Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventiosn of real media products?

The task was to make 3 different promotional materials for an album release. These promotional materials were a music promo, a CD/DVD digipack and a magazine. The purpose of these three elements in a promotional package is to promote the band’s new album by giving the audience a taste of the new songs through the video and the digipack and promoting the new album by giving the audience some information through the magazine advert and the website. An example of pre-existing texts is Biffy Clyro ‘Only Revolutions’. Here is the cover of the digipack and the magazine advert.

Below are the styles that music promos typically follow

Below are the general conventions of a music promo.

Below are the conventions of the alternative/indie genre

 

 

 

These conventions might be broken by particular directors/bands so that the music promo will stand out among the other music promos that people see every day so that they will remember them. This makes it successful as promotions to the album as if the video is unusual then people are more likely to remember the video and therefor the band/song.

This is the set we used. The location was a light and airy kitchen that had a wall that looked like it could be a studio-based location. While this isn’t a particularly a typical location, we chose it because it suited the type of style and genre of the promo and it worked well as an art studio. When compared to a real promo, this location isn't particularly conventional, especially for an alternative/indie promo. This is due to it being light and airy which isn't conventional when compared to the traditional gritty, dark type of alternative/indie promos.

The costumes we used are very typical of the genre as the costumes are very realistic as what teenagers to young adults would actually wear. The props we used are reasonably conventional to the genre as they work well with the theme of the promo which is art and break ups. We made these choses as we wanted a promo that followed the majority of conventions of the genre and we wanted it to be realistic.

The editing techniques/transitions/video effects we used in relation to defining genre was mainly stop motion, fast paced editing and a few transitions e.g. the blur transition. We used this because we wanted to make the promo look more eye-catching to the audience and a transition will do this quite easily.

Our camerawork was conventional as we used mainly mid shots, close ups and long shots. This is conventional as this is the typical camera shots used in any promo. The only thing that wasn't conventional was that we didn't use a pan or tracking shot to follow the actress or performer but instead to show the location and set. This isn't particularly conventional as most promos will use pans or tracking shots to follow the people in the promo and not the scenery.

We have used narrative and performance in our promo. We showed performance in our promo by getting the male to sing the song. This is very conventional for most genres as almost every video involves performance in one way or another. The genre of the band typically has more performance than narrative so we showed this in our promo. The main parts of the narrative are the shots of the girl painting, getting dressed up and arguing with the male singer. The meanings that we hoped to create were of the idea of letting someone go which we showed through the shots of the girl cleaning herself up and implying that she was going to go out. But to get to this part we had to show the different parts of the break up.

Our ancillary tasks were influenced by the idea of our music promo which was to show the aftermaths of a break up for a girl and when she overcomes this with art and the idea of the hands that were done in stop motion. We thought that it would be effective if we linked the three texts by something simple but eye-catching but also something that was important in the song and the promo. The song is very much about the idea of letting someone go so we thought we could show this with black and white hands letting go or in reality appearing to let go by either being moved away or being drawn like they are being moved away. The main influence behind the ancillary tasks was this idea which worked well. We also included the main conventions of the digipack and magazine advert to make sure that it was easily recognised as each of the texts.
The conventions of a magazine advert and digipack are:

 

 

In class we looked at a number of different theorists. Andrew Goodwin’s theory that music promos follow certain conventions which are:

1.  Conventions depend on the genre
2. Star persona is important and companies use close-ups to sell them to the audience
3. Voyeuristic images are used to attract an audience
4. They often contain intertextual references to other media
5. There is a link between the lyrics and the visuals
6. There is a link between the visuals and the music/pace.

Our music promo mostly supports this theory as we have followed a lot of those conventions such as numbers 1, 2, 5 and 6. However, it subverts this theory as well as our promo doesn’t include intertextual links or voyeuristic images to attract an audience.