

For our A2 media course this year, we were asked to create several practical pieces. This consisted of a music video, an album cover along with all the inserts and a magazine advertisement for the album.

Part of our coursework was to create an artist we had created. We were to create a fan base and target audience for this artist also. With this, we also had to decide what genre to place our artist in. We created the character 'Jessie A' an artist within the 'Indie Pop' genre targeting audiences of both boys and girl (however predominantly girls) ages 13 - 25.

Before beginning any kind of production work myself and my partner Shannon spent a lot of time researching into the genre and the artist behind our inspiration - 'Katy Perry'. We conducted a survey for the public to gain a general insight to what 'Indie Pop' fans looked for in music videos, we researched in to real music videos to assess conventional shot types, shot angles, mise en scene, narrative etc. Alongside this, we also researched into the artists of the music videos magazine adverts and albums so we could fathom what sort of thing we would need to create. We wanted to asses how creative their artwork is, colours, background etc. We were very keen to follow the typical conventions we'd found out quite closely, however not so close that we couldn't branch out on our own creativity. We chose to re-create the music video to the song 'Teenage Dream' by 'Katy Perry'. We chose this for several reason.

• She is a strong example of the genre 'Indie Pop' 
• We are both very familiar with her work therefore it wouldn't be a struggle to portray it
• We both liked the song and found the lyrics easy to come up with ideas for narrative

In the official Teenage Dream music video the narrative is very simply and not very complex in relation to the lyrics. It follows the lyrics like a story. The narratives shows the relationship between two teenage lovers and is predominantly about how the young man makes her feel. The narrative is shown through a stream of different performance shots and establishing shots. 

This is an example of one of the stills from the official music video. Throughout Katy Perry's music video there are a lot of performance shots where she is surrounded by other people (which adds to the narrative) and is also set on a beach. My partner and I loved the whole idea of a teenage dream however we knew that we wouldn't be able to create something as elaborate as filming on a beach with lots of other actors. We knew that because of our age we could easily relate to two teenagers being in love therefore we decided to simplify the narrative. We chose to base our video around two teenagers who have fallen for each other and just show them in different scenarios. We realised that this wasn't as creative that the original however we did feel that it captured the intention, mixed well with the lyrics and also followed along with the results from our survey. 

This is an example of a still from the original video. Through our research we also were able to pick up on conventional shot types. one of the most frequent shot types in Katy Perry's music video is a close up and mid shot. We wanted to follow these tendencies as we didn't want our video to look odd and out of place. We worked very hard on our performance shots (which we filmed in the studio) to ensure that we had a lot to work with and also worked with several different outfits. I wanted to ensure that I was really strong when performing to make our video more affective. When syncing our music video together and choosing which shots to use we wanted our editing to be very clever. E.g. continuity being sharp.One way to improve our video would have been to add different angles to each performance shot. We had several different clips with different outfits however we didn't play about with different angles with the same outfit which would have contributed to the continuity within our video. 

Our music video, as well as Katy Perry's consisted of both performance shots and narrative shots. Through all the research on our blog you can see how we analysed the different shot types and narrative setting related to our genre. I feel that we captured the common conventions very well. My knowledge of camera shots etc was not as strong as my partners as I hadn't needed to use this skill in my AS project. I feel my understanding has severely improved because of the requirements of this project. 

Overall I feel we stuck to the conventions associated with our genre well and didn't stray too far from them. We did not try to challenge any of the conventions as we felt that it wouldn't be appropriate given the genre that it is.