Evaluation Question 1

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

With using an original song, our artist has only had access to releasing music on Sound Cloud. While Sound Cloud is a popular music streaming site for other artists without a lot of recognition within the music industry, it still limits the availability they have with an audience due to the site not being as popular and famous such as others like Spotify or YouTube. So with uploading our music video onto YouTube, this allows us to broadcast our artist on a larger scale. With being on YouTube, our music video is available to millions of users that can come along and discover it within suggested videos or sue to adverts seen about the artist and searching on YouTube has proved to be the easiest way to find music videos. YouTube will be beneficial for our artist to become more popular within the music industry due to the fact of how a mainstream site such as this allow people to have the recognition they deserve for their work. The fact it is a free streaming site for music videos makes it that much more popular and intriguing for people to go online for.

Our advert can be seen to challenge real media products due to how we have taken genre stereotypes into account and used them to our advantage. For example, with using Photoshop, we were able to create an edit of smoke appearing to cover the artists face. We believe this is effective due to the fact that while we have decided to show our artist on the poster, something not typically focused on within indie artists magazine adverts, we have changed it into a way where we have left a sense of mystery; we were able to it in the theme of the album and the single ‘Poltergeist’ to the advert by creating a mysterious, supernatural effect. With also using a continuous style showing to have patterned across form our digipak to our advert, the advert can be broadcasted and advertised into other multiple ways and not just only a magazine. It can be advertised on social media sites or as a YouTube advert with clips form the music video shown to help engross a new audience.

With our music video, our genre is predominately indie/rock based and we have been able to adhere to the stereotype of the indie genre conventions with the idea of focusing on a narrative music video. Most indie artists follow through with this style of music video to tell a story; a clear example of this can be seen within Florence and The Machine, where they were able to create a whole conceptual, narrative music video series surrounding their entire album; each video being able to link in with the lyrics of each song. We focused on creating this within our music video as well by telling a story of a toxic relationship within an LGBT couple, but the main focus of telling a story within the video was to adhere to a stereotypical indie genre convention. 

Other ways we were able to adhere to the indie genre within our music video would be focusing on the costume; this being the key item of clothing that is memorable to our key audience being the denim jacket, due to many indie genre stars – such as The Smiths – would do something like this as a key factor of their style. With most mainstream music videos, they focus on including a large variety of different locations, a common factor noticeable within the music industry recently being these music videos being filmed in locations such as exotic beaches. 

For our video, we focus on our location not being shown as the focus of the entire video is on our actress who is only standing in front of a green screen. Other music videos filmed like this or in a similar can be seen to be done by Coldplay with ‘The Scientist’ where the music video is focused predominantly on the leader singer but uses a real life situation and location for the background, rather than a green screen which we chose in our case.

In ways we have challenged the conventions of the indie genre can be seen with how we have used a female artist; while there are commonly known to be quite a few female indie singers, it is still the case that the genre is mostly male dominated, as such with other music genres. With using a female artist, this allows us to be able to go against the mainstream music video idea of sexualising a women’s body within a music video, which is commonly seen in pop music videos. With using a simple close up of our artist singing into the camera in a continuous way with editing in other footage, can be seen to challenge the stereotype of music videos with displaying our actress as a normal ‘heartbroken’ girl, rather than a sexualised object which can mostly be the case within the media. The idea of showing the representation of a gay couple within a music video can also be shown to challenge the concept of music videos as there are not many famous music videos which focus on the storyline of a LGBT couple; Macklemore and Troye Sivan can be named as one of the few famous mainstream artists that have been known to show this representation within their music videos. Even with the representation of homosexual characters in music videos, it is also known that not many of these couples with music videos show female and female relationship storylines. One famous indie singer known to have done this, and can be said to be famous for her music videos because of this, is Hayley Kiyoko who has involved multiple lesbian relationships or feelings within her videos, often portraying herself within her narratives.

With looking at our Digipak’s, in many ways we have conformed to the typically accepted ‘norms’ that this packing is predominately distributed as. One of these factors being how most artists will carry out a common theme throughout the whole of the digipak. For example, using a photo-shoot to cover the front, back and inside cover of the digipak. An example of this can be seen with Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ where she has used multiple images from the same photo-shoot to carry out a theme for her digipak. The idea of using specific and similar images helps create a sense of repletion and familiarity for the audience, allowing the digipak and artist to become more memorable in a way that will be easier for the audience to access the artist; for example, if the same packing style was used for the artists advertisements, they would be easier to recognise.  

Overall, I believe our ancillary texts have been successful with the idea of conforming to the indie music genre. With the inspiration of other artists of the same category, we have been able to create an overall product conforms to this aesthetically pleasing idea that has been created surrounding the indie genre while creating our own unique twist with regards to linking our ancillary texts to the theme of our artists song being about ghosts and the supernatural element in some ways. To push our digipak further, I would prefer to edit it and see how we can improve it and allow it to become more unique and unlike most, creating a new and interesting element that we have already begun working on originally.