1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Music Video
Our media product uses conventions from other real Alternative styled music videos such as slow edits, close-ups of people expressions and the video went back and forth evenly between the artist/band playing their instruments and the narrative. We took these themes and ideas and used them in our music video to conform to an Alternative styled music video.
One of the conventions that our music video conformed to was having the artist alone in the frame in some part of the music video. We did this to create a position that the artist can be sympathised with by our audience. Our market research into Coldplay’s “Fix You” music video showed one member of their band walking for the first part of it. We used this convention in our music video along with the black and white filter for an extra emphasis on the mood it will have on our audience.
Using black and white is another convention that was identified when looking at previous products and we used this throughout our music video alongside the other key codes and conventions. In our music video, we used the black and white to represent the mood of the character with relation to the two paths he has a choice of. The two choices were “Move on” and “Sleep on it” and the video eventually hits a tinge of colour before the video starts to rewind giving our audience a clue about how his emotions are changing. Levi Strauss said that creating a conflict propels a narrative and that a narrative can only end on a resolution of this conflict. By using this black and white filter to portray a conflict in the mind of our artist, we attempt to show a conflict through visual contexts. Our artists is constantly seeing the same girl wherever he goes producing the idea that maybe he loves her in some way and by this we show a conflict through conceptual contexts. Only at the end does the artist resolve their conflict.
Our music video conformed to the structure of an Alternative styled music video too. Swapping between the narrative and shots of the artists playing his instrument is used in our music video to keep our audience entertained and this helps promote the artist and keep him in the spotlight – Richard Dyer’s star theory.
One of the pre-existing products we looked at was "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol. The ideas we noted from this video were things such as Goodwin's theory of types of music video. We identified this music video as it being an illustrative type of music video where the lyrics represented what was happening. We liked this idea very much and used it in our music video where the lyrics say "Two paths to choose", we shot a scene with the artist standing between two pathways with each path showing what mind set the artist was in.
As this is a sad song, we tried to use merge these codes and conventions with a few ideas of our own to develop these conventions further and experiment with things such as slow-motion and lyrics on-screen. We emphasised the emotional lyrics from the song to contribute to the mood of the song.
Our music video does subvert from some codes and conventions from the Alternative styled music video genre. We wanted to make our music stand out and add bits that made it unique like the beginning of the video. The beginning of the video is silent and shows the artist setting up his camera and his stool and guitar. This is different to most alternative music videos where the music kicks in straight away. The next time our audience watches this video or happens to see the beginning they’ll know straight away that this is the music video to “Never Again”.
Instead of our music video being fully conventional, we added some transitions into it instead of only having traditional cuts and a few fades. We used some transitions to show the artist’s face above clips of him playing his instrument and a transition to show a change in location instead of another cut. This little transitions made the video more interesting to watch and unique to other music videos of the same genre.
Album Cover
When researching album covers, we had to identify the codes and conventions of pre-existing products. Looking at album covers I found that Alternative genre albums seem to have abstract pictures with symbolism or simple pictures that don’t crowd the front of the album cover. I took into conisderation that the pre-exisitng product research was carried out on popular artists and bands so they didn't need to show their faces on the front of the album to make themselves known but Jake Black was a new artist. For this reason, the album subverted from having an abstract picture on it. The pictures that were used were in black and white to match the branding throughout and make this colour scheme a recognisable icon of the artist.
[This is the photo of the front cover
that was edited onto the album cover]
[This is the photo of the front cover
of Coldplay's Parachutes album]
The layout of the title and artist name for any album cover is not placed in a specific position so we placed our where it was best readable and looked best so as not disrupt the photo. We did put the bar code and record label on the back of the CD because looking at all other albums from any genre we noticed that the front of the album is supposed to focus all the attention on the image and title of the album. Our album conformed to this style of layout so our target audience could focus on the image of the artist and title of the album.
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[This is the back cover of our album] [This is the back cover of Snow
Patrol's Up To Now album]
Website
The codes and conventions of artist's and band's websites are quite creative with their websites and they give a heavy impression of the band so you will always know whos website you're browsing. They have tabs to let people find out more information about the artist/band members, tour dates, social networking site links, music videos, forums and stores. By using these pre-existing websites to further promote these bands, we used these same elements to create our website. Our website has an artist bio, tour dats, social networking links, a link to the new single 'Never Again', a store, new album information and a comment section. The website matches the black and white colour scheme and has Jake Black on the background for the website.
[Home page of our website]
[Snow Patrol's home page of their official website]
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts (cd cases, website, digi pak)?
3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Class feedback:
More product feedback:
Digi-pak feedback
4) How did you use media technologies in the contruction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Technologies have advanced and continue to advance every year. Without these sorts of online techniologies, I wouldn't have been able to create my production the way I did and the overall quality would have been worse. Thanks to these sorts of online websites I was able to work efficiently and quickly instead of having to research everything by books and waiting for information from others. I can present my work clearer by using these technologies which enables me to get my message across and make it easy to understand by use of auditory and visual aid. It becomes quite boring very quickly having to read a wall of text and current technologies allow me to present my information in a more interesting way and I have a chance to get creative with my work.
