Evaluation 1

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

The genre of my chosen song was a mix of R&B/Soul. 

Conformed to codes and convention of fashion e.g. Lewis to wore a hoodie and baggy jeans with trainers these all represent an urban aspect in the R&B genre.

I have challenged the convention of iconography and male gaze which are mainly featured in R&B music videos, where women in the video are seen as an object for the male desire, and place emphasis on their sexuality through minimal clothing and their make up.

I challenged this by having Bemi dress in innocent outfits and natural make up, connoting her innocence in her relationship.

However I dressed her quite ‘sexy’ in a tight pencil skirt, and a pet plum style top, just to have her right to dress up and be sexually attractive, which can be explained by the Post Feminism female gaze approach.

The music video I produced for the song ‘Stranger’ by Jhene Aiko can be categorised as a narrative based music video because of the lyrical content of the song, which reveals, love, frustration, and confusion. 

 Rihanna We Found Love. (link) This video implemented a mixture of real performance and narration, where Rihanna and her boyfriend present contrasting moods and relations with each other, similarly, I presented the yo-yoing events of a young relationship between Bemi and Lewis, which involved love, anger, and distress.

Many Soul songs are slow paced, and their music videos have editing styles to match. I followed this convention by using slow-paced editing throughout the majority of my video, and by slowing up the pace of editing at appropriate moments in the song where the song slows down This technique is used in the music video for Beyonce Halo where the pace of editing was very slow as a result of the pace of the song

For my ancillary tasks I used the majority of the conventions for an album cover and for a magazine advert for an album cover.
When constructing my album front cover, I used a portrait based cover, because I felt that this aspect was crucial for a female solo artist, where I have used a close up image of my artist.

Moreover my album cover features the name of the artist ‘Lola Cruz’ and the album title ‘Stranger’, and these are conventions of an album cover.

My album's back cover used many more conventions, list of tracks, a bar-code legal information at the bottom and company logos. 

I kept the colour scheme similar from the front and back cover, to the inside cover and the spine, as this is an important convention that keeps the whole album cover presentable and increases its authenticity to the audience

The album cover's spine followed the conventions of real media products, with the company logos on and the artists name and album title in the centre, with the same fonts and colour scheme used in the rest of the album. This is present on the sine of Monica ‘Still standing’ album.

For my magazine advert I conformed to the codes and conventions of nearly all magazine adverts where largest item on my magazine advert was the picture, followed by the text for the artists name and the album title. These are all conventions which I have used, and which can also be found on other album magazine adverts such Jessie J ‘Who you are’ and Rihanna ‘Loud’ allowing the audience to associate the album and the advertisement together. Similarly, in my magazine advertisement, I also decided to include the original album cover.

Similarly to Chris browns magazine advertisement, he revealed to the audience where they could purchase his album cover 'hmv', similarly in my magazine advertisement I also included the 'iTunes' logo to allow the audience can easily access the album.

. My magazine advert also includes the album's release date, successful released singles and ratings, which are all things I found on other magazine adverts I had analysed.

Bullet points of the conventions I have followed 

- Album name

- Album title

- Album release

- Artist Image

- A featuring song

- Album disrtibutor

- Artist website

- Critical ratings