Evaluation Task 1 : In what ways does your media product use,

develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

By James de Winton

Introduction Conventions are things that you recognize

with a meanings, signs that can be seen as either technical or symbolic. An example of a film convention could be tumbleweed, that would be a convention of western style films. A convention can be more than props, for instance the lighting in a music video can be a convention of the genre and mood,e.g. a dark video would inferred as heavy metal.

The music campaign that we created was for a techno artist.

Dark LightingOur first techno genre convention was the lighting in our genre. Majority of the shots in our genre was in dark lighting, we did this because we felt that techno music conventions would best be presented in our video in a dark setting. Lots of other music videos use dark lighting to comply with the idea that techno music is listened to in a club. However it would be wrong of me to say that all techno music videos are darker, because that just isn't true, however it is a recurring theme. In Our music video most of it was shot at night where a few shots were shot in a cloudy London, and was graded to look a lot darker then it was.

As you can see on the first picture on the bottom left is a screenshot from The Chemical Brothers music video for galvanize, its dark which gives the club scene effect. Moreover below the center and right photo is from our music video, the center being the gloomy day shot and the right being the night shot lit up by street lights, which is like a club in the sense that it is being lit up by lights when the atmosphere is dark.

Symbolic Convention : look for girl and boy

A good looking boy and a good looking girl is a common convention used in both film and music almost everywhere, however the way we cast and the look of our cast made it a bit different. For instance both of cast members Carla and Alec are good looking people, however they both have a mysterious characteristic and image about them.

All of these pictures below are either from our music video or a techno music video. Moreover all of these characters look mysterious, which was what we were going for in our video, it had the effect of making our overall product look more secretive and mystifying.

Fast pace editing/shot duration

We edited the video on final cut pro to make the video look really face paced by using lots of shots with a very small shot duration which made the video look like it was very fast paced. We did this because it intensified the video a lot more and made it more fierce and energetic. The gif below is from our video and a chemical brothers video.

Set (The Streets) The streets – We shot on the streets for part of our music video to

give it this urban vibe. We basically found a street with lots of graffiti in our pre production and decided we should go there so we could paint graffiti without being the cause of some vandalism.

Digipak Font The font on the cover of the digipak typically looks very

smart and sleek, it makes the album cover look more presentable. We did using the font bar in adobe Photoshop when creating the digipack. We did this because we wanted our digital be to presented in a way that didn’t look tacky and had this premium finish to it.

Digipak image shape

Another convention from techno digipaks that we have taken to is the shape of the main feature of the digipak, now not all digital's have these curls and flakes on them but some do. We did this by using a picture of a jellyfish that we took during our shoot, as you can see the tentacles of the jellyfish gives the vibe and of being chilled. Both of the example albums below present that image by have a fluent and free flowing main image on the album covers.

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Conclusion