Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your promotion package for your album use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real music videos?

Music Video

To us the most important component to our promotion package was the music video, it took the longest to plan and create, and is seen as the main part. In terms of sales in the music industry, music videos play major role in advertising and promoting new singles and tracks. So it was the most important part of the package to create.

 We had three directions to go with the creation of our music video, one was to make it solely a narrative based video, to make it performance orientated or a mixture of the two. With consideration that the mixture of the two sticks to the stereotypical conventions of a rap genre video, we went for this option. originally we planned for the video to be partially performance with different shots of the main artist rapping and the majority narrative, but the song lyrics portrayed little opportunity to make the video solely narrative based. We wanted to follow conventions like that of  the theory portrayed by Andrew Goodwin, that some typical forms and conventions for music videos is the relationship between lyrics and visuals.

We felt the best way for us to portray any message, like the themes and messages we did use in the final edit, would be through narrative and not performance, we managed to portray a poor relationship between the artist/character and his dad, his physical inability to write lyrics etc, which were all pointed out by the audience in the audience feedback. 

We stuck to the typical codes and conventions of the rap genre and it's videos but, with the element of pop and alternative genre through the Ed Sheeran chorus we altered from most primary conventions of typical videos of this genre. Such as the character not being set in urban looking environments and settings, but instead in typical town settings that most audience members can relate to, than being set in big city locations. The general attire of our main character conforms with that of the rap genre (hat, jacket, jeans etc) but the actions he performs isn't that typical of rap conventions.

Digipak

For the digipak I used a simplistic looking digipak theme, by having the cover white with Lego bricks that are in relationship with he album title bordering the image. 

My digipak design certainly challenges conventions of a typical rap cover. Usually the typical rap/pop CD cover contains the artist on the front or on the rap side, an urban theme shown through the  images or typography. I wanted a digipak that was simple and effective, by reinforcing the theme or title of an album like Jay-Z's Magna Carter Holy grail where he uses classical, historical artifact based images which are in relationship with the title, while keeping the simplistic element like AM.

Magazine Advert

My magazine advert is of both the artist's featured in the title track of the album, and main single Lego House. I have used both artists (Ed Sheeran and P Money) facing forward towards the camera. I have used themes from the digipak, such as the blue and red lines, symbolizing the artists performing in unison, and the white background. While using themes that are typical of Ed Sheeran as an artist including the paw and orange theme.

 My magazine does stick to the conventions of a typical magazine advert from similar artists. The ones i have researched before i designed the advert all contain the artist facing forward. Of all the components of my promotional package the magazine advert forms conventions of magazine adverts of similar genres and artists.

BH