EVALUATION QUESTION ONE:

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

For our music video choice, my group and I decided to go for the song “Sticks ‘n’ Stones” by Jamie T, choosing two other songs to compare the similarities and differences between all 3 videos, picking out the main conventions, they all had for this similar genre of music, being British Indie/Rock. So, for the first part of my answer (Split into 3 separate categories; music video, digi-pak and advertisement) I’ll be discussing the music video.

In every video my group and I watched, we noticed one major convention found in almost every single music video, and all videos we researched  was that the lead singer of the band in the music video was actually lip syncing in the song, obviously to show his status of him/her as lead singer of the band. There were also the inclusion of shots of the band members playing their musical instruments. Again, something we saw in many of the music videos we saw. This was one convention that we decided not to go with, as it would make our video like the many other music videos out there. Instead the purpose of the video was to create a short story with added humour elements. We thought that having too much footage of the band playing, or the lead singer singing, would seem out of place and disjoint the action in the video. The actual setting of the video seems to keep to the genre’s conventions, on the other hand. In the British Indie music videos that my group and I researched, we saw how the videos were mainly set on cloudy days in busy British streets, keeping the setting of the genre close to home. So we also went for shooting in the streets of places such as York and such, so fans of the genre, who are most likely to be Brits, will be familiar with the videos feel and setting.  

The digi-pak in itself seems to keep to the basic design that we have researched. It is a traditional 6 sided digi-pak that is designed to take two discs; these being the album CD and the extra content CD. The digi-pak also contains track listings on the back and information about what is on the discs themselves, such as live content, music videos etc. We didn’t want to take any risks with how the digi-pak was laid out and all thought that the simple 6 sided digi-pak was a simple one yet effective. The design of the digi-pak links into the theme of the music video and the title, being full of graffiti and includes pictures of the two main characters of the music video, also being the two members of the people who made the album.

For our advertisement, my group and I decided to stick with the theme that the digi-pak had and adapted it into an advertising campaign. We noticed that in every advert we had researched, things like the text of the advert were all kept bold and straight, but also stuck to the theme of the album they were releasing. This is used so that if the audience wants to go out and purchase the album, they can instantly recognize it by what they saw on the advert. The colours, the text and the images that were on the album. So in this case, we also kept to conventions, for the purpose of audience practicality. Having images from the album art also on the advert, and having the graffiti like text being the text of the advert too. Things such as quotes from music reviewers and star ratings from magazines were also included, as well as the record label. These features are again present in all the adverts we researched, and so we kept with this convention, as it is a great way of promoting an album.