Exam Practice - Question 1B

Analyse genre in one piece of work you have produced.
Genre is the specific style of any sort of media, whether it is printed media or moving image. This makes it easier to group different media together and lets the audience choose what they view in a simple easy way. For this question I will be analysing the genre used in my A2 Media portfolio music video – which happened to be acoustic music. To start my project I looked at existing acoustic videos to explore the conventions and analyse how different components of production were used in them. From carrying out this research I was able to see that nature and natural scenes were a very common setting and therefore a convention belonging to the acoustic genre. I also found that acoustic music covers a wide scale when it comes to what the song is about and therefore the visuals that run alongside the audio. I found that there was a recurring theme of love throughout the acoustic genre. Editing techniques were often quite slow cuts and fades in the love-themed videos. All of these findings helped with the creation of my work and were found in videos by performers such as Paolo Nutini, Newton Faulkner and Rusted Root.
My music video’s narrative ran a love story theme through its entirety and the visuals represented this with the lead character singing the lyrics and acting out her story of love. The lead female began as a weak character then moved on to develop a stronger personality as she becomes more in love with the lead male, then stays strong and continues to tell her story after rejection. This represents the convention of a strong character that develops throughout the video. The decision was made to contain this convention in the video because I felt that it had worked so well with other videos before in the genre and it felt safe to stay within the pre-written home of the acoustic genre. The inclusion of conventions of the chosen genre was also important to make the video appealing to my psychographic target audience (aged 13-20) who were people who were categorized into ‘puritans’ and ‘utopians’. These people wish to feel virtuous and want the world to be a better place. To make them want to watch my video, I included the conventions of natural settings and wanting to be with someone so that life would be improved and more enjoyable. I also used a young female as the main lead in the video, as the target audience would be able to directly relate to her. This is just another way in which genre was used in my video.