Q1) In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

At the beginning of this project during the research and planning stages, I researched the different conventions in a variety of music videos. This gave me a basic understanding of what would be expected in our finished products. When we had chosen our genre Disco Pop we looked at the mise en scene and the different strategies for our piece. We chose the song ‘Not Giving In’ by Rudimental. We became familiar with the lyrics and we created a base concept for our music video. Comparing some of the different Disco Pop videos we noticed that bright colourful lights fitted in: an example of this is in Ke$ha’s video ‘We Are Who We Are' and The Wanted song called ‘Glad You Came’. 

 We also realised that disco pop music videos frequently have an outdoor location. The Wanted video 'Glad You Came' has a good use of outdoor locations.We confronted this by using Box Hill for our location footage. 

We looked at the cinematography of Disco Pop music videos and thought about ways we could feature those types of shots in our piece whilst maintaining a link to our concept of struggling to not give in to stress. We decided to represent this idea with a scene showing the main actor struggling to learn a dance sequence but frustrated by a section of the movement until he decides to free-style it out in an expressive way.

The Box Hill location was used to juxtapose the freedom and happiness of not having to give in to anything on the one hand with the stress and frustration that is created from the struggle. In this piece we have tested the concept of location using it to show two different aspects of our theme.

When creating our music video we had to be aware of the different genres and the characteristics of our chosen genre. Each genre has its own style, showing a variety of conventions useful to the stereotypical style of our genre Disco Pop. We had to keep in mind different aspects and shot types: editing to the beat and mise en scene. I think we have been successful in creating this music video.

I used the Facebook social networking site to ask people their views of our music video. Here is a screen grab of the different comments I received:

For our music video we used the Carol Vernallis theory where we were able to cut from different locations more freely compared with a Hollywood film where there is a narrative for the shots and they all have to be in a specific order.

In our ancillary task we decided, for our poster, to use a layering technique, altering the opacity. This represents a deviation from the majority of Disco Pop music posters which tend to consist of a mid shot of the artist in their particular style. We applied a blue and pink colour scheme which is intended to link with the  Disco Pop Genre. The layered heads were intended to be a subtle reference to the Hindu god Gayatri Devi who has heads looking both ways, and this together with the colour scheme is intended to suggest the peace and strength that the artist feels as he returns to create a comeback album after disappearing for a long time.

Our Poster

We decided to base our album cover around the Disco Pop genre vibe by using bright lights and colours as well as a Hue and Saturation filter layered on top, and with elements of the picture brought back to their natural form; we also combined saturated colours with the neutral colours. An example of this is the artist's shirt with contrasting blue and the pink. We also used the techniques called Layering and Clone Stamp tool. We took inspiration from elements of our music video as well as from artists and their image style (e.g. our album back panel is influenced by Michael Jackson's movements on the album cover titled ‘This is it.’)

 Once we felt we had developed our album cover to its full potential we came to realise that we could also attach a backstory to the album - in this case, that the artist was having a second debut comeback album. This is when we decided to create a background profile for our main artist connecting the album cover and the poster.

We were featuring Poi on our CD cover as these objects create different colours and their movement can be captured when photographed using slow shutter speed. The Poi characterize the bright lights that feature in our music video and help to convey the disco pop genre.  We used the Poi as a recognisable prop in our album cover, just like in the Jordin Sparks Battlefield album cover where she uses a prop symbol to conceal her eye. We also saw a connection between the Poi and the album cover's name, ‘Fluorescent’. At the same time we have diverged from the genre tendency by not having the artist face-on but instead daydreaming out the window. I feel this front cover makes our album unique and helps to tell the background story to are artist.’ The style that we created for our artist is based around Olly Murs.

For the front cover, we were influenced by the artists with front album covers depicting them looking away or not quite facing centre -for example the comparison with the real media text of Taylor Swift's album featured above.

Our Album Cover:

 We decided to collect audience feedback and get other views from people on our album cover as well as the poster, to see whether they could recognise the genre it was meant to portray and tell us how successful we had been in creating this.