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Post for the Moderator.

This is our A2 Media Coursework blog. You can navigate through our posts by clicking on the labels on the right of the blog.

For our evaluation posts, they are all labelled: "Alex Evaluation", "Anjana Evaluation", "Sam Evaluation" as well as labels that link directly to each question for each candidate.

We also have a tab with a link to the main Latymer Blog. You can also filter though our posts by date.

Our candidate numbers are in brackets next to our names in our blog description.

We hope you enjoy looking through our blog and seeing the work we have put in!

Evaluation Question 1

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

Our music video, website, and album cover all use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products. Some of the real media products we used as inspiration include Paramore's music video for Ignorance, Canterbury's music video for Ready Yet?, Enter Shikari's website and Evanescence's debut album cover.

Music Video

Our music video used inspiration from real music videos, and ideas of our own, which we explain in the video below.

We also talk about the female representation in our music video below.

Website

We looked at 2 different genres: female fronted bands and electro rock, as there are lots of bands within those two genres, but female fronted electro rock bands are very niche. Here is a Venn Diagram of the qualities of the websites.

This research helped us make a website that had these conventions to make it look like a convincing band website. 

Our website has:

• Social media links
• Competition
• Colourful colour scheme
• Equal focus on band members
• Mailing list
• Navigation bar
• Synergy and branding
• Photos
• Tour dates
• Videos
• Purchasing opportunites (merchandise and music).

Album Cover

We looked at debut albums of female fronted rock bands and electro rock bands, which either used concept artwork (such as Linkin Park, Enter Shikari and Paramore) or pictures of the lead singer (like Evanescence and Within Temptation). 


We used these conventions but also developed them by having part of the lead singer's face with paint dripping down it. The paint was our concept which then became a theme throughout the rest of the album's other panels.

Our completed digipack

Evaluation Question 1

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

We used and developed many conventions and theories as well as challenge others to ensure our band was modern and original as well as familiar enough to appeal to our different audiences. Some real media products I used include Tonight Alive, Paramore and Imagine Dragons as well as many others.

We researched female fronted bands as well as rock/electro bands in general to create the We Fall Apart brand.

The female lead singers tended to either be extremely sexualised (Amy Lee from Evanescence) or slightly more reserved (Hayley Williams from Paramore). Also, female fronted bands would have all male instrumentalists, and that's something we wanted to challenge by having a female drummer. We also noticed that the lead singers were white, and that's something we also wanted to explore and challenge by having an Indian lead singer.

From our research into narrative, we wanted to convey a narrative that was structured around cultural studies on star phenomena, global icons and popularity as well as what those effects are on society and in our audience.

The popstar is generalized to comply with many pop genre conventions from pop music videos to their lifestyles. These are presented in the gif underneath.

The narrative is packed with information about the pop star, the many scenes all add to the overall atmosphere so audiences would want to make sure they saw everything which would result in watching more than once.

This is a Prezi of how we used Goodwin's Theory in our music video:

     

In addition to Goodwin's Theory, this is a video on how we implemented Vernallis’ Theory:

Sven E. Carlsson stated that often in performance movies the performer becomes absorbed in the performance, losing their identity. He said 'he or she is a materialization of the commercial exhibitionist. He or she is a monger of their own body image, selling everything to be in the spotlight - selling voice, face, lifestyle, records, and so on'.

We explore this theory as We Fall Apart's lead singer dramatizes it through the pop star in the narrative. We contrast the life of the pop star with the rock star.


   Website

We looked at websites of female fronted bands and electro bands such as Evanescence, Imagine Dragons, Paramore, Enter Shikari and Tonight Alive for conventions that we should include. This mind map summarizes some of the most common features and how we implemented them in our website.

To go more in depth, as the website acts as a hub serving the entire campaign, we followed conventions by:

• promoting the record label

Our website

Evanescence

• Symbiosis with other brands. 

Symbiosis between We Fall Apart and Alternative Press - exposure
for us, magazine space filled for them

Symbiosis between Paramore and Hot Topic by having
'exclusive' merchendise.

       

      Digipak

We researched female fronted rock bands and their debut albums as well as electro rock bands so that we could see what conventions we could use and develop when it came to album covers.

   
   

As a debut band, we wanted to comply with the convention of a female fronted rock band of portraying the lead singer in the front cover, but from an electro band perspective, it was common to use abstract imagery to connote a brand.

As we were trying to appeal to both audiences, we applied conventions we saw in both. For example, we kept the lead singer as the image in our front cover, but created a sense of anonymity and strong imagery with the purple paint and the top half of the face being cut.

There were  conventions visible throughout all the albums though, that we complied with  to ensure we created an album that would comply with record label needs. This is a table portraying those conventions.

Conventions we researched and included

Band name      Album title      Artist/Band photo      Key iconography/ visual motif      Typeface      Record logo      Barcode      Website      QR Code      Tracklist      Product code      Place of manufacture      Copyrights      Release date

       

 

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


In my opinion, the combination of all our media texts is very effective, as we kept a synergistic campaign in mind the whole time. Below is a Prezi I made to explain the elements of our media texts.

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge form and conventions of real media products?

In our media products we used and develop conventions in different ways and in other ways we challenged them. We looked at other bands from our genre including The Pretty Reckless, Paramore and VersaEmerge, and saw the conventions of each product were such that we could be informed of them to use, and/or challenge them as we saw fit.

Our Band

Most popular rock bands consist of only boys, with a few which are mixed gender usually consisting of a female singer with male instrumentalists. We however wanted to challenge this convention, which we did by having our band consist of two girls and two boys.

When styling our band we looked at several other bands of similar genre to determine how best to style each member. Here is a a collage containing some of the Electro-Rock and Rock bands which we drew inspiration from when styling the band member personas for Alex and I. Bands shown include Linkin Park, AWOLNATION, All Time Low, InnerPartySystem and We Are the In Crowd.

As can be seen from this most male band members are styled in fairly casual clothing, usually featuring skinny jeans, and a tshirt or shirt of some sort. So when styling the boys in our band, we decided to use this convention. However, when thinking about how we could promote our artist identity, we decided we should have every band member wear a purple article of clothing. As such we developed the conventions for representation of men in Rock and Electro-Rock such that we could have a stronger branding for our band.

When researching women in rock it became clear that there were two different representations for women in rock music: A highly sexualised representation, and a relaxed, more casual representation. For example The Pretty Reckless' Taylor Momsen and Evanesence's Amy Lee is usually shown as being highly sexualised:

However the other conventional representations of women can be seen in icons such as Paramore's Hayley Williams, Tonight Alive's Jenna McDougall and We are the In Crowds' Tay Jardine:

We decided to use the latter of the two conventions to style our female band members. However we also noticed that almost all female rock band members are white, which is a convention we decided to challenge by having an Indian lead singer.

The Music Video

Here is a directors commentary for our music video in which we outline inspiration for each aspect of the video. 

We looked at Goodwin's theory in order to see how we could use conventions. Here is a mind map showing the aspects of Goodwin's theory and how we used them in our music video:

(Scroll to zoom, and drag box about to view entire mindmap)

Similarly we looked at Vernallis' theory. In this video Alex and I discuss how we used Vernallis' theory in our music video:

The Website

We looked at numerous websites in order to find out conventions which are commonly used. We found that band websites often haven numerous features in common. Here is a table containing those features, and how we used them:

Some of the websites which we used as reference for this research (click to enlarge):

Our Album Cover

Our research into debut album covers implied that a debut album cover is usually conceptual or a drawing. This makes sense as it is a low budget solution to creating an album cover in comparison with a studio photoshoot. Here are some of the debut album covers which we saw from the bands we researched:

However we did also notice that female fronted bands were more likely to feature that a band member on their front cover:

 

 As such we decided to combine the conceptual convention with the convention of featuring the lead band member, by having a conceptual cover, which also featured a photo of the lead singer. This was how we challenged the conventions of real album covers.

We also adhered to the conventions of formatting in album covers such as including the album's and band's names on the front cover, lyrics and copyright

information on the back cover, a barcode on the back and copyright number on the spine. We developed the conventions of putting website details on the back cover by including a QR code so that viewers could go directly to the website from their phones.

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that the combination of our main and ancillary texts is quite effective, however it does not always abide with norms used by other bands in our genre, and therefore could be improved. Having a consistent, synergistic marketing campaign is essential  as an audience member may first encounter the band on any number of platforms. Having a cross platform campaign will maximise audience reach and as such lead to a more effective campaign.

When a member of the target audience first hears about the band, their first port of call is to look them up online; this will likely lead them to the band's website, which is why it is very important for the website to promote a clear sense of artist identity to potential fans.

We use consistent colour schemes and branding in order to create a strong artist identity throughout our marketing campaign - we made purple a constant element in all of our texts, for example. As can be seen, on the album cover, the colour purple was used in numerous places, including the paint on Dani's face, the bar at the bottom of the back cover containing copyright information, and the paint on the bands' hands in all of the pictures.

Our website also contains a clear purple colour scheme,with a purple background, purple buttons, and purple banners. The lighting in the performance section of our music video solidified this branding.

Another factor we used in both our album cover and our website was including as many triangular shapes as possible. For example, on the inside cover of our digipak, a triangular mesh is used over four different pictures, and on our website most of our banners and larger buttons also feature triangles.  This not only creates synergy between the two different texts, but also matches the font of our logo, which is is very triangular.

This logo is also featured throughout the three different facets of our project, which creates cross-platform synergy, and therefore ensures that a viewer can associate one text with the others.

Research

Our research into the use of synergy between websites, music videos and album artwork covered a range of bands in a similar genre to our own. Here is a Prezi showing effective combinations of texts from our references.

As can be seen, we did not include several of the conventions in a synergistic marketing campaign, such as using our album cover as our website's background and including similar motifs in both the music video and the album cover. Were we to repeat the project, I would try and incorporate both of those features in order to make for a more effective combination of texts.