Evaluation Question 1 Final

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

MUSIC VIDEO

From my research and planning, I found that it's very important to follow the conventions of a music video, especially when shooting a production that falls into a particular genre of music as its important to connect with your target audience and listen to their needs/what they find entertaining to watch. Keeping this in mind, this affected our location choices, casting choices, costume choices and general mood/tone of our music video; we had to put all the right elements together in order for our production to be entertaining for our implied target audience. 

When researching the conventions of real music videos I discovered that each music genre generally has different conventions as they are produced to aim towards different target audiences. Therefore, as Sam Sparro is a dance/pop artist, it was important for us to do our research into this particular genre so we can produce a video that will entertain the watchers. From this research, I found that most pop videos were narrative based, so as a group we came up with a story line to keep our audience interested throughout. However, we  wanted our video to overall be about 60% performance based and 40% narrative based, so we could show as much of the artist as possible in their element as they're singing into the camera. But we kept the music video narrative based to intrigue watchers into a storyline and to make the video memorable. 

Below, I've created a running commentary illustrating some of the ways in which our music video used the conventions of real media products.

Overall, we didn't really challenge any forms or conventions of real media products as we felt it was important to create a video that would be entertaining for the general audience of a pop/dance artist to watch. 

DIGIPAK

Before making my digipak, I also did some research into the conventions of a digipak so I had some guidelines to go by.

The first thing I noticed was that the album covers usually featured an image of the artist so audiences can identify which artist the album belongs to and get to know the artists style. Therefore, I used a full frontal close up image of Eoghain looking directly into the camera to illustrate this convention. Below is the process in which I came to the final image.

Another convention is that the front cover usually has the artists name and the album name illustrated on the front, along with the name of the record company and a star review (however these are less common). I decided to add all these features to make the cover look as realistic as possible. My first draft didn't feature the name of the record company or a review and it looked too simple and there was too much spare space on it, so I added in these elements to give the audience more to look at. The first draft without the extra font is below.

The back cover of a digipak requires to have all the song titles, and often a different image of the artist. There's also usually a running colour scheme throughout to create a sense of continuity. I showed this by keeping the style and colour of font the same, the background colour the same and a darkly lit image of Eoghain. Eoghain's also wearing the same clothes and has the same hairstyle, which keeps this sense of continuity and shows a bit of his brand identity.

The theme of the digipak also has to reflect the album name and genre of music that the artist represents. As Sam Sparro is a pop artist and the name of the album is 'Life Through Technicolour', I decided to have add bright colours in somewhere to reflect the pop genre and 'technicolour'. However, I also made sure to create a link between the leading track and name of our music video song 'Black and Gold' by keeping most of the font in gold and using a black background. This will hopefully tie the whole digipak together in terms of keeping a sense of continuity throughout and a running theme. The similarities between all my media products hopefully present a promotional package for Sam Sparro as an artsy, pop artist and will persuade audiences who enjoy this type of music to buy his album.