During the two year course of Media Studies, I have completed two preliminary tasks, one for each year. By doing so, they have given me an insight of what is to come when I actually do the final products and what challenges and hurdles I will have to overcome in order to achieve the highest quality of work. For my AS year of the course, I created a school magazine called ‘Homme’, meaning ‘Man’ in French. The target audience I was going for were boys who were studying at Lutterworth College and had an interest in Fashion & Lifestyle. I would say that from doing this, I did have some knowledge of the conventions of a magazine as I was a regular reader of men’s magazines such as GQ and Esquire. I used these particular magazines as a foundation to build on preliminary magazine on top of, and by doing so, I thought that my preliminary magazine was quite high standard as it was only my first time trying to create a magazine and had little experience with the editing software we were using which was Adobe Photoshop Elements. For my A2 year of Media Studies, as a preliminary task, I was asked with my classmates to create a music video to Busted’s ‘That’s What I Go To School For’, I found this second preliminary task was much more complicated and harder to do as there were a lot of things which needed to be done before we could actually start shooting the video. Examples being that we had to come up with a storyboard of what we wanted to happen in the video, cast the actors who were going to play the characters in the video, come up with a shooting plan of when and where we were going to shoot each individual shot and only then could we start shooting the shots we needed. After all the scenes had been shot, we then had to individually take it in turn to edit the video so the shots go in sync with the music. As our video was very much based on the original video of the song, we didn’t really have much freedom with our ideas so I would definitely say that for our preliminary task, the conventions of a music video heavily influenced us when it came to producing the video.
Before I had started my AS coursework, I thought that I did not know any conventions of a music magazine, or any magazine that were already existing. But as I started to do my research and planning for the magazine, I began to find out that I did already know some conventions of a music magazine or any other magazine. For my A2, during my research and planning, I was able to find conventions in which music videos followed, although most of them do not follow the same. What I found out was it was up to the genre of the music which decided the conventions of the videos, Pop music for example, artists such as Lady Gaga and Madonna. They are two internationally known pop stars and although they make great music, it is how they express their music through their videos, performances and shows that is almost as important as the music itself.
When creating the music magazine, I found that this was very much easier as the magazine was from my point of view, so I was able to incorporate only my ideas into the product and no one else’s which made it easier to produce something I liked all the while still following the brief of the task. From the very start, I wanted to create a music magazine that was very much fashion orientated, but still keeping the content of the magazine music related as music and fashion go hand in hand. Before I could start taking any pictures or start writing the content, I had to do a lot of research into existing Fashion and Music magazines such as ‘VOGUE’, ‘LOVE’, ‘Wonderland’, ‘Q’ and ‘Rolling Stone’. By looking at fashion magazines, I could see the typical conventions they all shared and incorporate it into my magazine. The conventions I found were that the featured celebrity in the issue was styled from head to toe and they were using different types of camera angles like close-ups, long shots, mid-shots, everything was fashion forward and they didn’t change who the person was through hair and makeup, the magazines kept their feature star individual as this would be why people would buy the magazine. They were also doing particular poses which would only be seen in a fashion magazine, and during that time, I not looked at magazines, but also photographers who inspired me as well like Terry Richardson and Mario Testino. When looking at music magazines, I found that unlike the conventions of a Fashion Magazine, the mis-en-scene for their pictures are kept simple and clean, the main attraction is the artist featured on the page, nothing else. The music magazines I had chosen were ‘Q’ magazine and ‘Rolling Stones’, I had chosen these particular magazines because they were and still are the highest selling music magazines in the industry, meaning that they were respected and it would be appropriate to incorporate the conventions found on these magazines into mine.
In A2, the brief was to create a music magazine and two ancillary texts such as a digipak and a poster. To find the conventions of a music video, we first had to pick out what song we were going to do. Once we had done that, we could then start looking at other existing bands and artists who were similar to our band so we could take influences from them and incorporate it into our video. Other existing bands we looked at were Kings Of Leon, Coldplay and OneRepublic, the conventions of these videos were of course, lip syncing, instrument playing etc. So I incorporated some of these aspects into our music video in order to get a prodessional looking end product. For the digipak and poster, I looked at the same bands as I did for the music video and found Kings of Leon’s digipak of ‘Come Around Sundown’ which featured a scenic photograph of the beach and two palm trees in the centre of the frame, by the use of editing they were able to take away some of the colour, almost making it into an old photo. The reason for why I really liked it was because the photo felt like a memory captured through the bands eyes, I thought that it made it more personal for the audience. So I tok this inspiration and applied it to my digipak and poster, I had decided to use a photo of picadilly circus I had shot when shooting the shots for the video in London. I thought by using the image of the city, it emphasised the album name ‘City & Colours’ giving the audience a visual representation of the city.
