OH-Evaluation: In what ways does your Media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation.

I believe our product is generic of the genre of soft rock by the way that the video conforms to the normal narrative cut between a performance piece.

This general structure of a music video would conform to adornos critical theory that all videos are pseudo individualised and mass media makes them convey the same thing to appeal to a large audience for mass profit.

Such as “Jason Mrazs - I’m Yours” which shows an idealistic lifestyle, such as panning shots of vast amazing landscapes and CU shots of him smiling and having fun with friends, these are all very conventional shots and follow the genre characteristics of this type of music.

But our video, I believe breaks with this critical theory due to the fact that the narrative breaks the conventional idea that the singer song writers video will end up with a happy ending or sings about a happy situation about how he/she is happy and comfortable in there life.

We can see this from the CU shots of the actor in the narrative, looking sad and showing negative and sad body language threw out which is an unconventional emotion to see in this general genre of music.

However our videos twist is in the narrative, the actor ends up in a grave yard, which obviously brings severe connotations of death and loss, this intertwined with the general tone and lyrics of the song portrays the idea that the actor has lost someone very close, and the red rose could be further showing connotations of who it may be, a possible lover.

So this is a reason how our video doesn’t conform to the pseudo individualised mass market that the song, (in other hands) may be intended for.

However it does appeal to a big market but in a different way, this is due to the fact that the performance by the artist and the actor in the narrative makes the artist seem “sensitive” this will definitely appeal to a large demographic such as teenagers and young adults, which is what our target audience was intended to be from the start.

I believe that our video is fairly obvious as to what’s happening and the general mood is it being very emotional, sad and to an extent depressing is shown threw out.

From this I can make the assumption that it conforms to Stuart Hall’s critical theory of being encoded and decoded by the audience. So in this aspect our video conforms to the genre, by which I mean most soft rock videos are encoded to give, normaly a happy mood to them, such as “Paulo Nutini-Candy” which can easily be decoded by an audience. Even though ours gives a mostly sad deconstruction by the audience.

In conclusion I believe that our video challenges Adornos critical theory by the use of the darker narrative that we have used, however it conforms to Stuart Halls theory of being encoded, and decoded by an audience of being obviously depressing because of the meis-en-scene connoting the actor has lost someone close to him.