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

For our current project we were asked to create a music video as well as two ancillary tasks, one was a digipak and the other was a magazine ad, these promotional materials would be used to advertise the song as well as the band.


We chose a local unsigned band who we worked closely with to create a music video as  well as a digi-pak and a magazine advert. Bands and artists use videos, digipaks and magazine ads to promote new songs and/or album realise's it helps to make the band and get them into the public eye in various ways. By using these three techniques to advertise an artist it often creates an iconic image for people to be able to recognise throughout the process of selling a new song or album not only this put allows them to reinforce or develop their current image.


Digipaks are just one of the types of advertisement which artists use to promote their new songs as well as themselves. Digipaks are usually
book-styled packages with card outer binding and plastic trays inside which hare used to hold the CD or DVD. They were the first alternative to jewel cases to be used by major record companies. There are many positives for using Digi-paks rather than your basic jewel cases such as they are shatterproof, jewel cases easily break, they are environmentally friendly as most of the card used is recycled.

Below is Katy Perry's digipak, tour advertisement as well as an advertisement for the realise of her album, I annotated each of them showing how the relate to each other.
 

As you can see from my annotation all forms of advertisement clearly link, so if you were to see one of them you would be able to relate it back to the others, this is creating a band image for the artists this is done by the use of colours, font and general style. These are all prime examples of an ideal form of promoting an artist, firstly each of them all include the name and image of the artist which within pop genre is highly important because within this genre it is important the artists identity is shown.

A music video is another method of advertising a song and artist, it means that fans can not only listen to a song but watch a video alongside this giving them more of a storyline with the lyrics. By making a video it would meant that the song and the artists would be hugely published due to it being on you tube as well as various TV shows such as MTV or Viva, also if the song enters the top 40 it will be shown on various top 40 programmes. There is also viral marketing which is a really good marketing technique as it will be passed around to various people.

Within music videos it is expected that there would be a mix of narrative and performance shots throughout the promo. Within a pop video such as Katy Perry various camera shots are usually used such as close ups and mid shots, this is to be able to focus more on the artist as pop artists are often more famous for their imagery rather than their music.

To the left are various shots from the Katy Perry video, these are all very conventional shots and are very typical pop promo. As you can see the main attraction of each shot is Katy Perry clearly showing the artist, whether she is singing dancing or acting within a narrative. Going back to the other forms of advertisement this clearly links with these, including the colours, style and obviously imagery of Katy which is used throughout.
Music videos narrative can be one of three things amplification which is where they exaggerate most of the lyrics of the song, illustration is when you pick out key words within the lyrics and illustrate them throughout and finally is disjucture this is when it has no relation to the lyrics at all which is often popular for pop promos. Katy Perry's video is an example of a slightly disjuctured video, but there is slight illustration in areas, as it is an almost magical, sureal world linking with lyrics such as "I know a place
where the grass is really greener. Warm, wet, and wild, there must be somethin' in the water" which is shown through the mise-en-scene.

This video is an example of illustration as well as some amplification of the lyrics. There is a real sense of loneliness and sadness throughout the promo which the band wanted to get across. Such s when the milk bottle leaves the house as no one was paying attention to him and the lyrics are "does anyone really care how you feel" by using a milk bottle it still gives the video a unique edge which will stick in people's minds.


The prezi below shows music video conventions.

I have created a wordle summing up conventions of an alternative music video.



Depending on the genre the conventions are different, as you can see the conventions within my wordle are different to what was shown within Katy Pery's  pop video. Nirvana- smells like team spirit is a good example of an alternative video, as it clearly shows various of the band performing which is very common within alternative videos. There is a slight bit of narrative, but the video is mainly focusing on the band and the performance, showing off their skills and instruments. We wanted this style within ours however we did want to use some narrative within it as we wanted to be able to create a disjunctured piece.

Our main influence for both us as a group but also the band themselves is OKGO as we liked their unique videos and use of stop-motion which they often used in their videos. We paticulary liked End Love and we took a huge amount of inspiration from this video when creating ours. After meeting our band various times we also thought that their personalitlies are perhaps similar to OKGOs and by using similar methods such as stop-motion and the use of mise-en-scene which would help to portray the band's image and the fact they don't take things to seriously and are up for a laugh. We also want to dress the band similair with a casual look as this is common for alternative promos.

 

 

As you can see we have clearly taken influence from OKGO End Love, this video clearly shows that we have used ideas from their video to create an almost dance routine for our band to perform. We also used a similar mise-en-scene with the outside image with various wooded areas.As you can see we have also used the casual clothing image as we wanted them to look as much like a alternative band as possible.

Another video we took inspiration from was Good Time by Owl City and Carly Raw Jepson. We paticuarly liked the party scene around the camp fire towards the end showing a group of friends having fun and we wanted to capture this image within our promo as well especially as it would illustrate lyrics such as "tonight is the night". The picture below is a screenshot from our music video and as you can clearly see it is inspired from the end of Good Time, we feel this illusrates the lyrics really well as well as giving an image of the band bein fun. This also flows really well with the upbeat and fastert pace which fits really well with these images.

But we also wanted to make sure we used various shots of the band because the conventions of a alternative video include shots of instruments and the singer, to be able to focus on their talents and to represent them more as band which is done through using shots of gutiars, drums etc. As you can see we used various shots of the band performing, mainly from a live gig which we were fortunate to go to but on during the day in the woods we often asked them to use their instruments also. We used typical camera conventions such as close ups of the lead singer, or of a guitar which we added in within the narrative piece this would also make it feel more like a real video. Another common convention is having two different location shots to be able to split the narrative and performance up, by having the woods with the autumn leaves and then the gig where it was dark but with spotlights gave a really nice contrast throughout the piece.



This is our closing shot, we decided to finish with a blurred firework then a fade out from this, due to the pace of the music being slowed down this wasa really nice way to complete the piece as we also slowed down the firework still representing the fun within the video, but by having it fade out it gave the piece a smoother ending.

Not only did we use fireworks within our piece but we also used sparklers, to make these more interesting we sped the clip up as well as changed the colour, so each time they were different but this also meant they linked with the fireworks as well as the leaves from the woodland scene. This worked really well and was almost a montage technique of editing, using our art skills to make the piece more artistic and interesting.

 

I have created a wordle which shows the conventions of a digipak.

When creating our digipak we would have to make sure we remember these conventions but also remember the conventions of an alternative music video so this could be enhanced through the digipak as well as the magazine advert.

 

This is an example of a digipak and as you can see there is a theme throughout the digipak and it is also linked to her song California Girls which has a similar theme. The theme is a candy theme, which is used on the covers and the actual CD's themselves. There is an effect of candyfloss being shown as clouds which is also used in the California girls music promo. The CDs are also within the theme one being a donut and the other candy. The font used is also within the theme with colour scheme's to fit such as the reds on the back of the digipak. Inside there is also images of Katy to fit the theme there are cakes with her in the image. Also when you open the digipak there is a scent of sweets and candy which really adds to the candy theme she is trying to give. As Katy Perry is on the cover this will drag people's attention more due to her being a popular artist everyone will recognise her.

 

Below is our digipak which we have created to alongside our music video and magazine advert, which i have annotated to show how it is conventional and similar to real digipaks.

 

I have also created a wordle on conventions which are offten within a magazine ad, once again like the digipak we also need to remember the alternative conventions to make it clear what the genre is.

 

This is Katy Perry's advert for Teenage Dream as you can clearly see it is similar to the digipak such as the colour schemes and use of font meaning people are able to relate the two due to the imagery being the same. The text fonts and colours are also the same keeping a house style throughout. The advert doesn't have a lot of text but shows what singles are included which are well known No.1's which will draw people's attention as everyone knows them. At the bottom it includes her website so her fans are able to go on it and perhaps find more information about her and the album.

I have also annotated our magazine advert to show how this relates to the digipak and also how it is conventional.