Question 1

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

When doing our research into popular music videos we noticed that there is commonly a main singer shown to be singing along to his/her song. We used this feature in our video by getting a female to mime to the words of a song that we chose. A feature that we identified to be crucial in generating a relationship with the audience was providing a narrative for the music video. In our research we looked, in depth, only at videos that provided a story to accompany the music. This inspired us to come up with the idea of introducing an Alice in Wonderland theme to our video as we felt it would help the audience gain and maintain not only a relationship with the video and those who are seen in it but also an interest in what they are watching. A common feature amongst folk and pop videos is to use a natural and outdoorsy scene which is where we got our inspiration from, by watching music videos such as Ellie Goulding’s ‘Burn’.

Our first subsidiary task was to create a digpak, which included: ad CD, the front cover of a CD case, the inside of a CD case and the back of a CD case. It is common for the front cover of a CD to include some basic information. We met those standards by including the name of the single and a photo of the artist so that the consumers can create a connection between the music and the artist. Other information that we thought vital to include we put on the back of the CD where the audience would find it easy to locate still as even in shops if it is still encased in the plastic and cannot be opened. The information that we thought important to show included: the name of the artist, the song title, the length of the song, the label the artist is singed to and a quick response code to allow people access to the artist’s official website if they wished to see any extra information.

The final element of our A2 coursework was to create a magazine advert. Within the creation of our first two tasks, we had already identified a theme and genre. We were able to continue the theme to our magazine advert as we kept the model holding/dropping playing cards into a lake. Just like with our digipak, we needed to make sure that our magazine advert had all of the appropriate information included. One thing that we thought simple yet important to include on the advert was a web address linking to Gabrielle Aplin’s webpage. Any extra information that the audience would like to know, could then be found there. We took many photos in preparation for the creation of our advert but when it came to making the final product we both agreed with one another on the perfect image. Having our model, Abi, in the water truly did reflect the lyrics 'Out on my own' and we believed that it showed emotion as she was letting go of the cards as if she were letting go of here emotions and fans of Gabriella Aplin would be able to identify the lyric "I think I've outgrown my home" as a very significant one. Relating parts of the song to the elements in our video, digipak and magazine advert is a good example of how we followed codes and conventions of a usual media product. 

We have not challenged very many conventions of a music video. As it was our first real attempt at making a video for ourselves we may have found our actions to be tentative and not wanting to do anything too risky. However we did follow a lot of codes and conventions of a folk/pop video which we did not want to mess with too much!