In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The most clear way we used conventions of the pop/rock genre is in the location choice for out band shots. Most videos looked at in this genre show the band playing and quite often in a garage, stage or studio and we had access to the latter. The singer featured most prominently in the video, balanced with the drummer and the guitarist. This was to emphasise the link between the singer and the Boy from the story. The story narrative itself doesn’t deviate from usual conventions with the ‘good guy’ winning the girl in the end but challenges the structure of most videos in this genre in other ways. There is a deliberate break in the track to emphasise the story more which is not entirely unusual but longer than normal. It also signals the start in the video of where the story takes more importance than the band shots which are used more to break up the story. When filming the story shots we also tried to get as few people as possible in shots after the two characters met each other so as to show the characters’ isolation and running from others which reflects the song’s title, Running From Lions. The ending of the video has a more uplifting tone as the ‘good guy’ wins and is revealed to be the lead singer, we added this twist to give our serious video a more fun ending. This has worked because most people who have seen the video have enjoyed it and think the amusing end works really well. It doesn’t, however, break from genre conventions as twists like that often appear on pop/rock music videos. Overall the video mostly fits with the genre but we challenged conventions with progressively letting the story take more importance than the band as the video plays along. Through looking at other band’s albums in the same genre we quickly found that most consisted of drawn or manipulated images and not photos of the band. This was consistent not only for the band All Time Low who’s song we chose to do but for other pop-rock bands. I drew the album artwork in a similar sort of cartoon-like style to the original Put Up or Shut Up album. I also mimicked the font style for the band name and tried to keep it as recognisable as an All Time Low album. The album also involved a lot of research because, similarly to the digipak, every genre has different ways they advertise their music and albums. The examples we found in Kerrang! were very simple with the background consisting entirely of the album cover art and minimal writing. This proved to be more difficult than we thought as we wanted to include as much about the album as we could but, in keeping with the conventions we observed from out research, the advert looks more like the examples we found and better shows how we have observed and learnt from our research.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The music video is the strongest and most involved product we produced with an engaging storyline and fast editing. The story itself links to the digipak as on the track list it shows the two main characters from the music video sat on the grass similar to how they are in the ending of the video. The ripped out pages of the notebook on the digipak that show the track list and also the band and studio information on the inside covers are also references to the notepad the Boy is writing the song in during the video. Similarly the front cover is of a fist clenching some paper with the band title All Time Low. The paper is, once again, a reference back to the notebook that was a subtle link between the characters of the Boy and the vocalist before the end. The fist was an expression of the frustration and jealousy that was very much a part of the video and appears when the Boy sees the Girl with the Boyfriend and again when the Boyfriend pulls the Girl away and the Boy attempts to stop him. It is also why we decided the image in the advert should be of the album art not only because of our research showing it to be the biggest convention of album adverts but also because it encompassed the whole story we’d tried to tell. The advert also quite obviously links with the digipak with the use of the same image. People shown the images knew they were linked and in combination with the music video both fans of the band and those who were not said they were very in-keeping with the genre style. 
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The feedback given on our music video that was posted on YouTube has been really good with positive comments and high ratings. People in other classes have said they really enjoyed our video and that they really understood the story as it was portrayed without words and we were very selective about which shots to use to show emotion and heighten the engagement with the characters as that was crucial to get the audience to enjoy our media product, that for the three minutes they were watching they liked what they saw. As is typical with most YouTube comments they don’t offer much in the way of improvements or details of what they enjoyed but the overall impression is that they liked it. When showing it to a focus group of friends to see their reactions they especially liked the way the story progressed with the song with their being shorter or more mobile shots towards the end and faster editing whereas it begins with longer in places and much slower shots. The digipak, during its construction, has also received positive feedback from classmates and other students. The colour scheme is eye-catching without being too bright as that would break from convention but the use of the green with the black and white that is present in the advert as well works well to compliment the three products against each other.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In our research we used a lot of the internet to get information about the band utilising the band’s Myspace page, fan sites and forums. They helped us gain an understanding of what audience focus we were aiming for. Then we researched pop-rock in general to find more similarities using Kerrang! magazine and a questionnaire to find out what sort of bands people associated and recognised with the genre we had chosen. We also used Amazon.com’s ‘customer’s who bought this also bought…’ feature to see what other band’s albums were bought so that we had other bands to look into
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