Evaluation Question 2

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

The main product of my A2 Media project was the Music video created for the track 'Human' by 'The Killers'. The ancillary texts were an album cover (which the song and music video would be released with) and a Poster to advertise the album.

The main product and the ancillary tasks combine effectively in the way that the album cover and poster use the same colour scheme and both show the tree and guitar, which are key props and are significant within the music video. This can help further advertisement by using these symbols to imply that the band had influenced or released new material.

Evaluation Question 1

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

 

For our A2 Media project we had to create a music video, accompanied with a Digi-Pack (Album Covers etc) and a Print Advertisement for the Album that the original track used for the video would be released in.

Music Video

The music video we created both challenges and conforms with generic media conventions of other music videos within the same genre. The way in which we challenged these stereotypes of music videos was that our creation was heavily focused on the narrative, whereas originally the majority of the videos are taken up by the performance of the band. The narrative also challenges stereotypes as it wasn't obvious what the message of the story was, and could be interpreted in several ways, which we thought worked well as the lyrics can be read in this manner aswell.

However, our music video does also conform to certain stereotypes of music videos, for example the costumes we decided to use are similar to clothes that would be expected to be worn in music videos of the same genre as shown below, the right one taken from a video by 'The Killers' who performed the original song we recreated the video for.

 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Digi-Pack

The Digi-Pack I created mostly conforms to generic conventions of an album cover, for example the placing , size and font (big, eye-catching and easy to read) of the text and images. However, the image itself deviates from other album covers of this genre as generally, they are random drawing or paintings that, if you don't listen to the band then you probably won't understand the link between the image and the band or a certain song / lyric. The image I decided to use was directly linked to the music video in the way that the performance part of the video was based around the tree seen in the image. It also uses the same guitar that was seen in the video.

 

Advertisement / Poster

The Poster that I created for my album challenges and conforms to media stereotypes. The first examples of conformity is the inclusion of the cover of the album cover used on the poster and that the rest of the poster follows the same colour scheme as the Digi-Pack.

However, the Poster also challenges these conventions as most bands that are releasing an album are already successful so their album covers can be exteremely simplistic and don't have to reveal much about the band or album. As the Poster I created isn't for a popular band, I had to include certain links (Facebook, Twitter etc) and other ways to persuade people to buy the album (using ratings from external reviews).

 

Flat Plans

Here are the two flat plans that I created for my Digi-Pack and my Poster.

Music Video

Here is the completed music video that me and my group did for the song 'Human' by The Killers.

The idea of this video was to use the lyrics in a different way than the writers originally intended, where we tried to imply that 'dancers' are the fun-seeking and creative people, whereas the 'humans' are the blank and boring people of the world.

Poster

Here is my completed Poster, advertising the CD / Digi-pack I had created.

Digi-Pack

Here is my completed Digi-Pack for the CD containing the single of the music video I helped to create and edit.

Photos for Album Cover

Here are all the original photos that were taken for the creation of the album cover. Some of these photos will not be included in the actual creation due to generally being a bad shot and not capturing what I'd hoped for, or my intial idea hadn't worked as intended.