Over the last two years, in AS and A2 media studies, I
have completed two main tasks. In AS this was to create the front cover,
contents page, and double page spread for a music magazine, following a genre
of my choice. For my music magazine, ‘Exploit & Destroy’, I chose to focus
on the rock and heavy metal genres of music. In A2 I had to create a music
video, again for my own chosen song and genre, and two related ancillary pieces,
a digipack and a magazine advert for the digipack. In both projects, I chose to
stick to many conventions of the type of piece I created, and the genre of
music I focused on. These conventions could however, be changed or ignored
occasionally when I felt it was necessary. Over the two years, completing these
projects, I have developed my understanding of these conventions, allowing me
to make relevant decisions regarding their use in my projects.
For my first
project, the music magazine I completed for AS, I used a variety of real media
conventions. To create my magazine, I took ideas from the layout and styling
used in ‘Kerrang!’ magazine, another rock and metal music magazine. These
conventions would enable me to ensure that my magazine piece looked like it fit
into the genre it was representing, and that it looked professional and like a
real music magazine. For the front cover I stuck to a lot of conventions used
across all types of magazine, including a masthead, cover lines, the principle
of thirds, a barcode, and a variation of fonts used throughout the cover. One
convention I felt I would do differently to real music magazines, was the use
of only one image across the whole cover. Many of the other magazine covers I
looked at used main one image, and then two or three other small images as
well. I wanted my cover to focus on the main article within though, and chose
to go against the conventions for this. For my contents page I stuck mostly to
genre conventions, using features such as a “contents” title, eye-catching
colours to direct the reader’s eyes, several images, captions, page numbers,
and an editor’s introductory passage. In my double page spread, I chose to mainly
stick to genre conventions as well, using a title line, main big images, an
introductory paragraph above the main text, and quotes from the main article
text.
For
my A2 coursework, the music video, I chose once again to follow the genre of
rock/heavy metal. My chosen song ‘Evidence’ by Marilyn Manson gave me a lot of
room to play around with music video conventions, as it had no official video
and Marilyn Manson’s music videos change drastically from song to song. I chose to take a darker route with my music
video and make it a dark fairy tale. Because of this, the main convention I
stuck to strongly was a heavy use of narrative throughout. I also wanted to
give a sense of speed and fear during certain points in the video, so used a
large amount of quick jump cuts. To stick with the conventions of most modern
music videos, I also chose to include performance shots of the band performing
the song. To switch between these narrative and performance shots, I used another
convention of music videos, parallel editing. The same was applied for the
ancillary texts; I needed to still follow some conventions of similar real
pieces to make mine fit in with the crowd and look like they belonged there. The
digipack that went along with my video featured conventions like, the name of
the band (Danse Macabre in my case), the name of the album (Personification of
Death), the track listing, credits, recording information, barcode, and artwork
related to the themes of the album. As a lot of heavy metal bands use hand
drawn horror-like artwork on their album covers, I chose to follow this
convention as well, featuring hand drawn images of gory and horror scenes
across all of my digipack. My second ancillary piece, my magazine advert for
the album featured such conventions as the name of the band, name of the album,
band website, short review lines from music publications, star ratings from
music publications, and an image representing the album.
From
my AS to A2 work, I feel that I have developed a greater understanding of
conventions and how they are used within media pieces. I believe for the
research for my A2 music video, I looked into the conventions of other music
videos of the same genre, more than I looked at the conventions of music
magazines at AS. I feel that I studied a great range of sources as well at A2,
looking across many different music videos, going all through rock and heavy
metal, allowing me to get a larger feel for the conventions of my genre, and
how to use them in my piece. At AS however, I think I focused too much on the
design of one magazine, ‘Kerrang!’, which may have impacted on how my magazine
represented and used the conventions of rock magazines. Only using one magazine
as research probably impacted on my ability to understand why it had used the
conventions it had, and how I could break the mould a bit for artistic effect.
Conventions are important in creating a media piece, as they allow us to stick
to well know genres and ideas, which makes everything fit together and not look
too out of place for the audience of the piece. They also let the creator of
the piece challenge set conventions of their genre, generating new ideas and
evolves the genre as a whole.
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