In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
This is the
homepage to our website. As you can see, we have stuck with the
convention of using close-ups of the faces of the members of the band as
they are new and need to get their image out there to be successful. We
went for the two block colours such as black and white as we didn't
want the website to look too messy. This could actually be improved by
adding more colour to go witht he young, care-free and vibrant feel of
the band.
It is essential for the band's upcoming gigs and news to be shared on the website because there is nowhere else for it to reach a wide audience. Our target audience is 10-16 year old girls and as we are now in a highly online and technical era, a website is the best way to reach out to that audience. We also have links to social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook which are also very popular with our target audience.
In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
After deciding that we would go for the stereotypical convention of an all male, young, clean-cut band, we decided to look into similar artists such as One Direction and McFly. Looking back on our finished music video, there are many similarities and conventions that come up unintentionally and intentionally placed by us. For example, there are many close ups of the musical instruments in our music video. Here, we see a close ups of the drums, the guitar and the bass. This fits with the convention that young boy bands play their own music which makes a wider audience appeal to the music they are creating as they show multiple talents. It is crucial for the audience to see the set up of the band to know what image they are going for. We see the band McFly with similar shots like this, suggesting that it is a common and successful convention.
Another example of a convention of a boy band, is a close up of the singer and in fact all members of the band. Especially as they are a new band, it is important for the viewer to be able to see what the artists look like in order for them to become widely known and famous in the music industry.The new band Kodaline also follow this convention as they need to gain a wider audience to become more popular.Here is their video for Love Like This:
It is important for the band to look clean-cut and fun-loving in the music video. We did this by using powder paint and a rivalry between a girl band and a boy band. This convention gave across the image of carefree young boys who would be great role models for the younger audience. One Direction also used this idea of powder paint to show how fun-loving they were, and this convention was successful due to their ever growing fan base. Here is a GIF from One Direction's video:
Overall, I believe we established and successfully conveyed multiple conventions and can see that they are popular due to the examples I have shown. In comparison to real media products, our music videos is not dissimilar and does not challenge the form and convention but adheres to it wholly.
The most recent cut of our music video is called a rough cut because we have yet to add an enhancements to the footage and any of the more difficult editing shots such as wipes and split screen. A rough cut also means we have watched all of the shots we got and have gotten rid of all the ones which we know we are not using in our music video. We rejected some shots because a few of them were out of focus and a few of them had a partial black background in the back of the shot. Luckily, we had plenty of other shots which enabled us to make a good rough cut.
As we didn't have any other narrative elements to our music video, the rough cut is closer to the finished product than a lot of other groups as we only have one performance element throughout the whole video.
We hope to finish this fairly soon and be able to post the final video on my blog.
