Evaluation Question 1

As a part of the promotional package I was creating for my advanced portfolio as well as a music video I also created a Digipak and Magazine advert to go with it. Before I created these I looked at the conventions of both the media texts from already existing media texts that I found on the internet. When researching the conventions I tried to use products that were from the same genre that I was using to create my products in case there was some conventions of genre as well as form.

 After looking at the conventions of a Digipak I knew what I needed to include for example using a barcode so the Digipak could be sold in retail. Doing research before creating the product allowed me to have a starting place for my product as I knew that I had to include these certain things as well as making all of my products have synergy so that it looked like one promotional package by one artist.

My Digipak

I also did the same for my magazine advert

Also doing research before creating my magazine advert by looking at the conventions of the form. I also looked at a magazine advert by the artist whose song I had chosen to use for my promotional package so I could get a sense of their advertisement and make a better decision of how my magazine advert was going to look so that there was a clear house-style and synergy between all three of my media texts.

My Magazine Advert

In conclusion the research I did using Google and YouTube so that I could conform to as much conventions of form within the three of my products to create synergy so that they would be a successful promotional package that would appeal to my target audience.

During the research for music videos I looked at the conventions of form and genre on google before looking at music videos in the indie genre to see how many of the music videos conformed to these conventions or not. Doing this research was very helpful as it allowed me to see how many conventions of form were being conformed tin my chosen genre. From this I found that lip synching and close-ups of the artists were used a lot to create a strong brand and making sure the audience knew the artists face as well as having lip synching the close-ups so the audience felt they were getting a personal concert.

For the research of my magazine advert and digipak I found that similar images were used in both the digipak and magazine adverts for the artists to link the products together which is something I needed to think about when creating my products as it would create synergy between all of them. From research it was clear that the name of the album and artist needed to be present on both of my ancillary texts. A convention which was sometimes rejected by indie artists was the appearance of their face but I decided I wanted to feature the artists face as they weren't an easily identified brand already like Florence and the Machine.

A motif that featured in 2 out of the 3 products which was the imagery of the gun as it was a very important part of my music video because of the lyrics "If I had a gun, I'd blow my brains out." I decided to have the repeated imagery of the gun to have strong links between the lyrics and the visuals as it would have been hard to have my artist think about having a gun so I decided to include it as an important part of the video and digipak. I did initially include gun imagery with my artists had acting as the gun but decided against it because of feedback from my target audience about having it feature in the only image of the magazine advert had the connotations of just being about what the gun represented not about the ideology of the artist. Another recurring iconography is the continuous featuring of my main artist between all 3 of my media texts as I wanted my artist to be well represented and become a well known face to my target audience so that he would be remembered.