Evaluation: Question 1

Question 1:

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

I wanted my music video to use conventions from current day media texts, so that my viewers would be able to recognise and relate with it. I believe that in this modern day genres are becoming more and more diverse and niche. This meant that I had to try and make the examples that I studied as closely relating to my own artist as possible. For me, this meant attempting to find Indie artists, who were male and from England. For example, Jack Bugg and The Arctic Monkeys. My artistic conforms with alot of typical and common features of this genre, however also challenges a few. I noticed that a large amount of indie music videos where presented in black and white colouring. This was other to reinforce the moody feel of the lyrics. I want to use this convention, but I noticed limitations with it. Converting footage into black and white lost a large amount of detail, making the locations and costumes much less dramatic. My solution to this was to use a half and half effect, which muted the colours without all the details. I also replicated this in my digipack and magazine poster by reducing the saturation in my images on Photoshop. Another typical convention of the indie genre that I used was including a guitar as a prop. This suited the acoustic song, and reinforced the idea of a large percentage of indie music videos include this. I also meant that my music video had elements of a performance video. However, due to the lyrics there was also a storyline. Which challenged David Gauntlett's theory that all videos must be either one or the other. Mine is a hybrid narrative/performance video. An example of an artist who also does this is Ed Sheeran. Yet another convention that my video challenges is with its location. All the music videos that were also set in and around a church, had a happy romantic theme to them. Mine conflicts with this, as the artist is not happy and in love. 

I also used conventions from real media texts for my digipack. I analysed "Jack Buggs" digipack and learnt that real media texts include certain details such as barcodes, lyric pages, and record label logos. I conformed to these conventions in order to make my work recognisable as a digipack. I used the same and image colouring throughout, in order to link each digipack pages together as a booklet. The font used was also supposed to link with the location of the church, due to the traditional and old styling. In order make the front cover recognisable, I used a simple portrait style photo of Vincent Dellow. I also used the guitar as a prop for this shoot to reinforce the genre of indie. My poster also conformed with typical conventions by including the artists name and image, alongside a review from a music magazine.