QUESTION 1 PLAN

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

The media products I have chosen to make were the music video with a digipak and magazine advertisement. I chose this brief because I felt it was most suited to my skills that I have developed throughout the foundation portfolio and allowed me to expand my knowledge of the media industry by starting to film and improve my skills with video cameras.

Firstly as a group we had decided that it was important for our video to be similar to already established music videos so that it would reach our target audience and be recognisable as an indie pop music video. We did this by looking at similar genre music videos and finding the conventions and then finding a way to employ these conventions into our music video, which would also fit with the song itself. We also wanted it to stand out and be different to get the song out there and have our artist be recognised.  We decided to defy some conventions in order for us to be different and unique in the industry.

Firstly we found the conventions by looking at already established artists from similar genres and then in comparison we looked at music videos from completely different genres. Such as pop punk band Blink 182, rock band The All American Rejects and drum and bass duo Sigma.

The All American Rejects – Dirty Little Secret   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPDcwjJ8pLg

·         Uses short quick scenes

·         Close up focus on main image

·         Band Scenes

·         Postcards used

Blink 182 – Adam’s Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRdtXWcgIw

·         One continuous band scene

·         Photographs in the background

·         Close ups of photographs

Sigma – Nobody to love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD5fLb-WgBU

·         Continuous story line

·         Contemporary no instrument scenes

·         Landscape and people shots

These are examples of what we used in our music video to both defy and comply with conventions. For example for most indie/pop videos they use one continuous band scene with short break ups in-between much like Blink 182’s video for Adam’s Song, so we wanted to use some of the conventions that they had employed such as one band scene that was continuous throughout the entirety of the music video. They also featured photographs in the background which we thought was really interesting but we didn’t want to just copy their idea so we researched further into the idea of using something to get people to hold up or show to the camera, we found a few videos such as a local band which used a whiteboard to display what they would do with 1 million pound. Or more noticeably The All American Rejects music video for Dirty Little Secret, this features members of the public holding up postcards with their secret on which we thought was a really good idea so we decided to use it but change it to suit our own music video. This ended up being the colour of the title of the song which was “Dark Blue” so we wanted everything to relate to the dark blue theme.

We wanted our music video to represent the journey that bands make whilst on their tour around the world and we wanted to convey the band and crew on their journey in this video. To do this we wanted to defy all the conventions set out by indie music videos and focus solely on pop videos. Pop videos are becoming more and more contemporary and leaving a lot to the imagination, such as Sia’s video for Chandelier, which is all a dance scene. Our main style model for this would be Sigma’s video for nobody to love because it’s all storyline and features a mixture of landscapes and people shots.

For my ancillary tasks I chose to create a digipak and a magazine advertisement to accompany my music video. To begin, I started to do some research on current album covers and digipaks for all genres to get an overall idea on what was required on a digipak and how to make it look appealing to the audience.  This involved me looking at a variety of realistic and quite artistic covers. This included albums from Rihanna, Jessie J, Olly Murs, Coldplay, Maroon 5 and Muse. One thing was clear they all had a very prominent theme and house style through the whole album pack to make it easily recognisable to their audience which is a convention I thought would be really useful as it gives the whole album an identity and makes it clear to the audience who the artist is.

The next ancillary task I had to do was my magazine advertisement. As I started my research it was obvious that advertisements always stem from the album cover to make it more recognizable to the audience and give the artist an identity. This was definitely an important convention I thought I should incorporate in order to attract my audience.

It was important for me to use several conventions for my advert so that it was obvious it was an advert, these features included: Album cover image, release date, released single track names, reviews, etc.

Because I wanted my advert to stand out I thought I was important to develop some of these conventions to suit the adverts needs and make it more noticeable. It’s important that your advert stands out so that the audience will be interested and actually read it. These included having the cover image in the center of the page rather than at the top or bottom.