Evaluation

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

When beginning looking at our music video, we first looked into the song and it's lyrics. We decided to see if there was a music video that had already been created and we wanted to see if there were any changes we might make if we were to make the production ourselves. We found that Frank Turner does have his own version of the video so we looked into that and we believe that the video could be viewed as boring. It is a simple video that is complied of only one shot, with people moving in and out doing different things to support the music side of the product - Due to the video being a tribute to the artist's friend who died, we believed that this may be the reason for the one shot. Although, we thought we could make something that was significantly more thought provoking and could really create a strong sense of emotion within the audience. Below is a showing of the shots that Frank Turner used in his video that we used as initial research -
It is clear that throughout the video certain aspects change, such as lighting, the number of people and the amount of things going on within the piece. We found that the video focused generally on adding people in through the build up of the story, and then as the story hits it's climax the people move out again. This is metaphorical of the death that was faced by his friend, but we had an idea that would make the video seem much more like a tribute to the persons life. The shot ideas we had are placed below -

We wanted to change the media conventions that were already used within the original Frank Turner video to create more of a story. Despite the fact that this goes against the conventions that were chosen by Frank Turner, there is also significant evidence to suggest that stories are included within a music video. An example of a video that focuses entirely on the narrative could be "When the sun goes down" by Arctic Monkeys -

Although, again we believe that this may not work entirely for our video either. Not many bands focus entirely on the idea of using only narrative and Arctic Monkeys are brave in the attempt. We believe that our video should follow the very typical codes and conventions of a music video by focusing on both shots of the artist as well as a narrative structure.

The most important factor that goes with creating a narrative with the piece is that it has some relevance to the lyrics of the song. For us, this was very easy because the lyrics tell a story alone and we simply followed the lines word for word. We have found that this is very common within existing products and we have compared these directly to ours below -

We also found that other artists who showed shots of the artist playing an instrument did not simply have one shot of them playing the instrument itself. Due to this research we have found that it would be beneficial to use this within our own piece because it gives the audience something more to look at as well as ensuring that we followed the typical codes and conventions of existing media products.

We also wanted to add the idea of home videos playing back over the video to show the audience the relationship between our characters. We believed that this could help the audience have an insight into their relationship and how to express the emotion that is held between them. To do this we looked at any conventions we could find. It was much more difficult to find an example of this because it was not frequent within any media texts that we initially looked into - This is one of the reasons we enjoy our video so much, because we believe that it has a much more unique idea behind it that allows our video to have a stronger establishing storyline. We were able to find one example of this and have compared it to our own work

Below are some further screen shots of the memories we used, these were desaturated slightly, but not the the point that Secondhand Serenade had done on their own work. We believe that the 50% desaturation helps to show exactly that it is a memory and people seem to find this a very attractive feature in our piece.

Print

When looking at our print, we looked directly into similar artists to the one that we had selected. The way that this worked was because it allowed us to see exactly what conventions were typical in our selected genre. We did not want to create something that does not fit our genre because it will directly confuse our audience and may even take away potential buyers of the CD.

Our artist is an alternative acoustic artist and this is a genre enjoyed by our group so it was easy to select exactly what we need and want to see within a CD. We looked any many examples to see which ones we believed to be aesthetically pleasing as well as ensuring that we stayed within the conventions of a typical CD packaging.

This idea above also links to the design that we used on the back of our CD packaging. We found that the front and back of CDs match perfectly in design aspects to ensure continuity throughout our piece.

We also found that the inside of the CD packaging was also consistent with the front and back also. To do this we simply looked at more examples to see how it was that they had done this. Typical examples showed that there were lots of pictures, interesting designs and the lyrics to the songs that would appear on the CD itself. We wanted to follow this convention exactly and the end product is presented below.

We then looked into the idea of posters and magazine adverts. It was common that these were exactly the same design wise and would appear in both formats. We wanted to make the CD cover closely related to the advert that we created. To do this we used the same location and included the ideas of leaves. This was also common within many of the examples and many of the themes clearly followed one another.

Conventions

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