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

 

Our task was to create a music promo, digipak and a website for an unsigned band of our choice. The purpose of such a package is to promote an artist to a wider audience. Today more than ever a good music video is a necessity for an upcoming artist. This is because they need to be noticed amongst all other artists across all genres. Videos that become popular and go viral often have a unique selling point or a gimmick. One example of this is the video for Here it Goes Again by OK Go! The now famous video features only one shot all the way through but the use of treadmills as a sort of dance-floor made it instantly memorable and shot the band into the headlines. Disjuncture such as this is often a great USP for a music video. Most music videos are far more conventional with a mixture of narrative and performance that showcase the artist. Our video follows this convention as we have a roughly 50/50 split of narrative and performance. Music promos also often feature the artist in a narrative role as well. This is common in pop videos but less common in rock videos. If an artist is in the narrative in a rock or indie video they are very rarely in a starring role. We decided to subvert this convention and place the lead singer of the performance aspect in the lead role of the narrative. It is common that a video will be just performance but it is not often there will be a video consisting of just a narrative. This is because a narrative will have to be very strong to keep the audience engaged for three or four minutes.

 

An easy to use and concise website is also very important in promoting an artist. It is the epicentre for all key information on the band or singer. This means that the website has to be easy to navigate. Another factor is that people that visit the website will most likely have searched for it with the intention of gaining information on tour dates and purchase merchandise. The easier it is for someone to navigate the website the easier it is to promote the band. If the website is hard to work then it means that people may not get correct information regarding tour dates and merchandise and will be less likely to purchase anything, therefore meaning it is a poor promotional tool. Our website is easy to navigate and has all the major links/buttons on the homepage so all everything is easy to find. Often on band websites the theme and background of the site is related to the artist’s latest release and will often have the same colour scheme as the latest album. Our website follows this convention as our digipak is predominantly green and so is the theme of our website. 

 

The lighting in pop punk music videos is often quite dark and dimly lit and we stuck to this convention in the performance elements of our music promo. Videos like ours are often lit like this to reflect the lyrics which are often quite personal and intimate. There is also a lot of camera movement in the performance of our video and this is a convention of not only pop punk but rock music as a whole. This is because it gives the audience the sense of what a live performance of their favourite band might be like and this therefore promotes the band as people will be likely to want to experience this first hand. This camera movement is often teamed with fast cut editing to further enhance the feeling of being at a gig or concert. This is more likely to be seen in videos from the various rock sub-genres.

 

In terms of the narrative we followed the conventions for not only pop punk but most modern music in general. The lyrics of the song we chose are about the breakdown of a relationship and we decided to focus that onto our narrative. This is similar to a lot of music promos as one of the most popular topics for music today is relationships as it’s something that affects the majority of people and they can relate to it. Our narrative reflects the song lyrics as it tells the story of a relationship breaking down because of a lack of trust. The theme of pop punk songs is often related to growing and adolescence and this is very often shown in their promos and we chose to adhere to these conventions. One of the most famous Pop Punk music videos is All The Small Things by Blink 182, it is a video that follows very few conventions of Pop Punk.