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

I feel that our music video, from the research and planning to the finished product, both challenges and develops the conventions that are used in real media products today. When starting this project, we had studied media theorist, Andrew Goodwin. According to him, there are seven key features that a music video must try to achieve. Through careful consideration we adapted nearly each of the conventions and included aspects of them in our music video. Firstly there is genre characteristics. This, I believe, is clearly demonstrated throughout the design, our chosen themes and our actual music video. The alternative indie productions produced by Snow Patrol, and similar bands such as The Wombats, The Kooks and Arctic Monkeys, are often made through visually artistic concept combined with performance imagery which is what we felt was important to achieve. 
The link between the music and the visuals we found was far more important for our production. The slow pace of the music meant that cuts had to be perfectly timed and changes in clips had to be carefully selected, selecting a creative range, so that the audience did not get bored whilst watching the video. I believe that the editing and shot length and arrangement was well suited to the song that we chose, and that it was much harder to achieve than it would be with a fast paced song.
The notion of looking put forward by Goodwin is a convention that is massively exploited over many genres in the music industry, especially the R&B and Rap genres. However we questioned weather this was necessary in our production, as we did not intend to represent the women as a sex object. Laura Mulvey, media theorist has explored and developed the Male Gaze theory. She believes women in the media are seen strongly, through the eyes of men, as sex objects. We did not want to reflect this image of the females used in our music video as it did not suit the context of the lyrics or themes of the song. We used symbolic references to replace what would be the woman role in our video. The black horse shown being led through a field and eventually running freely is there to resemble the woman in the failed relationship. We felt a horse was appropriate because they are strong, elegant and proud creatures which represented the new found strength and freedom of the female.
Intertextual content, the last of Goodwins points we conformed to, consists of a media product linking to several other media types (internet, film, radio etc). Although this was not a main focus point of our finished product we have included some inter-textual content which is also symbolic to our chosen song. We have included a scene where a ring on a gold chain is thrown into a pond, which of course is meant to mimic the scene from Titanic, where Rose throws the Jewel into the ocean. The use of the burning letters is also a clear link to the romance film The Notebook where Allie’s mother keeps letters sent to her from her partner because she believes he is not suitable for her.
By conducting both primary and secondary research on specifically chosen audiences, we were able to follows the conventions of the genre and style of song we chose. Not only researching the band themselves, but by conducting focus groups with various age groups revealed who Snow Patrol's main audiences were and because of this, we were able to select some ideas that the groups put forward. This was a key into the development of the video as it allowed us to combine conventions and styles that Snow Patrol use, with what the audience wanted to see.
Overall, using Goodwin's theory as an indicator of a real media music videos, it is clear that whilst our production does meet the majority of conventions commonly found in our chosen genre, we have also developed certain conventions to suit the demands required by our particular song. We also challenged some conventions which are often seen in real life media productions. For example by de-sexualising the women in our video, instead of showing her in a provocative light.