1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the conventions of real media products?

We used, developed and challenged conventions of both  music videos and music videos of the dance genre.

Conventions of the genre of our production

genre: (electronic) dance

The (electronic) dance genre is often production driven i.e. a collaboration between DJ and singer. For example the track that we chose "my head is a jungle" is a remix of pop singer Emma Louise's song, by Wanklemut, a DJ. However this convention is being broken across the wider genre of electronic music with artists such as AlunaGeorge (an electronic music duo) who have a singer and DJ within their band and Clean Bandit a larger group who take a classical music approach to electronic music. We wanted our artist to be similar to these groups but catered for a electronic dance genre. Therefore our artist, Lucid City, consisted of two DJ's and a lead vocalist.  

Lucid City

Alunageorge

Music videos for this genre are often conceptual or narrative and not performance based due to the collaborative nature of these tracks and the visual difficulties of a DJ performing (not as entertaining as a pop singer). For example many of the music videos in our stealomatic such as Route 94- My Love, Prayer in C, Major Lazor- Sweat, do not feature the artist. In our music video we challenged the conventions of electric dance videos by having performance elements as well as narrative, for example in the playing card performance scene that can be seen below...

Route 94 "My Love"- no performance or artist featuring

Lucid City- performance Scene with artist

In his book "Dancing in the Distraction Factory" Andrew Goodwin said that the relationship between lyrics and footage in music videos either amplify, illustrate or contradict each other. The concept behind our video is based on the line of the song "my head is a jungle" amplifying it to provide narrative for the video.

Music Video, Form 

The following power point covers the music video form, from inter textual references, multiple meanings, camera work, narrative development, shifting signifiers to visual codes. 

Album Cover Conventions

This album is our artists' debut, it is conventional for a debut album to feature a photo of the artist for the main image on the front in order to establish them. We also looked at the conventions of album covers of artists in the same genre...

how we used other media products to develop our own album cover- click to enlarge

It is also important that our album cover reflects the artists' institutional identity, which is mainstream, as they are signed to Technicity, a record label owned by media conglomerates, Universal. The album cover is conventional and clean which gives it an mainstream appeal to mass audiences. 

Website Conventions

When initially brainstorming ideas for our website we were really inspired by Beyonce's website. We liked how visual it was and the extremely simple layout- the focus is on a stream of photographs from her daily life with her husband, child etc with a hidden menu bar at the top. Although simple this is still effective as the photos make the fans feel like they have an insight to her life. 

However our artist is new and their website is working to promote their debut album, in contrast to Beyonce a world famous name that does not need to work as hard to promote her album as she already has a strong fan base. 

Although we couldn't use the simplicity, we worked to make our website as visual as possible, with lots of bright and fun photos, some from "Behind the Scenes".



In the end our website we took more references to Ellie Goulding's website which has a more conventional website format with home, biography, news, video, live, music, store, photo pages.

When getting feedback from a member of the target audience, she commented out how "the layout made things easy to find." (full video in q.3)