conventions of real media products?
Before identifying the forms and conventions of our music video and ancillary tasks it is important to fully understand the genre of music and the audience that it is targeted towards. The reason behind this is that different genres can follow completely different conventions. A convention of rock music is that there is a strong focus on performance in their music videos.
This screenshot is from the music video 'All my life' by Foo Fighters, it is a strongly performance based video. However they are well known for also making videos with a lot of narrative and often humour.
We decided to go for the performance based video as we felt that the percentage of narrative videos in the alternative rock genre was not representative of the genre as a whole.
Further research into alternative rock videos enabled us to pick up on other forms and conventions. For example the majority of filming appears to be shot with a hand held video camera rather than using tripods exclusively. Some shots still do use tripods or dollies, however the hand held filming gives a more rugged and raw feeling to the shots.
The speed of the cuts is also crucial to meeting the conventions. Generally alternative rock videos will have a fast paced beat and this would therefore need to be reflected in the speed of the editing. With our final cut of the video now completely edited I feel as if we have met the criteria of the alternative rock genre. The cuts are fast paced for the majority of the song reflecting the upbeat tempo of the music.
Nearing the end of the song there is a slower paced chorus, where all instruments but the lead guitar and the lead vocals fade out. we used this as an oportunity to challenge the forms and conventions of the genre. The shot length slows down greatly for the outro, and we introduce some transitions that were not previously used for the rest of the video.
The use off cross dissolves give a much smoother transition between shots, emphasising the slowed pace at the end of the song. As a further emphasis of the slowed tempo of the outro, we dimmed the lighting so that the blue filter lights were more visible on the lead singer.
Overall, for the primary task I feel that we have generally followed the conventions that we set out to, and i am pleased with the final product. The ancillary tasks, although just small side projects, needed equal amount of effort in order to meet the forms set in our music video. The house style that we created in the video needed to be reflected in the CD digipak as well as the magazine advert.
I think that the digipak and magazine advert were key to keeping the house style. As the digipak was done prior to the advert it was important to find a good font and colour scheme that would not only work across all three projects, but would give connotations about the genre of music we were trying to represent. This was very effective as I was able to find a font similar to a font used on various Foo Fighters products. although it was possible, I avoided using their logo as i thought this could be considered copyright infringement and not my own original content.
Although i do not own any Foo Fighters' albums i do have a large collection of CD digipaks that i was able to look through to see any patterns that occured in things such as layout, title placement, and what information had to be put into the smallprint. Although they are just small factors, I thought that it was best that they were taken into account, in order to try to create a good likeness of a real album digipak.
The magazine advert which was designed after the finished digipak was just as successful as the digipak in terms of following conventions and forms. The general layout and style, although fairly simplistic, is well designed and realistic. As we spent some time finding magazine adverts for inspiration I feel that our advert is as successful appearance-wise.
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