Evaluation- Laura Thorpe

Conventions and how my media products link.

We decided to stick to many of the conventions of a normal indie rock music video then steer away from them because this then meant that our audience would recognise it for that genre and it would appeal to them because they are used to the typical conventions. For example, as our song is quite fast paste we chose to have fast cuts in our video, much like Loverboy by You Me At Six as this meant our video would flow better with the song. Another convention which we chose to follow was having performance in the video as many indie rock music videos chose to have this, from this is meant that the audience knew what the band looked like which is essential for a new band as this then became a promotional aspect for the band as well as helping them appeal to our target audience. Although we had performance we noticed in our research that many music videos were hybrids of performance and narrative, therefore we chose to have narrative because this made the video more interesting for our audience. Our narrative related to our lyrics well as it is about a boys life and with the lyrics ‘you stole the sunshine out of my life’ it reminded me of good days and bad days therefore when discussing with my group what the narrative could be we came to a decision that this would be appropriate because it can also give the message that everyone has a bad day. After looking through our research we also decided to keep to the conventions of camera shots (generally mid/long and close-ups) because the audience will recognise them and we didn’t want the audience to get confused or feel like they had to think during the video, we mostly just wanted them to watch it and enjoy what they had seen. When deciding what image we were going to have for the band, we chose to have them all be individual because then our audience were able to relate to each one differently. To create the impression of different personalities we showed this through positioning of each band member (I.e. the order), the clothes they wore and they way they looked in the digi-pak with the separate images. This then meant the audience knew what each band member looked like and would be able to pin- point each one out. However there were some conventions in our video which we did not follow such as adding in camera movement. Although there was very little in our video we mostly had it in the narrative because this meant the audience could clearly see the different between the performance and the narrative; however the final clip for our music video is performance with a zoom out, this did not meet the conventions, but we chose to do this because then the final shot is of the whole band and the audience would be able to see exactly where they all were and what they looked like, meaning the image would be more memorable. For our digi-pak and magazine advert we too chose to still have many conventions included into it, for example the individual images of the band members was inspired by The Killers digi-pak, we liked this idea because it meant that the audience can see all the band members. Another convention which we followed was shown in our research was not to have the band on the cover, we chose to do this because it gives the impression that our band cares more about the music rather than their image and as their audience is of an age where school is an important time we thought this would mean the audience would want to relate to the lyrics and the music more than the image of the band, although that would still be important as we want people to recognise the band. There were also conventions of the digi-pak which we didn’t stick to such as the font type used; this seems to be quite ‘feminine’ however we chose to use it because it is the typical font type found of guitar heads and therefore when placing it onto the front cover it didn’t seem out of place. The font could also be seen as the bands usp as it will be something no other indie rock band has meaning even people who are not necessarily part of our target audience will recognise it. Our magazine advert is fairly conventional compared to our other media products as it has the least information on it and when trying to add more information we decided it made the advert look too crowded and therefore little was more in this case. We chose to have just general information on there that is the most important e.g. band name, price etc because the audience would look at it in much detail or for very long because it is just an advert therefore we wanted to make sure only the key information was included so the audience are aware of the band.

We chose to have several continuous themes between our video and ancillary texts such as always having the fonts the same as this meant that the audience would always know the fonts and know who the band is from these. Also to make sure our target audience were appealed to our digi-pak we decided to post all the images were had taken of the band onto social networking sites such as face book and got people to comment and like their favourite ones, from this we were able to learn what they liked the most and therefore knew that our digi-pak would appeal to them because the images were chosen by them instead of by us. To establish our brands identity we used the guitar head within our video, magazine advert and digi-pak. We did this by having the same image on both our digi-pak and magazine advert but also by having the image of the guitar head actually being the same as the heads of the guitar on the lead singer and lead guitarists guitar. We chose to do this because it meant the audience can identify with it and link it to future products of the band. From our questionnaire many of our target audience said that they would like to see images of the artist/ band inside the digi-pak and that they would like to see a smashed guitar or a drunk kit on the front cover. Therefore we chose to listen to them and this is why we have an image of the guitar head as the front cover however it is not smashed because we didn’t want to give the idea that our band is reckless because although they are a boy band who appeal to a youthful audience we still wanted them to be respectable and therefore had images which linked to the band and genre but not ruin our bands star image at the same time.

Feedback from Target audience.

Technologies used