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

For my media coursework I created a digipak, music video ad a website for a pop music artist named ‘Ava Jackson’. When creating these media products we looked at the conventions of a pop music video and pop music based media in general, to make sure that our music video was obviously a pop music video and that our digipak and website was also clearly from the pop music genre.

I also ensured that I made links between each media product, focusing mainly on making sure that they all shared a similar colour scheme/theme and that they all heavily featured ‘Ava Jackson’. This was something that I noticed when looking at real media products, not just from within the pop genre. The 1975 have everything in black and white. This creates an identity and makes it obvious that their website, CDs and music videos belong to them.

Music Video

My music video used the song ‘Shake It Off’ by Taylor Swift, a pop song. This song is what my group and I thought was a typical pop song.

We then chose to have 3 characters in the music video, all played by the artist.

This is something that occurs in the pop industry and Katy Perry’s Birthday music video gave us the inspiration. In the video Katy Perry plays 5 different characters that are commonly associated with birthday parties.

We knew that out target audience would be teenage girls. This is why we chose to have ‘Ava Jackson’ play 3 types of teenage girls. This was so that our target audience would be able to relate to the stereotypical characters that we portrayed: Emo, popular and geek.

We used how these 3 types of teenage girls are portrayed in media when choosing what clothes they will wear and the props that they would have.

The film St. Trinians uses these stereotypes:

The ‘Emo’ character wears a lot of black and has dark makeup on, the ‘popular’ girl is shown to have long blonde hair and relatively natural looking makeup and the ‘geek’ character is shown to be wearing glasses and has her hair in two messy buns.

We followed a convention which is used in lots of music videos: narrative. We tried to make sure that our music video had a clear story running throughout that our target audience would understand. We chose to make this narrative focus on the three different characters getting ‘played’ by the same boy, and then they all find out that he actually has a girlfriend. This is a very juvenile, unlikely, exaggerated situation which is usually demonstrated slightly in film, but we thought that this type of story is what would get the attention of our target audience as they are at the age that these situations are dramatic and important to them. We did however go against the generally ending of this style of story, where the male would ‘get the girl’, we chose to have the focus on a boy ‘messing the girls around’. This played with the name of the song, ‘Shake It Off’, almost acting as advice for the audience.

In the music video I used a variety of the different conventions that Andrew Goodwin says feature in music videos, specifically for pop music videos.

We chose to have a contradiction in the lyrics and visuals as when the lyrics say ‘I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain’, we had out ‘geek’ characters being shown, despite later showing that we have a ‘popular’ character, which shows the contrast in the stereotypes. This is because it is expected that popular girls are likely to stay out late and be stupid, however, we chose to have the geek character, who would be expected to be the opposite.

We also made a link between the music and visuals. In the song there is a sequence of 3 claps, this happens twice throughout. We chose to have a character shown clapping at the same time as this. This was to re-establish the link between the music video and the song.

We ensure that we kept to the characteristics of the genre by following the conventions of a pop music video. We ensured that we had lots of props and that the story had narrative. We took some inspiration from Taylor Swift’s music video for ‘Love Story’. In this video it shows her trying to get a boy that she liked to like her back, despite her not being popular. In the video Taylor plays all of the key female characters. We however, did not have a male feature in the music video and we did not have one of the characters ‘win’ the boy. We also wanted to make sure that ‘Ava Jackson’ was the main feature in the music video and didn’t want to have anything else that would be too distracting. This also links with Goodwin’s idea that the demands of the label can have an effect on the music video as it is in the label’s interest to have the artist as the key feature in the video.

We chose not to use the ‘emphasis of looking’ idea in our music video. This was because this would not have benefited ‘Ava Jackson’ because our chosen target audience is teenage girls.

Digipak

For my digipak I tried to follow conventions of pop music artists’ digipaks/CDs.

I chose to have a close up image of ‘Ava Jackson’ looking into the distance. Although pop is generally shown to be a ‘happy’ genre of music, the majority of pop artists’ CDs that I looked at showed the artist looking quite serious. I chose to follow this convention as I wanted to make sure that my digipak would be easily identifiable as belonging to a pop artist.

I also used clear font for the writing on the front of the digipak. This was important as it is necessary for the audience and people who may not know who the artist is to see clearly what CD it is. This is generally an industry standard with only a few exceptions where an artist/band hasn’t put their name or image on the CD cover.

My digipak has lots of pictures all over of Ava which is a convention, especially with pop, as a lot of an artist’s branding is with their image. I also chose to have the lyrics on the website, not on the digipak, which challenges the general convention of having lyric books. I made this decision because I think that people are online a lot more so it would help to create a link between the digipak and the website.

Website

I made sure that my website included the variety of things that pop music artists’ websites generally include. I also made sure that I kept with the ‘girly’ colour scheme and wrote in a style of writing that young teenage girls would understand, making the website appear as though it is made directly for them.

My website for Ava Jackson featured 5 main pages: home, music, tour, about Ava and store.

I then have each page a different set of things to include. However, some of these things overlapped and some were set to be on every page to keep pushing certain aspects of the artist. I had social media links subtly at the bottom of each page but much more obvious on the ‘useful info’ page and I had an image of the album and ‘buy shake it off now’ showing on every page of the website.

This generally follows the conventions of pop artists’ websites. Of the artists that I looked at both of their websites feature the majority of things that my website features. I ensured that my website included key features shown in all of the above including: tour dates, social media links, links to buy music and options to watch/listen to the music on the website, lots of images,

I made sure to have a strong theme throughout my website so that each page was clearly from the same website. This is a convention of any website.