Evaluation Question 1 Plan

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

I can see straight away that the question is asking for strong analysis of the music video but oddly enough it can be answered through so many ways. The problem i will face when answering it will be making it interesting enough and using some creativity to get high marks.

The first lesson our team had on the media evaluations was spent looking into detail on how we could answer this question together instead of planning how we would answer all of them. However we did search other blogs for ideas and came across a simple idea of using screen shots that depicted the strongest conventions within the video and commented on them. This was found on the blog: http://musicvideocm3christina.blogspot.com/


The idea although simple and breaking the golden rule of 'don't just write about it' was a good starting place to get us thinking. As always we aim to improve on what we see so we started listing the areas of our music video that either use or create conventions on a mind map. This wasn't exactly detailed but it described the range of ideas we all had at the time.




With some time left in our first lesson we went through our music video on YouTube and made screen shots that carefully showed conventions we had used and challenged. We then inserted them into a Publisher document so we could easily manipulate them and add the text boxes that would explain each screen shot. This also meant we could then save it as one picture and insert it into the blogger account. By the end of the lesson we had the makings of a our first draft answer for Question 1.

However by the next lesson the questions were all revised so a plan could be made for Christmas because of a tight schedule for work. We all decided the best option would be to split up the questions amongst us and each complete our own version of Question 2 (based on digi packs). As Hannah had already started Question 3 me and Alex had to choose between the resulting questions 1 and 4. Both not minding which one we completed I opted for this question because of how open it is.

Back to the plan: With all this in mind I've decided to change how we answer the question because as pointed out clearly by our teachers just writing directly onto the blog will gain no marks, the answers have to be just as creative as our music videos to impress as much as possible. But not wanting to waste the work we have already done i have chosen to still use texts and pictures to answer the question.

So to make some text and pictures more creative and interesting i have chosen to use an idea from our media teacher Mr Smith who came across the feud between a production group called Shynola and 'Mr Trevor'. Shynola created a diverse and seemingly new type of music video for the band Coldplay and their single Strawberry Swing but Mr Trevor boasted that his own music video had been copied by Shynola and made a series of claims based on conventions he thought were copied. The press release by Shynola, in responce, listed the same claims but with replies that proved the conventions were in fact stolen from various other places and provided evidence.
Originality Explained - Shynola Press Release

To answer the question i will create my own situation similar to Shynola's but I will engineer the situation to my advantage to allow me to be detailed and answer the question properly. The ambitious claim of plagiarism will be made by a reviewer for Q magazine that has a separate blog for personal comments. For this I will write an entire blog post based on claims that Acoustic Plenty's music video isn't original and i will write this in a similar analytical way to a review but mainly list 6 areas of the video that have similarities with existing conventions. I will then write a blog post from a production group that filmed and edited the music video that proves the reviewer wrong with evidence in the form of videos and pictures. This will be written towards the fans of Acoustic Plenty who lost interest after reading the review.