How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our products hold many similarities. For example, we use the same type face on 'dirty paws' and 'of monsters and men' on both of the products so the album is easily recognizable from the poster which means it is easily recognizable from a poster to the music video also which was something we really wanted to achieve as I believe it makes it easier for fans to follow the bands music career with easily recognizable band consistency. We also used the black background with white font through out the products which again is keeping to an easily recognizable style. We used the same picture on our poster and album cover which showed the band, we believed this was a good idea because followers of the band would immediately recognize the band members and become interested in the product. We made all of our products with the same title, the song was called dirty paws as was the album which we felt was a good idea so again it is instantly recognizable instead of trying to sell an album called one thing from an album called another. This is what current media products in the industry do also so we knew it worked.

I feel that all of our media products communicated the same mood, the facial expression on the image conveyed a solemn expression as is the mood through out the video but we didn't communicate the fact the video contained the story of grief of a soldier as that wasn't what the entire album was about, only the one song it was best not to advertise that too heavily.

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

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

The product we created challenges and also uses the conventions of current media texts. The mise-en-scene of the video and also images on the digipak and poster are compliant as the costumes worn in the video are stylish and currently fashionable, the actors used look like what we would like our target audience to look like, so hopefully our target audience would see this and be attracted to the video.  After looking at different music videos we came up with different conventions that we want to use in our final product. We looked at different music videos that were suited to our genre of music and realised that many of these music videos are narrative and so we wanted to do a narrative music video.

 Also we noticed that the narrative storylines of the music videos that we watched were very melancholy and downbeat and that’s what we wanted to show to the audience. Watching the different music videos, we saw that there were different ways in which we could show the title of the song and artist. Some music videos have the titles in the corner, which I feel could sometimes go unnoticed so we wanted it be obvious to the audience what the song was called and who the song was by. After observing the music video for the acoustic version of ‘We Are Young’ by ‘FUN’ I saw that they used a title sequence that was controlled by the beat of the music and we both thought that this was really effective in making an audience watching a music video as it challenges regular conventions of music videos which makes it stand out from the crowd, and so as a result we used a title sequence that was different from other music videos.

Another convention that we followed was images/cinematography. Most narrative music videos that we watched used cinematography that captures how the characters feel and what mood they are in and because we want to tell a story we felt like showing the characters emotion through the cinematography, as using speech would distract the viewer from the music. Using shots such as close ups, establishing shots, long shots and mid shots make the audience feel a connection with the characters, which we believe, is vital for a music video. We also used other cinematography techniques such as a focus pull as it makes the video look more professional.

Our first subsidiary task, the poster, uses conventions of current media texts; the style of the poster is in keeping with the digipak for the album as well as the video its self. We used the same colour scheme throughout both the subsidiary tasks and also on the video its self. We also added hints of baby blue in the ‘M’ on the type face used for the band name, this stops it from looking too plain and makes the bands name pop off the black background. I hadn’t seen this done on a typeface before but I had seen a pop of colour used in another way and it was very effective. We used a black back ground with a white typeface, giving it a modern feel, which is a fairly common among current media texts. The layout we used, having the album photo the main focus of the page with the text above and below it was us using conventions of current media texts as it was one we had seen else where and thought it was the most effective way to draw peoples attention, rather than loading it with information to read we kept it to the bare minimum. The typeface we chose we believe looked like something we’d see in our genre of indie music but the typography used for the bands name was more edgy and modern so we defied convention with that but if anything it made it more noticeable and attractive to our genre as it is different and that is what people typically associated with the indie genre.        

Our second subsidiary task the Digipak definitely uses conventions of current media texts but there are some slight differences. The front and back cover very much are similar to current music texts in the lay out, style and images. Its presented very simply to ensure it eye catching and not overwhelming and the chosen colour scheme is simple yet effective. We saw the black and white colour scheme on the album 'Yeezus - Kanye West' and we thought it looked very effective. We wanted to represent the mood of the song which is quite melancholic so the images used portray that.