Evaluation 1 - Our Products

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

In many ways, our media products conform to the conventions of both our chosen genre and real media products. Firstly, our video sticks to the conventions through the form of the video using both performance and narrative in the visuals of our video. We used a simple narrative storyline about a girl who fell in love with a boy but did not have enough confidence to tell him, then when she gets the confidence to tell him the boy has found someone else. This gives the video a theme of love which is a theme very often found in music videos for the acoustic genre such as Duffy’s ‘Warwick Avenue’. We also stuck to the conventions of fades and slow paced editing to fit in with the genre of our chosen song.
Also, in our video, our artist was our main character in the narrative. This will help the artist get recognition for her music as people will be seeing her on not just the CD cover but in the visuals and audio of the music video too. This will mean the audience will start recognising her music and make the link between herself as an individual and her music creating a brand. This is important because she is just starting out in the industry and the sooner she gets recognised by more people then the sooner her fan base will grow. I don’t think that we challenged the conventions of the music video as we wanted to stick close to home with the acoustic genre.
Our CD cover conformed greatly to the conventions of a real life product. We decided to use a close up of our artist to use as the cover image for our CD. This means that the audience’s main focus on the CD cover is the artist. This means that the audience can put a face to the artists name whenever they hear her mentioned or hear one of her songs. We used a ‘sophisticated’ font for the artist’s name, which stands out slightly against the simple features on the rest of our ancillary texts. We used the same font across the CD covers and the tour poster so that there was a common style in which our audiences saw our artist’s name. The distorted background we used helped massively to help the audience focus on the close up of the artist. We applied a ‘lipstick’ effect on Photoshop to the artist’s eyes in the close up image which gave the audience an even finer focus point and suggests she is looking directly at the audience and added a splash of colour onto our CD cover. We also kept close to the conventions of a real life album cover on the backing to it where we included a barcode, copyright information and company logo across the bottom. These are featured on real life CD’s so we added them to ours to give it an air of professionalism and reality. I think we deviated slightly from the conventions of a CD cover when creating the track list as we wrote the track numbers in word format rather than the conventional number format. This is not completely new, but has not been used enough to be seen as a convention. We did this to represent going back to basics and thought that it would give the CD cover a unique point to it to stand it out against other products that would be on the market.
Our tour poster also fit into the conventions of real life products quite comfortably. The main component that fits into this is the list of tour dates on the right third of the poster. These are featured on almost every tour poster and are the main point of the product. With this in mind, we included them in a simple font to fit in with the rest of our ancillary texts and so that the information that the audience would need can be seen clearly and understood when walking by. We also included the artists name and tour name to fit in with conventions and to increase the recognition of our artist. The styles of the album and artists name also fit in with the rest of our products as the album release and tour are too run alongside each other so this is shadowed in the products we created.
Overall I think our products fit in well with the conventions of real life products and have a high level of professionalism about them. We kept within the conventions with most of our work as we wanted to keep within the boundaries of our genre and products. This was our safest decision as we knew these conventions worked well in the real world and are already successful. However, I believe there were a few cases where we deviated and challenged the conventions to make our product. The reasons for this were purely to make our products unique to others in the real world and to show that there was something that our artist has that others do not.