Real media texts are essential in influencing both my AS and
A2 productions. They enabled us to understand what was needed to create the
genre codes and conventions of our choice and also gave us inspirations for our
final productions. For our final productions, my group and I produced a Film
Noir film opening called ‘A Dame with Clue’ in AS and a promotional package
with a music video to the folk genre song ‘Family’ by ‘Catey Shaw’. The use of
real media texts was developed on the transition through the two years from AS
(Year 12) to A2 (Year 13).
At AS we completed research into real media text film
openings by watching them on YouTube and
Vimeo. These films we classic film noir films such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ‘The Third Man’. This enabled us to learn
of and follow the traditional genre codes and conventions of this genre and therefore
create a narrative that would fit this genre, with the female (Dame) in
distress, she is the main female protagonist, in a dark street lit urban
setting, making her way to the detectives’ office who is the main male
protagonist, with a case which he excepts. Also when watching ‘Laura’ it
enabled us to learn that our female protagonist, should come across as
mysterious and tempting, therefore inspired our slow reveal of the ‘Dame’
character. Along with this we also watched more neo-noir film openings on Art of the Title, including
‘Drive’ and ‘Sin City’ which inspired our titles, to involve more colour at
the start, hence our gradient of colour removal in our first title, to create
the more modern feel to the genre and suggest the mystery which is about to
take place. As when we were inspired by a film opening at AS, we almost copied
what took place, it caused our final production to be heavily influenced and
dependent on real media texts.
At A2, due to the fact that we were creating a promotional
package including a music video, the research into real media texts was much
more extensive compared to the year before. We persisted to still use YouTube
and Vevo to watch similar genre videos, of folk/folk-pop music, which included Ellie Goulding’s ‘Your Song’ and Gabrielle
Aplin’s ‘Power of Love’. However, compared to last year, we realised that
at A2, there were multiple different ways in which we could interpret a single
media text (a song in this case), showing that there was not necessarily
straight forward codes and conventions that needed to be included to be
considered from that genre. With ‘Power
of Love’ all taking place in the same location and place, but ‘Your Song’ and ‘Please Don’t Say You Love
Me’ taking place in a variety of locations. Also throughout A2 research we
were continuously further looking for ways in which we were able to make our
artist different and unique to others in the music industry, which we did not
want or have to do in AS. This explained why for A2 research we also looked at videos
in the pop and rock genres, such as Coldplay’s
‘Charlie Brown’ and Jessie J’s ‘Bang Bang’, which showed us that the use of
Thought Beat’s and bright colours is extremely common as a way of making music
videos more exciting and gripping. This explains why we decided include these
features in our music video. Along with the use of other music videos, we
looked into other types of real media texts for inspiration which we didn’t do
for AS research. This included looking at social media such as ‘Instagram’ where the logo uses a
polaroid camera and this shows how our teenage target audience enjoy the theme
of photography at the moment. Therefore, this suggests the inspiration of the
use of camera flashes and the photo album at the end to link it all together,
which we used throughout our music video. This displays how at A2 in Year 13,
the use of real media texts was more developed, whilst still using the basic
conventions of music videos, such as varying shot types, more cuts and no need
to have a chronological narrative.
Along with that more real media text research was completed
for A2 due to the promotional package aspect of the Year 13 course, meaning we
also had to produce ancillary products of a DigiPak and a Website. We
discovered that for websites by using
Jasmine Thompson’s Website, it was important for it to be easily accessible
and interactive, which was shown in the live link of the Instagram. This
inspired us to include this live link of our artist’s Instagram account on our
‘Connect’ page. We further included the traditional, ‘Tour’ pages and ‘Shop’
pages that were displayed on multiple same genre websites including Ellie Goulding’s Website and Carrie
Underwood’s website. This gave the audience the opportunity to purchase
tickets and merchandise. For the tour, we looked at similar fame sized artists’
tour posters, for example The Vamps
when they first ever went on tour, and looked into where they performed, one
example was the ‘O2 Indigo’ which is
where we decided to place one of our concerts.
The DigiPak was also influenced by real media texts, from
looking at previous debt DigiPak and album covers, including Ellie Goulding’s ‘Lights’ and Birdy’s
‘Birdy’. We discovered that the front cover should reveal to the audience
clearly who the artist is, especially in the debt cover as many will not know
who the artist is yet, thus creating a star identity. Therefore, this is what
we applied to our DigiPak front cover. Creating these ancillary text products was
not something we had to consider for AS, as synergy was not needed since we
only had one product. However, at A2, synergy was vital and for our cross media
branding, we took inspiration and researched the campaign, which was run by Ellie Goulding using blurred lights on
all three products. This inspired our use of travel throughout, with the use of
the tube map and letter stamps in our video, Digipak and footer of our website.
In conclusion, real media texts played a vast part in our
understanding of what is expected in professional products. Without them our AS
production would have been near to impossible. However, by A2 we used our real
media text research in a more advanced and developed way, as rather than
guiding us as to what to do, it was used more as inspiration to help us make
our artist more unique and therefore making both our final products more
professional.
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