Friday, 2 December 2011

Evaluation - Question 1

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



Our task was to make a promotion package for the release of an album to include a music promo video with;
  • a cover for its release as part of a 
    Digipak
  • a magazine advertisement for the 
    Digipak
For our media product, we chose the song Sticks n Stones by Jamie T. 
The first thing we did was to analyse other music videos from the same genre, which in our case was 'indie', to see what the typical conventions were. 
We found that in many of the music videos there was the use of alcohol and cigarettes. We came across a number of music videos from our genre which included these props, and so we decided to have these props featuring in our own music video to go along with the typical convention of an indie music video - people stereotypically think that people into the indie genre of music smoke and drink to fit into the 'scene'.
Another convention we met from analysing professional music videos of the same genre, were some of the types of locations, which we found were usually quite run down and urban. In our music video, we used similar locations to these such as train stations and derelict car-parks to meet these typical associations of working class and urban Britain
From watching other 'indie' music videos, we also noticed the clothing and appearance was quite a significant aspect. In Jamie T's original video for Sticks n Stones, we noticed that he often wore a variety of checkered shirts and he had the typical rugged/unclean look that would almost be expected from an artist in the genre like 'Indie'.
With regards to our digipak, there were many conventions that I feel we met. When thinking about the design aspect, we analysed a number of other artists(professional) digipaks within the same 'indie' genre, which helped us spot the typical conventions. We analysed the Arctic Monkeys 'When the Sun Goes Down'and The Kooks'Inside In Inside Out' front cover as well as Jamie T's original Sticks n Stones cover. Overall, we noticed that the use of black and white was the main convention of front covers in our genre. We also noticed that these front covers kept the design quite simple and the colours all matched in together, as well as the fonts standing out from the background image.
We also decided to use black and white when producing our digipak, as we felt it would suit our genre more than colour would and so you could almost tell from looking at the front cover of our digipak the style of music it would be. To make our digipak look professional, we also added a small logo of Jamie Ts record label, website and barcode to the back cover and a parental advisory stamp on the front to make people aware of some bad language in the song. The font we used throughout our digipak wasn't originally
on Photoshop, so we downloaded a font (ALL AGES) that we thought would suit our genre well as it is quite rough which went well against the black and white background.

However, we decided to challenge one convention that many people would definitely associate and expect from an 'Indie' music video - the use of black and white. After watching a selection of professional music videos from our genre that used black and white, we chose against this because we didnt feel it was needed, and that it would benefit more from colour as we wanted to make the most out of the fast, exciting shots which went well the pace of our song, and also to differentiate our music video from other videos in the same genre.
With regards to brand identitiy, I felt that we edited our digipak and magazine advert so that they were easily identified and matched with music video to meet the conventions of real media products. we did this by using the same image on the front of our digipak as our magazine advert to ensure that all 3 products could be identified together and we also featured the front cover of our digipak on the bottom left hand corner of our magazine advert. We took this idea from Ed Sheeran's magazine advert, as we felt that it was a good idea to definitely ensure brand identity between our 3 products.

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