1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As our music video is narrative, we chose to make it more original and interesting for the audience by making our own performance original though we were also strongly influenced by the performances of other videos that deal with the break down of a relationship. We were particularly influenced by 'Smile' by Lily Allen, as it contained a revealing messages of relationship failure, through a simple and hilarious performance.

We liked how the chosen colours that were evoked through the costume and landscape, coordinated with the upbeat theme of the song, but also contrasted with the seriousness of the actual lyrics. This is much like the ideas we used to create a juxtapostion between the visual and auditory aspects.

To differ our product from its original version we used our characters' costume to reveal the different moods created in different scenes. Whereas in the original version of the video, Kate Nash wears the same dress throughout the video and the characters feelings are expressed through different mediums such as the props and actions.

We decided that our female character would wear a dark green dress when she was alone, to present a feeling of loneliness and distress. However when she is in the company of the male character, who is presented in the song as the antagonist, she wears a colourful dress to highlight the way she feels around him, and to contrast her characteristics to the male character who is wearing darker clothes to show how he is not interested in the relationship between him and Caroline. We have used more mid shots than any other shots, as we believed this was the suitable shot for our product to reveal our character's body language.

This screen shot was taken from 'Smile' by Lily Allen, another song that is about the breakdown of an relationship. This video, similarly to ours has scenes in a cafe, with the couple sitting opposite each other. This shows that some of our choices of what to include as our locations would fit in with what is chosen for other pop videos.

Our music video is different to other pop music videos as we used a significant ammount of low-key lighting, specifically in the studio scenes. This is different to usual pop videos as they are usually bright and cheerful to express the upbeat mood of the songs. However we chose to downplay this typical music video view to highlight the difference between the characters attitudes towards and around each other.

Also we used other ways to highlight the humour in our video by using techniques such as stop motion. This is different to many other music videos because they dont usually have both performance and stop motion in the ways we have used them. For example this video for "It's Only Love" by The Maccabees is fully concetrated on the use of stop motion to tell the story.