Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop orchallenge forms and conventions of real media products?

After looking into other Indie artists and their brand identities, we made a list of conventions we aim to retain during the making of our music video and DigiPak. To ensure we had full knowledge about the conventions, we spent a lot of time analyzing different music videos and applying different theories so we had background knowledge of what to put in our music video. It was important to understand conventions, so when it comes to making our own we would be able to choose what elements we want in it. We recognised these conventions by analysing real media products from artists like Calvin Harris’ ‘I need your love’.

Style of Music Video

After first listening to 'Go Lucky' by The Rifles we decided that we wanted to have an upbeat, fun music video that fits into the style of the songs beat and name, however we did change the name of the song to 'One Day' because we felt this fitted with our music video idea. The song sounds very modern so we wanted to incorporate a modern feel to it, this gave us a clear incite to who our target audience would be.

Music video Narrative

After researching into other Indie artists or bands we found out that the artists normally perform in the music video. We decided we wanted both sequences in the video narrative and performance. 

Top left: Jake Bugg 'Taste it' Top Right: Arctic Monkey's 'Arabella'

Bottom Left: Jack White 'Lazeretto'  Bottom Right: The Rifles 'Minute Mile'

Above are some examples of artist during the performance in their music video. We tried to incorporate both performance and narrative into our music video.

Top: Narrative

Bottom: Performance 

As you can see above, we made a visual inspiration of various artists such as Jake Bugg and The Rifles who both have individualistic styles. We wanted to incorporate these styles into Alex Echo's character. 

Digipak

Album covers primary functions are telling the audience what genre the album is, acting as a form of advertisement for the artist and giving information about the music.  

Here are some album covers of male artists in the Indie and Indie-Rock genre. The name and logo are the most noticeable part of the cover, because as an introduction into the music industry, it is possibly more important to form an easily recognisable name rather than a solid visual style.

The colour scheme across the four panels is very consistent. The black and white theme immediately shows the audience that Alex Echo is an Indie artist. This theme is prominent throughout our DigiPack, website and social networking sites. We included the track names including the debut single 'One day' and some legal information such as copyright and any other relevant intuitions who contributed to the production. Photos we used of Alex Echo were used on the front and inside cover, this shows brand establishment as a debut artist. We followed the typical Indie genre and the font over the whole digipak was quite simple and bold. The font for the album name 'Mistaken for Strangers' is quite hard to see and should of been made bolder.

From left to right: Images uses on CD, images used on the website and a photo from the music video shoot. We took aspects of the style mood-board and incorporated in each media product such as the black and white theme.

Website

The website is not only used to promote an artist but also the institutions that are associated with the artist, including the record label and any brands that the artist has collaborated with. The homepage of a website provides multiple opportunities for the viewer to learn more about the artist. After research we found out that indie bands or artist that stick to their genre tend to stick to a black and white theme. The 1975 are a good example of this, however we liked the layout of Ed Sheeran's website so we took inspiration from that.