Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In the making of our music video, we wanted to create a sense of Brand Identity in order to make our product look more professional and legitimate. To do this, we created a advertisement in the form of a Magazine Poster and a Digipak (Album Artwork).

In order to to successfully create a visually appealing Digipak/Poster, we looked at a variety of posters and Album artworks in order to find the popularly used conventions of each form of Media. After researching into these products, we found several examples of Albums/Posters that helped us find different conventions that are required in these products. For example...

- Copyright Information such as the Record Label/Producers (Typically in small text and shoved into the corner somewhere)

- Band Title followed by the Album Title (Usually the same typography is used)

- A general Colour Scheme (So that the Album can stand out)

- Song names on the back panel (Sometimes including length of Song)

- Recommendations by popular Magazines/Music Channels
- Relating Websites

 Examples of Magazine Adverts

 Examples of Album Artwork

Final Digipak and Magazine Advert

We showed examples of these conventions in both our Digipak and our Poster, although some of these our exclusive to one form of media (I.e. Track Listing for Digipak). For example, both forms of product has all the legal copyright info at the bottom, as well as a link to a website.

To further secure Brand Identity, we had to have some sort of a recurring theme between the music video, the Digipak and the Poster. The one thing that joins the three products together is the use of Warm Colours (Specifically Orange/Yellow). The lighting of the performance section of the video is a warm orange/red, the Digipak Artwork is mostly comprised of Red/Orange/Yellow gradients and the Poster is a simple Orange/Black Colour Scheme. The reason we went with this colour scheme is that warm colours typically connote high energy and happiness that is typically found in the Rock genre and is a prevalent theme in out music video.

Another thing that connects the Digipak and the Music video together is the use of a Guitar Amp. The Guitar amp is an iconic part of the Rock genre and is featured in the opening scene of the video and the back panel of the Digipak. We chose to feature the Guitar Amp this way to further emphasize what genre of music we are working with, allowing our target market to correctly identify what genre music the album is.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Conventions are specific ideas that can be seen and categorized into different forms and genres of medias. Music videos is a form of media that can have conventions that can be attributed to Music videos in general, as well as different genres that reside in music videos such a Pop, Indie, Rock etc.

Andrew Goodwin theory is that Music videos can be split into 3 categories...
- Performance
- Narrative
- Conceptual

Performance is simply the band playing along with the music, often cutting between each band member and close ups of them and their instruments. Narrative is where a story is interwoven into the video. The story is told through the visuals that play alongside the music. Conceptual is a little more hard to define. It can be said Conceptual is showing visuals that don't create a story, but can still somehow keep the viewers attention. The  Rock/Alternative Rock almost always has the Performance part covered in their music videos as they use music videos as a way to advertise themselves as being able to play their own instruments and such. They also quite often use Narrative in music videos in order to show variety and experiment with different ways to get the audiences attention. They also have a narrative in order to accentuation the meaning of the lyrics to try and make them more powerful.

Karlsson has a similar theory in that he splits Music videos into...
-Commercial Exhibitionist
-Televised Bard
-Electric Shaman

Essentially it means the same thing as the above definitions, only in more defined terms.

Our music video contains the use of both Performance and Narrative. The Performance takes place in a music studio with professional lighting equipment and instruments. The narrative takes place in a first person point of view of someone trying to get to band practice, which is later revealed to be what the band performance is, connecting the two together.

Typical conventions of Rock music includes...
- A Large amount of close ups on the lead singer of the band
- Quick cuts
- Wide angle shots of the whole band playing
- Close up of instruments being played
- Studio Lighting
- Casual costume of the Band Members

As such, we've made it a point to include many of these conventions into our final product of our music video in order to make it look more like a legitimate music video.

Letter of Permission for use of Song

Above is the email I sent to ask permission for the use of Orson - No Tomorrow. I screenshotted this to evidence myself asking permission for use of this song

Construction - Magazine Advert

Construction - Final Digipak

Top Left: Front Panel. Top Right/Bottom Left: Inside Panels. Bottom Right: Back Panel

When creating our Digipak, we had to make it so that there is a recurring theme so that all the panels flow nicely from one another. We agreed that one way to keep a consistent theme is to have a specific colour scheme that we'll keep throughout the panels. We chose to stick to warm colours due to the active nature of the song we chose for the music,

Construction - "No Tomorrow" Final Cut

Developing Digipak - Back Panel (Final)