MICHAEL MEROLA EVAULATION - QUESTION 1

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

     During the pre production process of our music video, we took inspiration from pre existing videos. We tried to find a song that not only sounded great but also had good potential to create a fantastic music video around. Once we all agreed on a certain non copyrighted song, we started planning out the storyboard. Whilst creating it, we did look at other music videos and noted that most commonly, there are two popular elements that make up a music video, a narrative element and an instrumental element where shots of the singer and/or instruments are visible. We took this knowledge and inserted it into our storyboard by having these two elements in our own storyboard. Our narrative dealt with the issue of teenagers and drugs as our central main character suffers the effects of taking drugs. Drugs and other political issues are often seen in real media products.

     We also thoroughly analysed the songs lyrics as it is crutial to understand what is happening and what is being talked about in the song in order to produce a relevant music video for it. Whilst analysing the lyrics we understood the explaination and emotions behind the essential singer of the song, who they are talking about and why they are talking about this certain person in a particular and strongly emotional way.

     We also looked into Andrew Goodwins theory on music videos. He suggests that live instruments, close ups, a liberal lifestyle, lip syncing and the video itself to be set in a studio is key in creating a successful music video. His theory inspired us to create band shots which would appear in between the narrative shots as during our first draft, our main focus was too much on the narrative part of our music video, less focusing on the instrumental part.

     Our digipak and promotional magazine advert follow the conventions of real media products. It contains a title that stands out well as well as key information regarding the date of when it shall be released. It also shows the main artist as its main focus point. Many bands do something similar to this and we took note of this and applied it to our work. However, we decided to use the actor in the music video as the main image and focus point of our digipak and front cover as we felt that in the music video itself, the audience would be more connected to the narrative character than the musician. We also included the website at the very bottom of the advert in order allow people who are interested an easier way to research more on the artist and their new album.

     We also decided to include the words "The Hit Single-Fire" on the magazine advert as a way of communicating to the consumer or to the general public that the artist has had great success with one of the songs placed in the album, heightening the overall quality of the product and the surrounding praise and positive criticism around it.

     On the front cover of the digipak itself, we included the words "Bonus Collection Set" in order to attract more people to purchase our product. This is because we felt that generally, people would be more likely or more tempted to buy a product if they knew they were getting more than the original version if it contained the word "Bonus". However, our main focus of people to be attracted to this would be for people who were fans of the artist and/or who wanted to use the product and they would not only want to purchase the digipak for the physical CD but also to the other accessories and information booklets that come with it which contain possible information about the artist, the songs, the lyrics and other background information, possibly including hints to new songs for the future.

     We took inspiration from other media texts to observe how certain groups and issues were represented from different filmmakers. However, we tried to not be influenced by what we saw too much and instead tried to represent things based on our own opinions and general instincts.