Evaluation - Question 1

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

From looking at the typical conventions of pop ballad videos and the research we have done, we decided to follow some and challenged some conventions. By going with many of the conventions we knew we would have a successful music video that would fit our genre and appeal to our target audience. We first decided that we needed to stick to the typical convention of encoding a message for our audience to decode. The message we encoded was that women are objectified in society and that women should be themselves. Our music video follows these typical theory conventions as we have voyeuristic treatment of the female body, and there is a clear relationship between the music and visuals, for example when the song sings ‘I can dance and play the part…’ our artist then is a puppet and is forced to dance. This used the conventions of real media products as stated by theorist Goodwin, who said that there “are frequent references to the notion of looking and the voyeuristic treatment of the female body”. Our video does challenge the conventions of a typical narrative as theorist Propps narrative theory tell us that they should be ‘Multiple central characters’. Ours doesn’t fit this narrative as we only use the artist, our video does not show a damsel in distress, villain or hero ect. Within the media a lot of females will agree that females are used as a sexual object and are weaker than men. Angela McRobbie however suggests that this shows women as powerful and dominating. We chose for our music video to go with and against this theory. We begin our video with the artist being ‘fragile’ and weak, but she becomes stronger throughout this video and fights off this idea that she has to be a sexual object to be shown off.  

We chose for our album poster to follow the codes and conventions of a real album poster. The purpose of an album poster is to promote the album the artist is releasing. From the research we had done, we found many of the pop digipak posters; use the same image that is on the album cover. This creates an instant connection between the poster and the album that people will notice. Our poster follows this typical convention as we used the album cover on the poster. The artist name and album name are typically found on the poster in larger fonts as this makes the artist stand out. We followed this typical convention as it allows the name to stand out and for people to recognise the name straight away. We also chose to place the Name of the artist is a typical place which is centre top. This is where you would first look and so people will see the name straight away and will want to find out what the artist is promoting. We stuck with the stereotypical colours for our target audience.  We also followed the typical conventions of having the name of the single that was released prior to the album. We kept this in a large font so that the audience would recognise the single and know that they will find it on the album. We kept the typical convention of the having the release date of the album in large font. This makes sure it stands out and allows the audience to know when they can buy the album. However we went against typical conventions and placed the release date about the single included. We chose to do this because the audience will be excited once they know the release date and wanted to make sure it was noticeable.

Our digipak defiantly follows the typical codes and conventions of the digipak albums. The main convention of a digipak is that they include something extra for the audience such as photos or sometimes a message. They typically have six sections and they are folded. Some digipaks may have two or more disks, however ours only has one so we followed the typical conventions of placing images on the 3 other sections. We followed the main conventions of having a front cover and a back cover. On the front cover we chose to use an image of a close up of the artist face as during the research we noticed this was a typical convention. We kept the album simple and used white and pink colours as this would attract our target audience. The name of the artist was placed at the top of the front cover. This went with typical conventions as we placed it in smaller font as it is less important, but made sure it was included as it allows the audience to be reassured it is the artist’s album. We placed the name of the album at the bottom of the front cover and in the largest font as it let the audience know what album they are buying as many artist have multiple albums. On the back cover is the list of songs that the audience can find on the album. This is an important convention of a album digipak as it tells the audience what songs are on the album and if they want to skip to a certain song they know the order they are in. As well as this we included the barcode which we placed in the typical place which is at the bottom, and the credits/brand logo at the bottom. We went against typical conventions of having another image on the back of the album as we found this made it look too messy.