Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challege forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video was of the acoustic genre. Artists such as the Plain White T’s and Newton Faulkner and James Morrison are acoustic artists. We used some of the conventions from their videos, challenged others and developed a lot of them too. We did this through the filming, the post production and the finishing touches to the music video, and in the designing, construction and finishing touches to the digipak.


Chris Cohen is a very simplistic artist. His songs are very monotonic and he only seems to sing about relationships. This is one strong convention of the acoustic genre, that all of the artists sing about a relationship being maintained, or a broken down one. This connotes a sense of pride or sadness, happiness or upset within the artist’s life and therefore makes the song and video more meaningful as a whole. I felt I should use this and reflect the same connotations into the music video for ‘If You Only Knew’. The lyrics for the song were very typical, and therefore we wanted to play on them. We took the opportunity to cut between the male and the female characters during the video, and to tell both sides of the story. This was a challenged convention, as normally, in most of the videos by acoustic artists such as the ones mentioned above, the story seems to be circulated around the male artist.
Telling the story was based on the photograph that was ripped at the beginning by the female in anger, and brought together at the end by both characters. Newton Faulkner’s video Dream Catch Me uses the photo as a basis for the storyline, and almost tells both sides of the story. We used the close ups of the female and male characters such as Faulkner does and developed them into the lip syncs from both characters. The video also uses close ups of the instruments and the photos. The photo is a big symbolic image in the video and without it the video probably wouldn’t make much sense.



Having the video in black and white was a choice we made as a group. The argument is in colour because it shows the couple together whereas the black and white layout for the rest of the video reflects the sadness that the couple are not together. I think the video also possesses a little bit of the male gaze. It is the female who comes back to the male, not the other way around. This could show that the female is weak and can’t survive without the male. The representation of the two characters is therefore biased, but I think it is naturally biased because of the nature of the genre.
Different to other acoustic videos, our narrative isn’t a linear narrative. We have a circular and convergent narrative. We start at the beginning but we keep coming back to the scene of the argument or flashbacks throughout the video. It is a convergent narrative because the two different stories of the male and female come together in the end. Typically, the videos that I have watched by the artists that are on Chris Cohen’s inspirations list are of a basic linear narrative from beginning to end. One video that is pretty much the same as our video has to be Plain White T’s – Hey There Delilah. It uses the close ups of the instruments and characters and also the typical break up story.



The continuity between the video, the digipak and the magazine advert I think is crucial. We are creating the promotional Chris Cohen package. For example, I own many James Morrison albums. All of them use the same font and the same style and the same idea. I used this convention and used the same font for all my lyrics, titles and comments in both my digipak and advert. I felt that using the stills from the music video in both too would link them together quite nicely. The black and white and the similarity between all 3 of the products emphasises the simplicity of the genre as well. Wacky colours would not suit the acoustic genre as it is just too simple. Some people associate colours with days, in the same way I associated the acoustic genre with black and white simple photography.
The conventions that I have used, challenged and developed have given me a greater understanding of genre and subgenre. Cohen’s music is very basic and similar. To create a promo package that has multiple platforms is difficult for such an artist, but I used the conventional ways that other artists have successfully used and put them towards my work. I feel that this has categorised my work and secured it within the genre it is intended.