Evaluation Question 1 - 1st draft

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

The main conventions of music videos are close ups and fast cut editing. Star image is one of the main ways my media products uses conventions of real media products. Richard Dyer suggested that a star  is constructed through a range of materials. Pete Fraser also said that close ups are fundamental in music video to help establish star image.Close ups are used throughout my videos with most of the shots being front facing Close ups of my actorsin order to put the focus and attention on them, resulting in an enhanced image.

 Fast cut editing is another common convention of music videos as music songs are often only 2-4mins long and often so much footage is taken they aim to use a lot of this. Also with such a short limit for time it can be very difficult to establish a theme so many shots are needed to do this. Lastly high shot counts and fast cut editing are so frequent in music videos as they increase repeatability as you do not often take everything upon first viewing meaning multiple viewings are needed to fully understand the video.



For my specific genre there are a variety of conventions linked to the indie rock genre such as perfomances based videos, longer takes, natural settings and casual costumes. Firstly I decided to go with a peformanced based video. Both my actors lip sync in the video which is seen in close up and mid shots. Unlike many other indie rock videos I did not use any instruments as I was unable to get hold of any and also it would not have been suitable taking them out on location. Costumes are also very important with videos as it shows the specifc styles of the artists. I loooked through several bands similar to those I wished to imitate and then decided upon a layed back casual style for my artist as bright colourful over the top clothing is much common in pop songs and this is not the image I was aiming for. I asked my actors to wear dark jeans, bomber jacket or hoodies and to bring some shades which gave them a cool layed back look. Natural locations are typically used in indie rock videos, this is one of the reasons for me choosing to film out in the woods but also because after looking around the area there were a few nice looking shot and areas.the centre of the my video is up on top of a peak which has a open clear veiw for miles in each direction, I thought this was an ideal place to film as it was out of the way and also matched the tone of the music it was visuallkly what i imaged when listening to the song.

 

 My ancillaries also used many conventions with them both being very similar in style and layout. This was done intentionally to help establish a band image and album image.

Both my digipak and Magazine advert are laid out following industry conventions. This is due to research I put into existing products. From looking at existing products I noticed that the majority of the magazine adverts and digipaks I looked at followed a similar layout. Firstly the artist's name was nearly always located at the top and was the biggest and boldest. Then the album name was often either placed below the artist's name or at the bottom and once again used the same font, was bold and easily readable. I chose the font PrimeTime from dafont.com for both my title and band name This was becasue it was easily readable and also fit the style of the genre. I also noticed that for magazine adverts there is normally only one image and this is the focus of the advert so it is often large and certral. Although the focus of my artists does not entirely fill my magazine ad it is placed centrally and is the only imagery within the forground forcing the attention on to them.

For each panel of my digipak the artist are featured as the main focus point to reenforce the star image created from the music video. For the back panel I wrote the tracklist, the tracklist is the list of all tracks featured on the CD. I matched the layout of digipak by placing it on the far left side and aligning them all.