Question 1

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

We decided to film question one, and split the question into four parts. Despina and Anisah spoke about Carol Vernallis, Joe spoke about Andrew Goodwin and I spoke about the importance of the ancillary texts. Here is the video of me speaking about the album cover and website, I have also included the powerpoint we used for the analysis;



Evaluation Power Point



In the research stage of the project, we looked at the theory of Andrew Goodwin who states "music video demonstrates genre characteristics" and as a group we thought about this a lot when constructing our artist. To see how Goodwin's theory is applied, we looked at artists in the industry, and particular Lily Allen. The reason we chose Lily Allen was because she had an identity very similar to the one we wanted to create for Lexi Grace - she is flirty, fun, confident and, most importantly, very British.

Goodwin also claims that there is a very strong link between lyrics and visuals, a concept that we bared in mind for the entire planning process for our video. The key lyric that we used to demonstrate this relationship was "meddle with the mind" - we wanted this theme to come across throughout the whole video and through our use of reverse footage and choppy editing we created a mixed up world for our artist, and also for the audience watching it.

We created a lot of visual motifs throughout the product, something that both Vernallis and Goodwin talk about in their theories. Lexi's primary motif is the swallow that features on her grey jumper, with a secondary motif being her necklace - she plays with it during the video and is biting it on the front cover.

A voyeuristic appeal, mentioned in Goodwin's theory, also comes through in Lexi's video in order to attract a male audience. We wanted her lips to be a reference point and there are several shots of these in the video. Lips could be seen as a sexual connotation, they are an erogenous zone, but we didn't want the video to be too sexualised as she is a debut artist and we wanted to sell her music, not her skin. We also reference the famous 'Rolling Stones' logo, an image of a pair of lips with a tongue sticking out, continuing the lips reference.