In what way does your media pr oduct use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- Our task was to make a promotional music video and release it after designing the digipak and magazine advert.
We decided to do the song Sticks ‘N’ Stones by Jamie T as our video. The typical conventions of an indie music video is that quite a lot of them seem to be in black and white, the props used are cigarettes and alcohol, the locations used are usually run down, quite urban and we have random shots of action like Ash sitting in a trolley and getting pushed, as this gives the video an indie feel as its quite rough and messy. In our video, some of our shots fitted in with the indie theme, as they were in quite run down locations for example the train track (brick walls), the back of tescos and under a bridge in Lincoln which all carry out connotations of working class and urban Britain. We could have used more obvious run down locations and could have developed this more, like getting shots with graffiti in the background, but overall I feel that we met generic conventions of indie with regards to the locations.
In our research videos we also noticed that some of the people wore chequered shirts, so we also did this, but used more than one shirt, for example different coloured shirts. Ash’s hair was quite messy when we were videoing as again, it gives the feel of an indie genre, being messy and unorganised.
We also used quite a few props in our own video for example alcohol and cigarettes. Again, we have gone along with the stereotypical indie theme as people automatically presume people who are in with the indie scene smoke and drink. Also looking at different album covers for different indie bands, we noticed that a lot of them did contain people smoking or drinking in them. The shots we included this in was when we filmed Ash Scott drinking near the train track as the lyrics said ‘cheap to get pissed..’ and videoed Aaron Scott smoking.
One convention we challenged from a typical indie video was that we filmed in colour and noticed normal indie music videos are often in black and white, and we haven’t got any shots in black and white. The reason we did this is because we didn’t particularly like the idea of using black and white as we wanted to make our music video a bit different to what you would associate with a normal indie video.
When thinking about how we edited our video, the song was quite upbeat and fast so we had to do shots that were quick to fit in with the music. Some indie videos were full of fast takes like ours, for example ‘Florescent Adolescent’ by Arctic Monkeys. Jamie T’s real video for Sticks ‘N’ Stones was also very fast so we felt as though we had to try and make it look as professional as possible, so kept up with the speed of his real video. We had to speed up some of the shots to make them fit in with tempo of the song as the shots were good, but didn’t look right at first.
However, there were a number of conventions we used when making our digipak’s. We looked at different digipak’s from our chosen genre (indie) and it helped us get an idea of what we needed to make ours look like. We looked at an Arctic Monkeys CD case and it was black and white, so we decided to do this as well, as it looked good and it fitted in with the indie theme. We also added Jamie T’s record label to the back of the digipak along side the barcode and the iphone scanner. We chose an indie looking font called ‘ALL AGES’ and we had to download it and do our writing on Photoshop to get it to work properly. The reason I think it looked ‘indie’ is because it’s a quite rough looking font. We then added the Jamie T website to the digipak because we noticed most CD’s had websites on them. Another convention we challenged was that we put 5 song titles on the back of our digipak instead one 3 for a single or 10 – 12 for an actual album. There wasn’t a particular reason we did this, we just thought it looked good on the back of the digipak because we had a black wall on the background with a white patch to write on, and the song titles fitted in well on the white background.
Our magazine advert fitted in well with the typical indie theme, as it again was in black and white like the CD cover, but we edited it on Photoshop to make it in the effect threshold. We included the website on the advert as well as the record label. We looked at a few different magazine adverts and noticed that different magazines had commented and rated how good the album was. So we chose to use the magazine ‘NME’ as this type of magazine is where you would normally find an advert for artists like Jamie T. There wasn’t any conventions that we challenged and I feel that we have fit the advert in well with the indie genre.
We also used brand identity when making our digipak’s and magazine advert because we wanted them to match the video slightly. The magazine advert is the same as the back cover of the digipak, because we thought it would look effective as we used the effect threshold on photo shop to edit it. I then added an image of the front cover of the digipak on to the magazine advert, so you could definitely make out that the advert went with the CD. We got this idea from Ed Sheeran’s magazine advert. The front cover also fits in well with our video, as most of it was filmed at the train station, and the cover is an image of Jamie T (Ash Scott) walking on the tracks, and because what he is wearing in the image matches some of the clothes he wore in the video. We also used the same font through out the making of the digipak and magazine advert to make the brand identity more obvious.
