Q1.

How do your Products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social
groups or issue?

For our Advanced Portfolio, My team made a musical promotion package for our spiritually
uplifting artist MARIYA. The musical promotion package included a music video with a digipack
and website for the artist. We decided to film a music video in a performance, narrative &
concept-based style, following a non-linear style in the narrative of the story.

Our music video followed a narrative of people who are dealing with eating disorder; and those
who are finding it hard to accept their imperfections. We added a performance to our music
video in which the artist is basically telling the stories of different people who are dealing with
self-rejection. Our main aim was to promote our singer’s music and adding his performance in
the music video aided us in doing so. It reinforced his star image as well.
Our digipack is similar to our music video in terms of aesthetics, as the aim of our video and the
album was for our artist to speak up about others story. We kept the similar colors in both the
music video performance and our digipack to create a connection between them. We also kept
the template of our website pleasant and artistic to make it appealing to the audience.

I wanted to give an important message through our music video so it was vital for us to come
up with a strong idea. Dealing with issues such as Eating disorder and self-rejection was
extremely important to me as we are living in a society where not much importance is given to
these problems and children are not taught to accept their differences and uniqueness which
results in them ending up in depression.
As the cinematographer of the music video I wanted to show how in everyday life different
children feel about themselves and how someone with eating disorder struggles.
My team and I searched for the perfect song for a few days, thinking of songs from the top of
our heads as well as searching and listening to different songs on YouTube. Searched many local
and foreign songs and ended up selecting ‘Scars To Your Beautiful’ by Alessia Cara. We choose
this song because its lyrics suit perfectly to the message that we wanted give our audience
about self-acceptance. I personally think this song was perfect for the Artist as well.

When discussing how we would go about shooting our music video, looking at and studying
codes and conventions of genres, styles of music videos we used and showing social issues was
important for us. Simply, codes are a system of signs which create meaning of media texts and
conventions are the accepted way of doing something.
Conventions are important when creating media texts as it is easier for the audience to decode
the texts. When dealing with a specific genre, for example the Pop genre in reference to music
videos, using conventions of the genre will be a sense of familiarity to the audience, so it will be
easier for them to understand the aim of the of the produce of the text.

Our song was a synth-pop, which went perfectly with our music video idea as music of these
genres is often usually driven by emotions and a lot of meaning. Pop music videos usually tend
to give an uplifting emotion and is a versatile genre. It usually revolves around a simple and
often strong narrative with any type of editing or post production effects added. Although our
storyline was somewhat complex it was strong and we focused more on telling the story rather
than including special effects. We stuck to simple shots such as close ups, mid shots and one or
two long shots as close ups are more personal and help the audience understand the feelings of
the actor in different situations. These genres tend to have simple mis-en-scene which is easy to
understand with conceptual meaning behind most props, locations and actions, which is what
we incorporated in our music video as well, for example a possible connotation used for freeing
the bird from the cage can be accepting yourself for who you are and coming out of your shell.
We have used dark colors with dim or no light when the actors were suffering with themselves
and brighter colors when they all were out of their shell. We also made the actors wear white t-
shirts when they accepted themselves to show that everyone is equal but unique because of
their imperfections.

Since our music video was a mixture of a conceptual, performance and narrative based music
video, we mixed conventions of all in our music video. When editing our music video, we knew
it was important to keep in mind that this would be a musical promotion package for our artist,
so it was important that she received more screen time than any other character. Adding
conceptual meaning to props and actions was a vital part in explaining our story line to the
audience.

Overall, wanting to show such issues on screen was not easy for us as there is not much
attention given to these issues but we made good use of codes and conventions as it was
important for us to do so. We were able to create a useful message that had an important
meaning behind it.