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.