Question 1

In what ways does your media product

use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Goodwin’s conventions

According to Goodwin, there are several conventions of a music video:1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics 2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals3. There is a relationship between music and visuals4. The demands of the record label will include the need

for lots of close-ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work.

5. There is frequently reference to the notion of looking and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

6. There is often inter-textual reference.

After close analysis of these points, we have incorporated these into our music video through production and post production.

Our Music VideoWe created a music video for the song ‘To Anyone’ By Crystal Whites. The genre of this video is indie/rock, we needed to ensure we followed the typical conventions to evoke realism in our video. According to genre theorist Williams; ‘Genre is the ‘Formats and formulas’ used by media producers to construct texts which create meaning for an audience.’

Through research and planning before we created our music video, we found certain music videos we gained inspiration from. For example: 1) Jamie T – Shellia. We liked the scene in this video of their

protagonist character walking alongside the river. This was incorporated into our music video narrative where we featured our lead singer and a girl by the river Thames shot in Central London.

Furthermore, we decided we wanted to feature our band shots on the top of a roof. This was taken from previous music videos by bands such as ‘The stripes’ and ‘Finger Eleven’ This is shown below in both their videos:

2) The Stripes – Hometown Girls

3) Finger Eleven – Paralyzer

However, due to difficulties we faced, we were unable to feature our band on top of a roof. This lead us to having to figure out a new location.

We used conventions of previous music videos in our own music video, for example these are stills from the band ‘The Stripes’ – ‘Hometown Girls’

1) Close up of Guitar playing

2) Close up of drums

3) Close up lead singer

4) Shot of the whole band

These images show how we have attained inspiration from The Stripes and the way in which we incorporated these into our own music video. We felt they were important conventions of a indie/rock genre as they allow an audience to easily analyze what genre is being featured. We knew if we used these various shots, they would be helpful in evoking the indie/rock genre of our own music video.

Another way we have evoked the genre of Indie/Rock, is by including a range of angled shots. These included high angles of the band playing the different instruments, low angles looking up at the band playing, side angles, eye level shots of the lead singer. These are important as they depict a unique feel to the band and the artists themselves while following generic conventions.

Furthermore…

This is the opening 5 seconds to the music video by The Stripes, for their song ‘Hometown Girls’ we saw this and loved the way they featured their band name and song name in the clouds, while subtly showing the skyline of where most of their music video will be filmed.

We decided we wanted to present our opening in a similar way to this, therefore we used a scene from our narrative, which focused on our lead singer standing by the river looking out.

Our text then appears in a big bold font in order for it to stand out and look professional.

Our DigiPak – Front and back coverThis is our DigiPak front cover. We edited this image in photoshop to remove slight blemishes and increased the curves level to make it brighter. It took us a while to decide on an image for our front cover, we created a first digipak and it just didn't’t look how we wanted it to look, therefore we made another one and this is what we created.

We have gained inspiration for our front cover by ‘The Stripes – Snapshot’ Album cover. They went with the simplistic yet bold font in the colour scheme of red white and black. We found this effective as it is simple, but allows our band to stand out.

We chose this picture cover as our inspiration oppose to other band covers, as it focuses on the band members filling the front cover. This contrasts to albums by the Artic Monkey’s for example, as they have just their lead Singer on their front cover.

This is our DigiPak back cover. We decided we would use the same image as the front, just faded using photoshop. I felt this would be a successful idea as it brings continuity to our digipak as a whole. We included our album track list on the back of our digipak which is a predominant theme throughout all digipak back covers.

We also included the necessary elements for a digipak, including our music company logo and a bar code. These add realism to our print product as every album in the real world includes these.

Our DigiPak – CD cover

This is our album CD. We went with a simplistic image to feature on our CD.Our CD cover just features our lead singer, we chose to not include any institutional information because we wanted to continue our theme of being simple. We researched CV covers before we started and we found a couple we liked. These include:

These are both CD image examples from the band ‘Artic Monkeys’ We chose these are our inspirations due to the simplistic element they evoke. The second image of the cigarette buds reinforces the genre of their band, highlighting a bad boy representation.

This is a clever technique of didipak’s as the audience are able to identify the genre just by analysing the pictures the band selects to represent their specific album.

This contrasts to these album CD covers by the Beatles and Curacao which include a lot of writing and don’t give much away about the genre of their albums.

Our DigiPak – Lyric Booklet

These are the two pages inside our digipak which represent out lyric booklet.

We selected two images to use then faded them down using photoshop. This was effective as it allowed continuity between the back of our digipak and the inside. We also kept the theme of featuring the band playing as the images behind the lyric text. We kept the text the same throughout our digipak, as it created a sense of realism and professional quality. This is because real media products wouldn’t change their font on every page as it looks quite childish. Therefore we kept the heading fonts the same, and the lyric fonts the same.

Magazine Advert we have been inspired by…

Our Magazine Article On the top of our cover we have presented our bands name – it is written in a bold font to stand out to our audience.Underneath we have our album name. It is written in red to present synergy with our digipak front cover, as the font style and colour is the same. We chose this as we felt it stood out well and contrasted effectively with the black. We have included a Quote From NME:We felt this added a unique quality to our magazine article, furthermore we placed the NME logo below to emphasis the quote. This is also red which matches our album title. We gained inspiration for including an image of our album single front cover, from a real media product. This was the magazine poster for ‘conduit – funeral for a friend’ we wanted to write the text in white with a black border to make it bold and therefore stand out to our audience.We

havewritten at the bottom in the middle a website page for our band. This features on the magazine article for a lot of bands and gives our magazine a professional element.

We have purposely included social media logo icons, as these are popular with our target audience age group.

We chose to feature an image of our band playing to put as our magazine advert image. This was because we wanted to reflect how the indie/rock genre focuses a large amount of their music videos around footage of them playing.