Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Throughout the creation of my 3 products I have tried to stick to the same genre signifiers and style. The Blighters music, in the real bands mind, comes under Indie – New Wave. This to me sounds almost like a hybrid of folk and pop music thereby creating mellow sounding songs. The importance of sticking to the genre is because it will instantly create a foundation of potential audience and buyers as well as enabling the creation of a label or link to the band.

By establishing the genre I was able to create more specific products. In the music video production we decided on setting it out as an action oriented presentation with no structured narrative apparent. The action was based around skateboarding, further adding a Sub-class of potential audience via its aspiration attraction and the ability to enable fellow skateboarders to relate to the video. However the key benefit of this is that it enabled me to be base my products around more of a ‘New Wave graffiti skate park’ colour scheme.

The actual music video challenges numerous conventions of media productions just by it's location. We decided to base our video in a rural, rather than urban, skatepark. This connoted a feeling of quirkiness and uniqueness rather than the conventional rich and famous connotations felt through over urban bases skate boarding videos such as Avril Lavinges Sk8er Boi. Throughout our music video we use long to medium shots to enable the audience to truly appreciate the location, and maybe even relate it to their own local skate park, in such images as below.

In many other fashions our music video stuck to many key music video conventions. Such as a shot showing the entire band (like above), a quick succession of actions shot which can be located in our music video at 1.55 to 1.59 below via editing in Adobe Premiere. These fast pace of shots are in many music videos but especially in the Judith - A Perfect Circle music video which I analysed some time ago in another Blog Post. However the fast paced transitions are also supported by being synchronised to the beat of a music providing a more seamless change.

Another convention of camera work we used was to use numerous close up shots of the lead singer. A prime example is the common occurring low angle shot to connote the singers overall importance By comparing the Lostprophets - Shinobi VS. Dragon shot of their lead singer with ours below you can see the similarities. By doing this we enable the audience to identify with the band more easily by allowing them to link it to a single face.

The video goes on to further develop the songs title "Boy's in Motion" by firstly using an untraditional Stop Motion title sequence connoting uniqueness along with basing our video primarily on performance and no narrative. We were largely influenced by Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie when deciding which stop motion to employ. Once reading the fact that the video consisted of 3225 still images we decided to use slightly less stop motion than planned for pure time limitation reasons.

My Digipak design mainly sticks to the conventions by having images of the band from the music video throughout. Along with this I wanted to use a simple Jewell Case instead of a digipak or some other constructed device because while being a convention it is also what audiences are used to. I also developed the usual lyric listing by having them annotated by the band members which adds another layer of communication between the band and their audience.

My Magazine Advert stuck to most conventions by being A4. Using the artwork from the album cover it plans to promote and to use promotion quotes from supporting magazines or companies stating the album is a positive construction, which can be seen in most other Album advertisements.

However throughout the production I have tried to keep note of Andrew Goodwin's theory. Throughout my product there is a link between the lyrics and visuals as shown perfectly in the above 2 images from my digipak construct along with these Goodwin mentioned the need for close ups of the vocalist and as mentioned previously we kept to this music video convention strongly by having Owen with the most screen time as well as the front cover of the digipak design and Magazine Advert.

Overall I have used a large amount of conventions while only developing and challenging a few. This is because while my band is part of the Indie - New wave genre their audience is still quite broad due to their demographic being around the age of 16-25. This means while I could go for a straight quirky and totally unique setup by keeping a slightly low key uniqueness it enables the overall product to attract a larger audience.