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

In a few ways, I have met the conventions of an average music video. I included a lot of short shots which would change every few seconds, I included a narrative and lip-syncing. However, I also consider myself to have challenged the conventions as well.

For my music video, I gave particular attention to mise-en-scene; One of my actors was made up by me to look like an alien/monster. Although this desire for a strange or almost supernatural look has begun to settle into the conventions of an average music video (e.g. Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj) It only seems to be given attention to in certain genres. Electro-Pop is a genre that often uses the lighting and special effects rather than the actual makeup. 

So in some respects, I have challenged the Electro-Pop genre through my use of make-up. On the other hand, I have also conformed to the conventions which I stated; I used a lot of coloured lighting for my video from different angles to get a variety of shots. As as well as that, I included many effects over the top; I used effects such as a mirror effect and emboss to make the video seem even stranger.

     The lighting really changed the entirety of the video, turning it from something plain into something scary and strange. 

Here I used an effect called 'Emboss' which allowed to make multiply the amount of Megan's. I thought it made the video look quite scary and strange and really connected to general electro music videos.

I also used a projector for one part of the music video to project text onto the walls. 

   I cut back and forth between clips often in the video, which gave it a very interesting effect. A lot of music videos tend to include small clips, but when I made mine even shorted by switching back and forth between them it had a fantastic effect on them.

With my ancillary text, I challenged the normal conventions of digipaks based on my genre. A wide range of albums which fall under the Electro/Synthpop genre focus more on having a words, the artists name or a symbol as their front cover; images of the artists or anyone else doesn't appear as often. I talk about this on my planning blog in a post here. 

In my original design, I had considered combining an image of the artists with a logo, therefore developing the conventions of ancillary texts of this genre.

However, when it got to actually creating the ancillary text, I decided to go a different way and went with what pictures I thought worked best for my artist. This was the product I came out with:

I think this product looks better than how the original design would have looked if it had gotten to this stage because it didn't really relate to the completed video like this one did. I think the first design makes the relationship between the two more friendly than how it's meant to appear, whereas in my final product they do not look like friends, but instead correspond with how they acted in the video.

I think the magazine advert works better than the original design for it as it is quite different from the cover of the digipak case. By including an image of the design of the digipak cover it shows a corresponding link between them. The advert draws the attention of the audience by the bright purple and yellow colours and the image of the strange eyes. This also helps to advertise the video for the song as it links to the music video instead of the digipak cover. The name of the artist takes up a lot of space from being so large and helps the name to be recognised more easily. The name also slightly goes onto the picture, meaning you can't look at the image without noticing to title as well. Like the majority of music magazine adverts, I included a release date for the album as well as putting the website URL of the artist. This makes audiences more aware of the artist in question and get to know more about them. I also decided to put 'includes hit single "lies"' on there, influenced by other magazine advertisements which often list singles which have gotten into mainstream media in order to advertise the artist more.