In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? - Part 1

Our brief was to create a music video promo for a song sung by an unsigned band, as well as a CD/DVD Digipak to house the CD and a Magazine Advert to promote the single release. For this production I had chosen to create these materials for The Colours and their single “Tonight I Let You Go”, a song which is in the Pop Rock genre from an unsigned band from Reading.

The purpose of these texts is as follows:

Music Video: To entertain and help sell the record, as well as giving the audience access to the band and a better understanding of the song.

Digipak: To house and protect a single CD that an artist/band is releasing, in addiction to more importantly to be targeted to attract the target audience to purchase their music.

Magazine Advert: To publicise the song release as well as advertising the artist/band to its target audience.

There are many elements that are used that make a music promo, the following elements are what we could expect to see in a music promo, however some would depend on the genre of the song:

Some of these elements would be dependent on the genre of the song as not all genres utilise these elements as they don’t have any relationship with the song.

The typical conventions used in a music video of this genre are:
- Band Shots, whole band shots and performance clips
- High lighting
- Bright lighting - not natural
- Close-ups and extreme close-ups
- Colour effects, often monochrome
- Fast-pace editing
- Straight cuts
- Panning
- Seductive pose from the female artists
- Deserted locations with straight forward narrative
- Guitar solos
- Voyeurism
- Urban locations
- Singing whist act

In the majority of music videos of a similar genre there commonly links between the lyrics of the song and the video in the narrative parts of the video. So before planning the video possible links had to be identified, so this conventional link between the lyrics and video could be made. You can see below how we deconstructed the lyrics of our chosen song to benefit us when planning the narrative scenes for our video.