Charlotte's - Evaluation Question 1 (Draft)

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

Our product is of a country/pop genre and our star is a young female solo artist. We therefore attempted to emulate the conventions of similar videos to that of our genre, with other artists such as Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding, Birdie and Kate Nash. 

The conventions of a music music we have used for our product are;

• Focus on star image, with 90% of shots being of our artist and the frequent use of close-ups highlighting her youth and beauty. This can be scene in all the videos we ananlysing, especially in ones from artists such a Taylor Swift.
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• Lip syncing throughout, important to link audio with video and express emotion through artists expression.
• Cutting with the pace of the song. We tried edit our video to cut shots between lyrics, and on the beat with out fast paced instrumental sections.
• We used a variety of shot distances and positions of our star. 
• Our artists wore a few different outfits to show the change of time and increase variety and interest. In the the videos we evaluated this was also a common idea.
• We attempted to keep most of our shots moving at some level all the time, whether it was with the use of zoom or panning. We read about the importance of camera movement during our research and planning. 'In a typical music video, more than 95% of all shots are moving. Tracking shot, crab, pan, tilt, zoom in or out, character movement. Static singers are never shown, opening her mouth only, in a still shot. At least pan or zoom is used.' It is regarded as a vital convention of music videos, to maintain interest and keep it sleek.

• We used some narrative within our video, which is a convention most common in pop videos and was very popular in the videos of the artists we evaluated such as Taylor Swift. This narrative attempted to follow the lyrics of the song in a Illustrative manner.
• We cut between different scenes and settings to add variety and interest.


• For our instrumental we took inspiartion form Kelly Clarkson's video from her song 'Since you've been gone.' We tried to re-capture the sense of distress and upset through the use of dramatic movements and the symbolism of destroying items from their relationship.

For my poster and Digipak I based the layout around the designs of similar products I analysed in my research and planning. From analysing these currents products of the same genre as mine, I was able to establish key similarities and conventions that I could use in my work. Some of the conventions I followed include;

• I used the same image on my poster as that of my Digipak, to maintain contiuity and advertise the appearence of the album being promoted.
• I used only a few fonts on the poster and Digipak so it wasn't too busy and there was consistency. On the other produsts I assessed the font of the artist's name was almost used as a logo to represent the genre of the artist and be repeated throughout future products to create a brand. I attempted to achieve this myself with the chosen font of my artists name, as it is distinct and recognisable from other artists. 
•  The cover image I chose for my album was a close up shot of our artists face. I chose this shot as it allows the target audience to establish what our artist looks like and it exempiflies her beauty and  youth. As our artist is a newly introduced artists it is especially important to present her appearence to the public, so she can become recognised and well known. When researching I also found that other digipaks of the same genre frequently used close ups on their covers, so I thought it was vital to follow this convention and in turn reflect our genre of pop too.

• For the back cover of my digipak I made sure I included the vital conventions I had identified on other products. This included the presents of a barcode, track list and copyright small print.
• Details on my poster that I had noticed across similar products were the details of the release date of the album, a wesite address or twitter page of the artist in the small print and reviews from magazines of the album's quality.
• In other genre's such as indie, album's can often be rather minimal and simple with panels of a single block colour. However I noticed that with the pop genre albums appear to have an image or pattern on every panel of the Digipak. I therefore followed this convention with the use of pictures covering all of my Digipak, or at least writing and objests on every page.