Evaluation Question 1 Conventions

For our coursework, we were set the task of creating a music video, a magazine ad and a digipak. We had to look at the common codes and conventions for each product and create our own. Below are the common codes and conventions for all of these.

Common conventions

Digipak

• They tend to be made from plastic and are most commonly known as a CD case and this is where the artists CD goes but is how the marketing of the cd is done via the front and back covers
• The artists name and song title are usually clear on the front. 
• The artists image or print work is on the front, usually recognisable and have a close link to the artist or the songs which are on the CD
• Website information and Artist website for people to find out more information. 
• The artists and album name on the side, including category number and company logo. 
• A brief description of the artist or a lyrics booklet which we have included in ours is in usually found on the inside. This provide you with information and song lyrics.
• A sellers barcode
• And a Copyright statement and record label information. 

Music Video

• They tend to include both a mixture of performance and narrative, a study done by Goodwin looks more into this concept idea. 
• They use a wide variety of shots. Panning and short shots are commonly used to create a fast paced look and feel for the song. House music videos mainly use short snappy shots of the main character and club footage on screen to add more emphasis. Whereas in other genres they tend to use close ups of the characters and of the performance members. An example of a video where the camera angles used are to hide the artist face is Run this Town by Rihanna. A lot of close-up shots of the singer are used with constant camera movement. 
• Lip syncing is commonly used to portray the sense of a performance going on. Most artist use this nowadays, mainly incorporating it in with the video. Unless the video does not contain a performance aspect. However in our video this is not the case as we didn't have much performance footage other than the old man on the DJ Decks
• Music videos feature jump cutting and the footage which matches what is going on on screen. Producers tend to edit the video to the beat of the soundtrack and to sometimes in our case as you can see in the first 30 seconds to the song lyrics.
• The mise-en-scene is usually selected to match the genre of the artist e.g An RnB artist would use some sort of warehouse or studio or urbanised area to create a mysterious feeling, whereas a House artist would use a brighter and stranger place. 

Magazine Ads 

• They always show the artists name in large lettering to make it stand out in the magazine, the smaller the artist the bigger the writing tends to be. 
• They show the dates when the tickets are for sale or a cd is on sale. 
• Star reviews help promote the artist and make people want to buy the song or songs or tickets which are being advertised. 
• The artists information and websites, so people know where they can find out more information about the artist. These are usually shown through the use of Twitter or Facebook icons. Which we have included to promote our own track
• Record label information and a copyright statement. 
• Artist image or cd image. 

We then moved onto looking at the common codes and conventions for each product for our chosen genre, house genre. This was to help us when making our final products.  A Film that inspired a lot of our idea was the Film Bad Grandpa and some songs from Storm Queen such as the original video for look right through


Firstly we looked at some of storm queens video. We found that House music originated in America in the early 1980's in the American city or Chicago. Early house music was generally dance-based music characterized by repetitive beats over and over again which meant that the repetitive rhythm of house was more important than the song itself. House music today, while keeping several of these core elements has changed drastically where by now you get less vocals used in the songs and when you do get some lyrics its only either for a short length of time or is repeated over and over again. Then we looked at and found the video for Look Right Through very helpful for filming our video.They used a lot of close-ups of the old mans features and a lot of steady camera work. We decided to go for the same sort of feel when filming ours which added to the inter textually. Although the performance was not very prominent in this video, we were mainly looking at how they filmed their narrative footage. We also looked at the fast pace of editing used in this video, it matched well with what was going on on screen. Also this video incorporated a diegetic opening which we chose to do so it fit in well with our choice of what we were going to film and we believed that it worked very well.

We then looked at the digipaks. We noticed MK went for a very simple design. Apart from the common codes and conventions we mainly liked the black and white backgrounds which he has used for the covers. We then decided that for our digipak we also went for a black and white image on the front to solidly signify the house genre. There was also a lack of textual information on the front. So we also went along with that theme and put on the artists name, album name and the information about the bonus video. We found that the majority of the images which are brighter in colour and depth and most of the information was included on the inside. Therefore we chose to do this as well.

Finally, we looked at a magazine ad's. We noticed again they used a very simple design. The image colour chosen was black with limited text used. It used some of the main codes and conventions of a normal magazine ad and was well edited and had a lot of imagination. In order for us to gain full marks we had to include more conventions from the house genre, also because they artist is barely known we needed to put more text with it. We included Facebook and Twitter links in order to help promote our digipak and get all the information across with a QR code aswell.