Evaluation question 1

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

• I think my media products follow the convention of an abstract and urban sub genre in the 'rock' and 'indie' music genre. The graffiti style of the digipak from the tattoo style artwork placed within the digipak such as the roses and pin up style wonder woman, and the font used in both the digipak and the advertisement develops conventions from the rock and grime music genre. 

• My digipak challenges a lot of conventions of female artists, such as over sexualising the female artist to attract and appeal to the male audience. I decided to place my artist on the cover of the digipak which does follow the convention of female artists throughout a range of genres and isn't limited to one, but I feel it challenges the convention as well as follow it because the artists face is hidden by the teacup in her hand, so the artist isn't looking into the camera and I feel that the clothing choice of my artist doesn't follow conventions because instead of being barely dressed or over glamourised and is simply wearing a grey jumper. When looking into the convention of having the female artist placed centred on the cover, I discovered that many of the covers had plain background such as white or pale pinks. Instead of following that convention I tried to include the urban and graffiti style and included a leopard print background and altered the colours and then included tattoo style artwork on the page

• For the advertisement of my digipak I decided to investigate genre specific advertisements. When investigating I found that a lot of advertisements for albums in the same genre used the picture used on the cover of the actual digipak and usually had it fading to black and simply placing all text on the blacked out section. I found a few that had similar designs to the digipaks but instead of using the picture used on the cover of the digipak, they placed a small picture of the album somewhere on the advertisement. I followed the conventions of keeping the advertisement very similar to the actual digipak and kept the same background but altered the colours and decide to use the same fonts that were used throughout the digipak. I challenged the popular convention of having the album cover photo covering majority of advertisement and instead had the cover placed on the advertisement. 

• For my video I challenged many conventions and feel like that I didn't follow many. For the video I decided to not feature the artist in the video at all, where as many videos from a wide range of genre will feature the artist somewhere in the video, this could vary from the band or artist performing or actually acting within it. To help make my video look professional and make it look like something that would be shown on TV I decided to use some product placement, this is in the opening scene when someone is looking on an iPhone 5C and the album is actually playing on the screen. The product placement continues when the girl is putting on her makeup and unknowingly I revealed the brands of the makeup. I feel that the product placement follows conventions of a more pop genre than a rock genre because pop music videos are more popular so are more likely so be advertising products. Much like the digipak I decided to not over sexualise the female character and actually had her heavily clothed in dark clothing such as a hoodie and hat.