Evaluation Part 1

Evaluation Question 1:



In what way does your Media Product use, Develop or challange Forms and Conventions of real Media Products?



Digi-Pack:



For the Digi-pack we firstly conformed to the conventions when it came to the physical layout of the Digi-pack. For us it was a strait up choice between Four panes or Six panes, because these were what almost every conventional digipack would have. In the end we decided to use the 4 Panes instead of 6. So in This department we have stuck to the conventions of the album. After this point we then had to be more specific with the conventions. We needed to delve into the more specific conventions of the Indie Rock Genre and Even more Specifically the Arctic Monkeys Style for our digipack. In order to do this I looked at previous digipack from bands and albums from the same genre as well as some from The Arctic Monkeys. The One convention i found was that the genre has a profound effect on the way a Digi-pack is constructed. For Our Genre of Indie Rock there is generally a more creative aspect to the works. Art is common or photoshoots. In this regards we felt it unwise to challenge the conventions, because we wanted to present the correct image and we didnt want any confusion as to what the genre of the Album Was. In order to conform to these conventions we decided that the best thing to do was to do a photoshoot because neither of us had the skill to do a painting. Of course we had both used editing programs in the past so we had the skill to edit photos to the specification that we wanted. The First thing during Editing was to make the images Black and White as is custom for the Genre. We wanted to go for a simple look that still looked genuine. So we decided to Use Simple Imagery with a Simple Text. Despite this i still think that we have stuck to the conventions of the Genre and achieved A High Finish. Another Crucial component for any digipack is the information that it portrays on the back pane. Usually this will remain true among most albums of any Genre so it will include Track Listings, Legal Information, copyright information and any additional info that may be required. For our album we felt it a necessity to have these things in our digi pack because without it, it would have been just a picture. This is not what we wanted. For the Image itself we drew on a picture from the same shoot, that way it is obvious that the pictures are in some way related to one another. We used the same Editing process as with the front image and used the same font as before. One final Addition that was made to our digi-pack was a false company logo. It is named BMC production which are my initials, because this wasn't a Huge point of the Digi-pack i didn't give to much thought into the name as that would have wasted time. The Logo was in some ways drawing influence from the GUP logo but any similarities are purely iconic. This is key because all bands have some sort of record label to their name and in this respect we held true to this convention.



Magazine Advert:



The Magazine Advert was the second part of our Ancillery Tasks. For this we had to look at previous examples from multiple magazines. One Convention that we found here is that the image in a Magazine Advert is usually always the same as that of an album. This is one convention that we broke in order to do something else. We Used a different image for the use of our magazine advert. We decided on this because it would give the band a more contrasting look, plus it was slightly more creative than just using the same Image from our album. However the image that we used was not completely abstract. We used a different image from the photo shoot that we did. The shoot consisted of about 40 images which all had a common style about them so each one was fairly similar to the others. Another convention that we needed according to what was on other magazine adverts was Appropriate reviews. What I mean is that we would have to look at reviewers who will review Indie Rock bands commonly, people who are more likely to review the band of our choice. In the end we decided on NME which is more likely to review our band than others. So this is a convention we felt was crucial to uphold in order to get a more convincing piece of work. Another aspect of information we needed to explore was the idea of information on the magazine advert. Generally there is a fair amount of information such as The Album Name, Copyright Information, release date. We Challenged the conventions of this ad put slightly different information on our Advert. Firstly We did not put any sort of release date on it. The reasoning behind this decision was because we were unclear as to what date would be most likely to seem feasible due to the apparent random nature of album release dates. We put limited Copyright information on the advert, similar to that on the Digipacks Back pane.



Music Video:



This was our primary task in the whole project, in this respect it was bound most by the conventions of other works of media. In order to get a feel for conventions we really had to look at previous examples of  music video. This time however we had to look purely at Indie Rock videos because every genre has very different conventions so it would be redundant to look at Pop videos for instance. We looked at examples from Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters, Muse, The Verve, Radiohead and other Indie Music Videos. We found that the main aspects of indie encourage more music and narrative aspects to them. There are usually lots of performance shots and there is in many cases some form of narrative in them also, even if they have no relation to the lyrics of the song itself. Also the mis-en-scen in these videos is also crucial to the feel of the indie rock videos. Clothing is usually basic and uninteresting; something like a T-shirt and jeans would do for an indie rock video. In these first conventions that I mentioned, so the Performance, Narrative and Mis-en-scen are all conventions that we confirmed to in order to avoid confusion of the genre of music that we were trying to promote.