Evaluation question 1

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

For our media coursework my group decided to create a music video and a digipak and magazine advert. We chose this because we felt as though it was the option that we could achieve the most in, creating a game or a teaser trailer didnt really appeal to us because we are interested in music and the way that music is presented in the media. Before starting our coursework, we researched a lot of music videos like Eminem's 'Stan' and Geri Halliwells 'Its Raining Men'. This research allowed us to analyse and find the conventions that exist in music videos. As well as this, we looked at Andrew Goodwins novel 'Dancing in the Distraction Factory', looking at this novel allowed us to identify and make a list of all of the conventions of music videos. After looking at video's by Eminem and Geri Halliwell and identifying the conventions, we moved on to looking at videos that existed in the genre that our song choice was from, I looked at a video by the Foo Fighters and also Queen and Arctic Monkeys, doing this allowed us to take the list of conventions, and see how they were developed in the videos from our genre.

A convention that we thought it was especially important to maintain was the use of close up shots in our music video, we used a lot of close ups of our lead singer; it is conventional for the lead singer/front man of the band to be flattered by the camera, we also featured some close ups of our guitar player because he sings in the chorus but for the drummer and the guitarist we mainly tried to feature close ups of their instruments instead because that focuses on their specific talent, much like getting a close up of the lead singer focuses on the talent that he brings to the band.

The close ups of the lead singer that we used were mainly featured during the chorus', this highlights the importance of the chorus because it brings the story of the lyrics together. It is also the chorus of most music videos that a lot of the close ups are featured because its when the song reaches its climax usually. There is a lot of demand from record companies for a lot of close ups of the lead singer so we tried to follow this. The use of this kind of close ups is used a lot in the music videos that we looked at in our previous research, Dave Grohl is flattered by the camera in the Foo Fighters music video that I looked at but most importantly, the close ups that I saw of Alex Turner in the Arctic Monkeys videos is what gave me the inspiration for the close ups of Tom in our music video.

 

close up of tom from Paige French on Vimeo.

     

If I look back at my planning, I see the shots from other music videos that we wanted to take inspiration from, for example we wanted a similar shot to this close up from the killers music video 'are we human' and we achieved this, as well as this, we wanted a close up of the guitar like this shot from an Arctic monkeys video which we also achieved, the fact that we have shots in our video that are similar to those in videos that exist in the real media world gives us confidence in the success of our music video.

A convention that we challenged was the use of performance and narrative, a lot of music videos often have a mix of performance and narrative to break up the video and make it more interesting, however we challenged this convention and made the whole of our video performance based because we wanted to give our target audience an idea of what it would be like to go and see the band perform live. However, in our rough cut we followed the convention by adding a bit of narrative in the middle of the video, although a lot of people that we showed our rough cut to actually like the element of the narrative because "it broke the video up" we decided not to put it into our final cut because we think that it made the video not really make sense and didnt look like a gig.

However, we got the idea to make the whole video performance based from watching the video for 'Switchblade Smiles' By Kasabian...

 This video is all performance based which means that our music video would still be successful in the real media world, this video has had major success with over 2 million views on youtube and there is nothing to break up the performance and the narrative so we decided not to either.

We wanted the lead singer of our music video to be active and as though he was actually enjoying being a part of the band, we looked at some shots of Serge in the Switchblade Smiles video and compared them to some of the shots that we have of Tom in our video and it shows that we have created shots that could exist in the real media world.

Another convention of music video's, is that the tempo of the track is used to drive the editing, our music video does this by changing shot when a drum beat is heard or a guitar strum, this contributes towards the effectiveness of the continuity editing. This is also applied to when the track slows down, when it slowed down we put the footage into slow motion to emphasise this.

looking back at my research of the conventions of music videos I see that there is often a relationship between the music and the visuals in a music video. Our video develops this convention firstly by using shots that illustrate this relationship, for example, when a guitar strum is heard, our video cuts to a shot of a guitar, and similarly to this, when a drum beat can distinctly be heard, it cuts to a close up of the drums. This is done in all music videos so that the transition between shots is smooth and flatters the music, for example, in the Kasabian video for 'Fire'

We used medium long shots in our music video when we wanted the whole band to be seen, we did this usually in the verses because you could then see each band member in  their element, you could see that the singer was singing and the drummer and guitarist were playing their instruments and we think that this made the video look authentic because it actually looked like they were performing. Medium shots are used a lot in narrative based videos because there is often a story and the whole frame needs to be seen to allow the audience to see everything, we used it so that the whole band could be seen working together.

Before starting our ancillary task we looked at other album covers from bands in our genre, I looked at the covers of CD's that I had at home like Bombay Bicycle Club and Vampire Weekend because they have a similar sound to Foster the People, I also looked at covers from Two Door Cinema Club and Arctic Monkeys online to see what the artwork was like and how it linked with the name of the album, from this we could plan our artwork accordingly to make sure that it looked authentic and appealed to our target audience.

Our ancillary task develops the forms and conventions of album covers by using artwork as opposed to a picture of the band, this is often the case with bands' albums which is why we did it. The theme of the images that are featured on our album cover is 'humans as sources of light' we showed this by replacing human body parts with sources of light like a bulb or a flame, this idea was inspired by the Two door cinema club cover for the album beacon. The theme of our ancillary task is also closely linked with the name of the album, torches.

Our back cover also uses conventions by having a barcode and the website of the band which is featured on most albums. We maintained a house style throughout our ancillary tasks; we used the same font, kept the font as the same colour, had the same background colour and kept and ongoing theme in all of the images that we used for the cover and the poster. Our album cover is conventional of indie bands' cover because of the simple colours that are used as well as the clothing that our model wears. Here you can see the similarities that exist between our back cover, and a cover that exists in the real media world - the track list for an album by The XX.
 
When creating our magazine advert, there are several conventions that we wanted to follow, we had to ensure that we had the bands website on the advert, we wanted to have ratings from music publications, have the central focus of the advert be the picture - so that the audience would be able to recognise the cover of the album if they decided to buy it - and to have links to the bands Facebook and Twitter. We feel as though we followed these conventions well and that our magazine advert would look authentic when displayed in a real magazine publication. Similarly to all of these adverts displayed, we have featured the artists name and the name of the album on our poster and we have shown when it is released, we have also featured the bands website which is featured on all of these real adverts.