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

The typical conventions of a music video are that they take on a narrative, performance or concept format, with narrative and performance being the two more common. The aim of a music video is to accommodate the music playing over it; often the video assists the lyrics in telling a story that should allow viewers to identify with the lyrics better. Our music video does follow these conventions as it takes on a mix of both performance and narrative formats, and it also fits alongside the lyrics of the song we had chosen and should hopefully work towards telling a story within the song.

Our video does challenge the conventions in that it is using both narrative and performance – It is most common for music videos to only use one of these formats. By using editing to cut between narrative elements and performance elements, the two formats fit together quite seamlessly.

Our music video falls into the indie genre, some of the conventions of this genre being the much darker tones displayed in both the visuals of the music videos as well as the lyrics to the songs themselves. This style of music is often aimed towards younger, teenage, audiences and also aims to target quite niche audiences, rather than appealing the masses. The stories told in the videos are also directed towards a younger audience with the intention being that a viewer can easily identify with both the song’s lyrics and video.

Our music video does follow a lot of these conventions in that the target audience was a young, teenage demographic with the aim of portraying and telling a story that was both believable and easily relatable. Our video does also feature some darker tones throughout the editing, leaning more towards dark desaturated colours rather than vibrant and striking colours.

Our video does manage to challenge the conventions in some aspects, the song we chose used some more upbeat lyrics, meaning that to follow that trend our video does contain some more upbeat themes and locations with a large portion of the video emphasising a mostly positive atmosphere, while the rest of the video does contrast with some more negative tones. We made the video slightly more positive as a persistently dark and depressing video may not match up very well with our chosen song. Similarly, Indie songs and their videos are normally quite slow, using slower cuts and longer scenes whereas our video does use some faster paced editing, the intent of this again being to convey this slightly more positive vibe.

The main aim of an advert is to advertise, to draw attention to a product and encourage people to purchase the product, or consume the media. Some of the conventions of magazines include release dates, as well as different locations that an item can be found – physically and digitally, whichever is applicable – and most importantly, in the instance of an album advert, the advert must show the artist name, as well as the name of the album. A typical convention for most adverts is that they are visually striking, this is often shown through vibrant colours and captivating images. The visual style of an advert should match up with the styles used in other media’s like in this context it should have some similarities to the album cover itself.

My advert does follow most of these conventions in that it includes the relevant information for where the album is likely to be found, as well as important release dates. My advert also uses contrasting colours for the artist name and the name of the album so it stands out with the background colours. The visual style of my advert does match up with the style used for my digipak, as well as using some of these darker tones that are common throughout our music video.

It is these darker tones, however, that challenge some of the common conventions of a magazine advert, though the intent of the advert is still to be captivating and eye catching, the colours used are darker and not quite so bold. This was intentional as it allows the advert to thematically match with the album cover, as well as convey the theme of the darker tones that are common throughout the music video and song. The colour I used was a darker crimson shade of red, so despite the tones being darker and less vibrant they are still unusual and eye-catching which should resemble the more unusual upbeat tones found throughout the video.

Similar to a magazine, a digipak is also meant to advertise a product Similar to a magazine, a digipak is also meant to advertise a product. A digipak is supposed to look visually appealing and have some correlation to the themes found in the music, in some cases for very large artists, an individual should be able to tell the artist or genre of an artist simply by seeing the album cover. Another reason for this could be because the album cover should also include the name of the album as well as the name of the artist. A digipak should be more aesthetically pleasing than a normal album cover as a digipak is commonly seen as a collector’s item, bought by big fans of the artist, and digipaks are commonly sold in stylistic cardboard cases rather than plastic cases.

My digipak does follow these conventions as it contains images for front and back covers, as well as inside covers with the aim being that the digipak could be printed onto cardboard rather than plastic. The Album name and artist name are displayed with bright contrasting colours so they stand out on the cover, meanwhile the main colour scheme of the digipak is a dark shade of red, this dark tone hopefully matching well with some of the darker tones added to our music video. My digipak does also include many of the advertisement features, including barcodes and parental advisory stickers.

My digipak does not necessarily challenge any conventions though it does still feature some brighter colours to contrast the darker desaturated colours that are most prominent. Once again, these slight touches of vibrant colour do show the more upbeat themes of our music video, and the chosen artist as a whole.

In conclusion, I believe that the three pieces of work I have produced do tend to stick to some of the more common and prevalent themes found throughout the indie genre as well as the common conventions of a magazine advert and digipak style. There are a few instances of challenging and developing these conventions and I believe they are impactful to the style of our chosen music as well as the themes and atmospheres shown in our music video.