Evaluation

The brief I chose for my A2 Media Advanced Portfolio was 'to produce a Promotion Package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with, a cover for its release on DVD (digipak), a Magazine Advertisement for the promo DVD.

In order to create my brief I had to research and plan I looked at what the medium of the music video was. I learnt that it was the recorded performance in order to promote a single or album release and that it consist of one of three employments; Dance, Live Footage or Fragmented story. The length of the contempary music video is between five to three minutes long and follow conventions and codes which determine the viewer’s response and the texts meaning being split into three areas, Symbolic, Technical, Written and audio. Looking into the History of the music video had a clear understanding of what is expected from a music video and due to digitalization and the technology of today I have a better understanding of how digitalization has affected the music video. If we look at Youtube for example this technology is fairly new and one of the most visited sites daily for the use of web 2.0 which allows multimedia texts on the screen at once Youtube primarily focuses on videos and small time bands aswell as label bands use this in order to promote themselves with a music video Youtube allows wider audiences then music television and allows you to watch what you want. When comparing this to the AS task I was able to look at time constraints aswell as different ways in order to create it with available equipment. The way a music video is really constructed would be over a different amount of time with a budget in order to buy certain equipment such as lighting these considerations where the ideology from the production means. Use of new skills, research methods and software allowed me to create what looks like a music video, what looks like a digipak and what looks like a magazine advertisement. Compared to AS with different resources available as well as ones used before with more skills known, The magazine from last year was the three products instead of one and for the music magazine all that was required form the brief was a front cover, a double page spread and a contents page. I was able to use prior knowledge about the music industry for my products.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I believe that my Media Texts use conventions of the specific medium chosen. the music promotion package. By researching other texts, looking at the standard conventions of the music video and I had a strong ideology of what was needed to be produced and how I would build and structure the texts. Before looking into the history of the music video I looked at the Key Features of the music video by Andrew Goodwin, what I learnt was that genre characteristics were demonstrated, use of intertextual referencing and the demands of the specific record label will mean that certain motifs will be produced such as close ups of the artist/band and then reoccur throughout the text. This gave a huge impact on what my text was going to be like.I believe the development of my music video has definitely challenged what is expected of real media products. I chose to use a real hull band and the song I had chosen to do wasn’t even recorded, I received the song just before the editing process. Before the filming started I had researched into conventions and history of music videos and specifics to genre. Unlike most music videos the narrative is the struggle of a small time band and how hard it is to make them big and this contrasts the lyrics which are conventional of the Indie genre and about love. The video is a montage of the band busking and then performing I used rhythmic editing and depending on tempo depended on the speed of the clip and where it was shown in the text. Time constraints on a real music video would take a couple of days and the cast will all be there my video was shot in one day and edited from an hours worth of footage. As the band where playing live I couldn’t reshoot certain shots instead I took a range of different shots.