Question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge form and conventions from real media products

Conventions were something we were keen to follow when creating our music video. However unlike print media the conventions aren't are simple to follow and as apparent, for example when creating our magazines we knew we could only include a maximum of three colours in order to follow conventions. However as music videos don't contain any aspects like that, so it was far more difficult.

One thing we had to decide to on was whether we wanted our video to be narrative, performance or a combination of the both. During my research I looked at narrative videos such as Pierce the Veils Bulls in the Bronx and Max Milners Needy Me. We also looked at Demi Lovatos music video for Heart Attack Upon completing my research I decided that a narrative video would be the best. This is because we spent a considerable amount of time annotating the lyrics for when the sun goes down and felt that there were many that we could portray in our video. We also believed that we would struggle to create performance video that was interesting enough to keep the attention of the audience, as a lot of the student created performance videos we watched we're very dull and didn't look professional.

Acting out particular lyrics was a key convention we decided to follow, as we thought this was a good way to make a connection between the song and our video. We picked key lyrics to portray such as she's in the stance ready to get picked up to which we showed the prostitute getting picked up by the pimp and also scantily clad beneath the clear night sky where the prostitute is seen outside in very few clothes, although this is something that carry on through the entire music video. For this aspect of our video we took a lot of inspiration from the Max Milner music video for the track needy me which I looked at while conducting my research. This video continually portrays the lyrics for example overwhelmed by your curvy lines as you undress me tonight in which the female in the video is shown undoing the males belt also with out my glasses I'm blurry eyed in which the artist takes off this glasses and the camera looses focus. I thought this worked really well and was the reason we decided to portray lyrics in our music video. A convention we noticed that that we didn't decide to use in our final video was editing to the beat. This is something we noticed mainly in performance videos, in particular Pierce the Veils video for Bulls in the Bronx and since our video was narrative we didnt see how it was benefit our video. However we included it in one shot and we felt that only using it once gave a lot of significance to it. We edited to the beat after the lyric 'I said he's a scumbag, don't you know? as the song dramatically picks up pace. We edited to the beat at this point only to show that the prostitute night was beginning once the music started to pick up. This was the only point in the video that we thought it was significant. However if our video was a performance video, for a mixture of the two we would of edited to the beat through out. This is a convention we decided to challenge.

Another convention we decided to follow after conducting research on existing music video was adding effects to particular shots to show that they were flashbacks to previous events. We did this when the prostitute was wearing the second outfit (pink blouse and black skirt) we used the move effect vignette. This made the video appear darker and a little out of focus, we thought this effect worked well as it was subtle enough to not take away from the video, in comparison to us thinking about turning scenes black and white which would of considerably taken away from the narrative. Again we took inspiration from the bulls in the Bronx video which constantly jumped between present time and what appears to be a dream.

We also wanted to make sure we conformed to conventions when creating our ancillary tasks. It was obvious to us that we needed to show the link between all three products as this is something artists do to create a distinct brand for themselves, I looked at Taylor Swifts advert and digipak for the release of her album Red, the same image and font was used through out both and this made it really clear that they were linked. I watched a couple of her music videos, even though I didn't include them in my research, however I noticed that in her music video for the track 22 the outfit and style she has is similar to the one featured on the digipak and advertisement. This helped to create a strong brand for the release of the track at it was obvious that all three were linked. Therefore when creating our ancillary tasks we used the prostitute from the music video on the cover of the digipak to show the connection between the two. To continue to follow this convention we used the same image on the advert, this helped us to create a really strong brand, as all our products linked, therefore following the convention. We took stills from the music video to to use in both the digipak and the advert, this again followed the strong branding convention.

When looking at Purity Rings advert for the release of Shrines I noticed that they included reviews at the bottom of the advert, I thought this was a way of limiting the blank space on the advert, while not taking away from the important information on the advertisement. This is why we deiced to include two reviews on our advert, I also believe adding the reviews will convince a person to buy them as we used reviews from strongly renowned magazine such as Rolling Stones.

While looking at both the Red and the Family Jewels adverts I noticed that they included a small image of the cover of the digipak, thought majority of the time these are the same. We decided to follow this convention as not only does it help to limit the blank space on the advert but the audience is drawn to it because its another image, this would therefore help will sales of the CD as audiences are already aware of what it looks like and could therefore spot it. This would be a key point for any artist.

A distinct theme was carried through on both the Katy Perry Teenage Dream album and the Miley Cyrus Bangerz album. The Katy Perry digipak carries through a theme of clouds and sweets, with the discs resembling a doughnut and a sweet. This is a convention we decided not to follow, as personally I believe it works better for a put together pop artist, rather than an indie band.