Evaluation part 1

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

Music Video:

In the music video, we challenged conventions of real media products by not having many steady shots throughout the video. This was something that we decided to do while we were in the middle of filming, as we thought that it would keep the audience of the video edgy and uncomfortable. This seemed like a good idea as it would also fit with the style of the narrative and the sound of the song. The guitars in the song sound fuzzy and they resonate at points in the song, and a shaky shot it is a good way to reflect that. In term of the style fo the narrative, it is a similar sort of plotline to what a thriller would have, but heavily refined for a short music video, and one of the aim of thrillers is to keep the audience on edge, so that is another reason for having the shaky shots.

At the beginning of the A2 coursework, I started looking at music video theories, and one of these were Goodwins six music video conventions. This theory states that most music video will contain these conventions which are; Voyeurism, intertextual references, relationships between the video and lyrics, relationship between visuals and music, the artist starring in the video, and a notion of looking. Our music video contained three of these six conventions. The first of these is the relationship between the video and lyrics. The most notable example of this within the video is after the line "This is the world now" where there is a series of fast cuts showing different areas of the locations where we filmed. This connotes that the world is like an industrial estate due to this relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. This point in the video is also a good example for the second of Goodwin's conventions that we used, which is the relationship between the visuals and the music. At this point cuts are matched to the beat, so that with every beat, there is a cut to a different shot. The last of the conventions used is the artist starring in the video. The band that the video is for is formed of two members, and there are two characters in the music video. This meant that both members of the band could star in the video, and that is what happened. This convention is used, as it familiarises the audience with the artist, and creating publicity for the band is one of the main functions of a music video, so we thought it was very important to include the artist in out video.

Another theory that is relevant to our music video is Todorov's narrative theory. This theory states that there are five basic stages to any narrative of any media. These are the five stages, and how they related to our music video:

1. State of equilibrium- This is the point at the beginning of the music video where we are first introduced to the main character, and he is on his way to work.
2. A disruption of the equilibrium- The disruption occurrs when you first see the antagonist, and the audience realises that there is a potential threat.
3. A recognition of the disruption- This happens when the main characters senses that something is wrong, and keeps checking behind him to see if he is being followed by someone.
4. An attempt to repair the disruption- This stage isn't really included within the narrative, as the main character never tries to repair the disruption, as he is unaware of it. The closest thing to this stage would be through the antagonists perspective where he attacks the main character.
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrim- This is after the attack, when the main character is dead, a different equilibrium is made.

Using this theory makes the video appear more like a real media product, as it uses a conventional narrative structure, that a lot of media pieces use.

The last theory used is Vladimir Propp's character types. This theory, like Todorov's, can apply to any piece of media with a narrative. This theory, was devised through Propp's study of Russian fairy tales. The two character types that we used were the hero/victim and the villain. Propp defines the hero/victim character as someone who reacts to the donor (someone who gives the hero the task) or weds the princess. We used the victim aspect of character type, and their goal is to react to the donor. The donor does not appear within the video, and so is not really part of the visible narrative, and there is no clear goal for the hero that is presented. In this way, this is a development of this theory, as we used Propp's theory as a basis for the character, but defined him in a separate way. This way being that the hero is who the narrative is centered around. The other character used is the villain, and we used in the way defined bey Propp, this being the person who tries to stop the hero.

Digipack:

 

The digipack that we made conforms to conventions of all the digipacks that I studied. On the front of the digipacks, there would be the name of the artist and album, and a picture that was intended to reflect the style of the music. We included all of these things on the front cover of our digipack. The picture we used was of a satellite tower in one of the industrial estates that we filmed the video in. As the song we chose is often labelled as industrial music, we thought that it was very appropriate to use that picture as the front cover in order to represent the music.

For the inside cover, we covered the whole panel with text that included the lyrics and some information about the band. This was an idea I got from my research, more specifically the album "East Jesus" by Lee Ranaldo, which had a panel full of text for the inside cover.

On the CD panel, we used a plain looking picture as the background, as that is the sort of thing that was used in all the digipacks that we looked at.

The back cover had the tracklist, recording, record label and copyright information on, which again, were very common features in digipacks that we studied.

The reason we wanted to conform to conventions with the digipack so much, was because we wanted it to look as professional as possible. In order to do this, we thought it would be best to use most features which real digipacks have.

Print Advert:

 

Like the digipack, we wanted to create a conventional poster. This is especially because it is a way of promoting the artist, and challenging conventions could make it more difficult for the audience to understand the purpose of the advert, as it would not likely be clear.

Research showed us that there were some things that were very important to include on the advert. These include:

• Album name
• Artist name
• Album artwork
• Album release date
• Formats available
• Website address of the record label
• A brief description of the album
• Record label logo 

All of these are present on our print advert, although the brief description of the album appears in a different form. We used quotes from reviews of the album as a description to put on the poster. Quotes from reviews are sometimes used on print adverts, but from my research, they weren't used that much.

Final Advert