Friday 2 May 2014

Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For our music video we produced an up beat energetic and lively video to go with our selection of music which was 'Love Me Again' by John Newman. We had to apply existing conventions of the dance/pop genre for it to look like a convincing and high quality music video.

After we had researched a number of different music videos within our genre of dance/pop, we found that there were many features and conventions which were all common throughout the music videos we analysed. For example, the use of bright colours and movement. We certainly incorporated this into our video right from the beginning to the end. Our main motif was the use of bright powder paint which we used to create a dramatic powder paint fight which combined with the movement of the people and the powder paint which created that dance/pop genre effect.

Another convention and feature that we saw in most of the dance genre of music videos was that there were relationships involved within the visuals. When we researched the videos we found that the relationships where more meeting in a club and having the night together and being presented in a more reckless way. We wanted to create our twist on this so we did not want to show this reckless behavior within relationships but instead we wanted to show true love and we showed this with a young couple who were arguing over something real in their relationship.

Finally, we wanted to create a twist on another feature usually found in dance/pop videos, We found that usually the teenagers would be associated to alcohol, drugs and partying and weren't grown up yet. We changed this and created a more light hearted representation of teenage life by using the powder paint to represent all of the alcohol, partying and drugs.

Thursday 13 February 2014

Our posters

First poster

Second poster

Our posters took quite a lot of playing around with the layout and we took our inspiration from different posters within magazines. We added on the tour dates and then put in the conventions of a usual poster. We added in John Newman's web address and his social networking sites and we also added in a promotion for the album. At the bottom we put the ticket offices websites and telephone numbers in small print.
We ended up doing 2 different posters to show that you don't always have to use the same photo from the album cover but you can use different photos. With the eye you can still see that it is for this dance genre because it is loud and colourful showing the dance aspect. The poster with the face on it however, I think is the better one as I like the way it blends in with the black at the bottom and I think that the image is stronger and looks better with the style of poster.

Poster research

Biffy Clyros poster

Biffy Clyros album 

From looking at Biffy Clyros album and poster we can see that he has used the exact same image from the album but just extended it and added tour dates and a few other conventions a poster. He has just taken the iconography from his album artwork and placed it on a separate page. He has then added the title and his name in the same typography but in a different size font than the album to make it stand out more. He has decided to extend it to a landscape photo and added the tour dates and the information about his album etc on the right hand side still in the same font so that it fits the conventions of a poster. 
You can see in many other artists album and poster artwork, that they have literally just taken the same photo from their album and used as the main photo for their poster as well. For example, Everything Everything and their album 'Arc'. They used the same photo and just extended their poster to a portrait photo and added the tour dates etc at the bottom.  

Everything Everything's poster

Everything Everything's album

Our Digi-pack

Front - This is the front of our album... We thought about which picture we could use and we decided on this one as we thought it was a strong photo. It represents the dance aspect of the album and it relates to the music video for the song  'Love Me Again' on the album  with the link to the powder paint. We used this specific typography to also represent the dance aspect. The letters are block capital and are sharp and bold just the the dance genre.

Inside left - This is the inside right of our album... We all felt that this photo was a very strong photo with the quality at a high standard. We liked the way there are parts of the photo that are in focus and parts that are out of focus. This also shows the busyness of the album and the fact that it is upbeat with the use of colours and bright exposure. We wrote a little bit of small print at the bottom to fit the conventions of the inside cover of an album. 

 Inside right - This is the inside right of the album... We decided to keep this side plain black as we wanted it to contrast with the font cover and the inside left cover. This side has the CD on it and we wanted that to be plain black with 'John Newman' written in small print around the inside ring of the CD. We thought this would bring power but also calm down the busyness of the album itself.

Back - This is the back of our album... We decided to use the back of her head as the back of the album as this fits the conventions our genre. This was the most difficult part of the album as we weren't quite sure what font to use for the song names. However, in the end we used the same font as on the front but just made it smaller. We used a bar code at the bottom and put in the conventional things such as the record labels logo and John Newmans' website information as well as the productions companies information (SANE Productions, which is us by the way!)