Question 1: In what ways Does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media products?

For my music video itself my music video uses conventions of real media products in many ways. The first way that my production uses conventions of real media is that the format of my production is a music video and music video’s are a form of real media. My music video uses forms of real music video’s by using a series of performance shots paired with narrative shots. My video production also uses genre as a real form. The genre for my artist is indie-acoustic. The uses of a real genre links in with using real media forms. My music video uses certain conventions such as characteristics of the genre it belongs to. For example the props that the character are wearing are very indie influenced. The use of certain shot types links in nicely to. The narrative structure for my music video is backwards and the video is shot all with a backwards narrative. This links to the indie genre and certain obscurities that videos on that genre have. The backwards narrative idea was inspired from the Modest Mouse video for ‘little motel.’ This product has a completely backwards narrative and that inspired me to use a reverse narrative. Other videos Such as Mutemath’s ‘typical’ and The Verve’s ‘bittersweet symphony’ also uses backwards narrative so I watched these for ideas and got influence from them. I shot my music video as if the narrative was forward. It was at the editing stage where I reversed the narrative to get the style I wanted.


For my digipak side of my product I also used conventions of real media products. In my research if CD covers and artwork I decided to go for the layout of a standard Jewel case because I felt that the case itself didn’t need to be fancy or stand out in anyway. During my research I looked into a huge variety of different artwork from the indie genre and various hybrid subgenre’s that related to my work such as indie-folk, indie-pop and indie-rock. The artwork that really inspired me was from and E.P. by a band called Broken Records. They used the idea of the gramophone playing out disdorted shapes. This obviously related to their band name. the idea of a broken records playing out noises. I took this idea with my work but chose to use doves coming out of the gramophone with musical notes and getting bigger the further they come out. This makes reference to the title of the song I used ‘let this white dove sing.’ I didn’t use white doves because I felt that the doves and musical notes was reference enough and using white doves was a little over the top. I also found out later in the editing stage that white doves did not work with the vintage sandy background I used to place my images on. Also during the editing stage I ran the image through Photoshop Lightroom to give the image a Vintage effect overall. By doing this it ties in nicely with the characteristics of the genre.


With my magazine advert I researched music magazines that were closely linked to my genre. The best magazine I found was NME. I felt this was the best because it had a large selection of adverts that appealed to me and also linked in with my artist. With my advert I used the doves from the album art because I felt that using that gave it to appeal to my audience and get the same theme of the doves flowing through it. Also the advert is promoting the E.P. so keeping the dove theme is a good idea. In NME most of the advert used shot of the bands album or incorporated their artwork into the advert paired with shots of the band. I challenged this convention because I didn’t not use any shots of the artist at all. I used the vintage layout with the doves. I used a different less scriptive font to talk about the E.P. and gave a rating at the bottom of the advert.