Conventions Essay

How has your understanding of real media conventions developed over the past two years?

At AS we completed a front cover, a double page spread and a contents page for a music magazine with a genre of our choice. We used Photoshop to create these products. At A2 we created a music video for a song of our choice (I used 'Save Me' by Automatic Loveletter) and the ancillary tasks: a digipak and a magazine advert for the album.

First of all, for the research and planning, I looked at music magazines as a whole. There are some common conventions within nearly all music magazines. These include using a large and striking main image on the front cover, usually of the band or artist that the main story is focused around. Another prominent feature is cover lines. These give more information about the story or artist, making the reader want to know more. On the contents page there are often page previews using thumbnail images of certain pages within the magazine also to grab the reader's attention. The use of layering is important for the aesthetic of the magazine. It is the technique of overlaying images and text in order to prevent there being a lot of blank space on a page. There are some other obvious features such as the barcode, page numbers and page titles that you would see in any genre magazine that it was important not to miss.

The genre of the magazine, however, did influence some of the conventions I chose to use. This was an important element to look at because some features are used differently within different genres and I wanted my magazine to be a coherent rock genre magazine. The first thing was the colour scheme; it was usually a lot darker and simpler for rock genre magazines, usually using black or grey. My own colour scheme was black, white and red which was very conventional. Often the style of the font and images used within rock genre music magazines were very fitting, connoting themes that linked with the music such as anger or sadness. The language of the actual articles seemed to be very colloquial and conversational predominantly. While this could be true for many genres it seemed to be a feature more so of rock genre music magazines, and there was usually a fair amount of 'taboo' language within the writing too.

Being able to compare my own work to an existing product throughout the creative stages and using the conventions made the piece as a while more believable and professional-looking. This meant that understanding the conventions enough to manipulate them to fit my own product was important. It influenced the decision making process because I had to choose which conventions to use and which I could challenge or adapt without my product losing a sense of genre or how believable it was as a piece.

Understanding the conventions for a music video was a lot simpler because we see them on a daily basis and it becomes very recognisable. This meant that ideas I had for the music video formed almost straight away after choosing a song. I feel that I did use conventions for the music video, mainly in terms of styling. The mise en scene was very simple for the most part because a lot of it was shot outdoors. For these scenes I wanted it to seem lonely and isolated to fit with the song as well as the conventions of a lot of rock genre music videos. The costume and the make up were heavily based upon the look of a lot of female fronted rock bands such as Evanescence and female artists such as Christina Perri and were therefore quite conventional.

For the digipak and advert the imagery I used of skulls and skeletons fits with the conventional view of the 'darkness' of the rock genre. I also used a very basic colour scheme similar to the one I used within my music magazine. Compared to my AS work I think my understanding of conventions has developed and is now more of a second nature when creating something. I think my knowledge of conventions with the rock genre is very strong but maybe that I need to branch out into other genres too.

For the AS work I mainly used conventions because it was the first time I had created anything like that and I was very aware  of trying to make my piece as believable as possible. At A2 I was able to take more risks because I was more confident of my abilities. Therefore I challenged the convention of using a lot of band shots within the video. In a lot of cases a rock bands will be made up of at least four members (My Chemical Romance, Halestorm, Evanescence, Linkin Park, Escape the Fate etc.)and in the video there will be a lot of dramatic performance shots. In my video, however, the performance shots were a lot more laid back and limited - partly because there were only three members to the band I created (similar to Paramore's new line up).

I think that, especially when initially creating something, conventions are very important to use as guidelines. They help to steer you in the right direction and they give shape to your product. Once you have your initial idea you can then move away from the conventions and challenge existing ideas to make the product really your own. I understand now, that conventions are not always as strict as I previously thought and that you can allow yourself to break the rules every so often in order to be creative.