Q1.a. Real conventions of Media Texts

Explain how far your understanding of the conventions of existing media influenced the way you created your own media products. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how this understanding developed over time (25 marks)

Throughout my 2 years of studying media, I have produced a film opening for my AS product, titled Amnesia, and during my year in A2 I, along with 2 other group members, produced and created a cross promotional package promoting a new artist, named iSO. During the production of both my foundation and advanced portfolios my understanding of the conventions of existing media influenced my choices often.

At AS, we had to research the typical conventions of teen drama’s as this was our chosen topic for our AS film opening, Amnesia. In order to understand how our characters should act or behave we researched the most common symptoms and the ways in which an Amnesia sufferer can cope. This helped us to relate the narrative to the behaviour and reactions our character would have. When researching this topic and theme we discovered the film Memento, which helped us to portray the behaviours and typical reactions of an amnesia sufferer as the protagonist in this film was dealing with amnesia presently. The theme of the film also stuck to memory loss which meant we were able to understand the thoughts and processes the character would go through so that our protagonist knew how to relate.

I looked at the opening of Toy Story where Andy and the toys are introduced to us who are the main focus of film. It focuses on the representations within this opening scene and the ideas of how the toys are portrayed. In the opening scene Andy is initially introducing the toys to us as the audience. We get to meet Andy and more importantly we are introduced to the toys who are the main focus of the film. Firstly, we learn Woody has some importance as he is featured more often and is played with more by Andy. The ideas and representations are made to seem true to the audience by taking the concept of children making up stories with their toys actually coming to life and having their own independent adventures. Richard Dyers theory is appropriate in relation to the opening of Toy Story as he believes that stereotype comes down to power and that those who have power stereotype those who don't. We also looked at the influence of camera shots within this opening sequence as the wide variety and frequent use of different shots enabled us to experiment with the types and amounts of shots. We realised the pace of the shots kept up with the pace of the narrative so we tried to replicate this in our film opening as it made sense to the audience.

When researching the titles for my film opening, I looked at the titles of Paranorman which is typically more of a children’s film so the titles were mostly cartoon and animated with a character matched to each title. However, from watching this title sequence we took away the order in which the titles appeared which mostly indicated the importance of the role. We also took note of the timings as they appeared and how long they stayed on screen as this was important so that our audience were able to gain an insight as to who produced, distributed and edited our film opening. 

At A2, we decided that our music video and new artist would be classified as the rap genre. However, as my knowledge into this genre was limited, my research into the genre and to the music videos was vital for my understanding of the conventions. I researched several artist who were in the same genre as the one we wanted to portray for our new artist. Kendrick Lamar is an American rapper born in Compton, a city known for producing great rappers like Dr Dre, Coolio and Tyga. He then went on to release Good Kid, m.A.A.d city which was one of the biggest Hip-Hop albums of the decade and has already been dubbed a classic album by many reviewers. With singles like Swimming Pools (Drank), Kendrick managed to reach a global audience to people who don't even particularly like Hip-Hop music but liked the singles. We discovered another rap artist who was less known; Logic is an American rapper born in Maryland, where he gained a lot of fans through the internet and is part of the RattPack group. He is signed to VisionaryMusicGroup and DefJamRecordings. His latest album Under Pressure received wide critical acclaim. Logic is one of the less commercial rappers still releasing a lot of his tracks on SoundCloud for fans to listen to for free. From this we were able to identity record labels that they were signed to and we could relate this to our artist as we wanted to make everything realistic.

For the website, we researched similar artist’s websites so that we were able to identify what were common features were important to keep and what weren’t. Logic's website is like heaven for Logic fans as it has everything they could ask for all in one place. I really like the blog on the home page as I think it's a great way of keeping fans updated but it's also personal. However, I thought the Home Page was too text/content heavy so when we create the iSO website we will incorporate a blog into it but on a seperate page like a news page for example.  We liked the layout of the store page, Logic doesn't have many products but we thought the way they are shown is good. He also liked the header image for the store. After doing a photoshoot, he will edit something similar for iSO's. We then looked at G-Eazy’s website as it has a very simplistic effective layout, which I liked. We will use G-Eazy's home page as a template when creating iSO's as it has everything necessary and looks professional. The other pages also had a great layout but didn't have much content. G-Eazy's store is exceptional and we will refer to it when designing iSO's store and the products in it. The range of products on G-Eazy's store is huge and they are all high quality items.