In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Music video

We feel our music video mixes conventions from several genres to successfully combine narrative and performance elements. For example, we used Lévi-Strauss's "Binary Opposition" theory in our video, but added themes from the post-punk genre to keep the mood light and better match the fast pace of the song.

Binary Opposition is where the viewer is left in no uncertain terms that the good characters are good, and the evil characters are evil. We did this by showing the good characters engaging with each other and enjoying themselves, juxtaposed by the band who are static and stifled in comparison. Putting a positive spin on a convention of horror makes the video more appropriate for our intended audience.

The conventions behind the interaction between the characters and the song are manipulated to draw the viewer into the video. Since the characters interact with certain lines in the song (eg. "There's been a homicide") it suspends the viewer's disbelief and makes the storyline seem as if it was happening in real time. The blending of illustrative and amplification elements makes our storyline presentation less jarring as the viewer may project themselves upon the emotionally ambivalent characters.

Digipak and poster

Our Digipak and poster follow most of the conventions of promotional artwork of the post-punk genre. My research and planning has shown that similar artists rarely use images of the band in their artwork, so we followed suit. We used Photoshop extensively to create images that were recognisable to our audience, but kept some of the abstract colours typical of genre to keep the artwork interesting.

A packaging convention we have not used is a barcode on the back cover. We planned for the CD to come packaged in a cardboard cover which would have the barcode on it. The barcode was removed as it looked out of place on the green striped background.

In terms of framing on the covers, we have followed conventions as we felt little benefit in changing a universally used format. The front cover has both the band and track name with some bordering, while the back cover has a track listing and a different border style.