Instruction Explain that tasks you have completed over the last two years.

Discuss your first big project the music magazine front cover, contents and double page spread. How did you use real conventions?

Essay Plan At AS we completed a front cover, a double page spread and a contents page for a music magazine with a genre of our choice. We used Photoshop to create these products. At A2 we created a music video for a song of our choice (I used Save Me by Automatic Loveletter) and the ancillary tasks; a digipak and a magazine advert for the album. First of all, for the research and planning, I looked at music magazines as a whole. There are some common conventions within nearly all music magazines such as Using a large and striking main image on the front cover, usually of the band or artist prominent within the magazine that week. Cover lines, giving more information about the story or the artist and making the reader want to know more Page previews, on the contents page there are usually thumbnails of the pages with big stories that would grab the readers attention. Layering, the technique of overlaying images and texts in order to prevent there being a lot of blank space on a page. And obvious elements such as barcodes, page numbers and titles. The actual genre of the magazine was an important element to take into consideration when looking at conventions too because some things were used differently, such as The colour scheme; it was usually a lot darker and simpler for rock genre magazines, usually using black and greys. My own colour scheme was black, white and red which was very conventional. Often the style of the font and images used within rock genre music magazines was very fitting, connoting themes linked with the music (anger, sadness etc.) The language of the actual articles seemed to be very colloquial and conversational. While this could be true for many genres it seemed to be a feature more so of rock genre music magazines, and there was usually a fair amount of swearing within the writing

Did it make a difference understanding the conventions? How did your knowledge help to inform your decision making?

Discuss the A2 coursework how did you establish conventions? How did you use them in the construction of your music video? Include work on the digipak and advert. Compare this to AS has your level of understanding developed? Explain.

Which conventions did you challenge the making of your media products and why?

Conclusion: How important are conventions? How significant have they been in developing your ability to create media texts that have meaning? Conclude the extent to which your

too. Using the conventions made the piece as a whole more believable and professional-looking so understanding them was important. It influenced the decision making process because I had to choose which conventions to use and which I could challenge or adapt without my product losing a sense of genre or how believable it was as a piece. Understanding the conventions for a music video was a lot simpler because we see them on a daily basis and it becomes very recognisable. I feel that I did use conventions for the music video mainly in terms of styling. The mise en scene was very simple for the most part because a lot of it was shot outdoors. For these scenes I wanted it to seem lonely and isolated to fit with the song and the conventions of a lot of rock genre music videos. The costume and the make-up were heavily based upon the look of a lot of female fronted bands such as Evanescence and female artists such as Christina Perri and were therefore quite conventional. For the digipak and advert the imagery I used of skulls and skeletons fits in with the conventional view of the darkness of the rock genre. I also used a very basic colour scheme similar to the one I used within my music magazine. Compared to the AS work I think my understanding of conventions has developed and is now more of a second nature when creating something. I think my knowledge of conventions with the rock genre is very strong but maybe that I need to branch out into other genres too. For the AS work I mainly used conventions because it was the first time I had created anything like that I wanted to make sure that my piece was believable. At A2 I was able to take more risks because I was more confident with my abilities. Therefore I challenged the convention of using a lot of band shots. In a lot of cases rock bands will be made up by at least five members and in the video there will be a lot of dramatic performance shots. In my video, however, the performance shots were a lot more laid back. I think that, especially when initially creating something, conventions are very important to use as guidelines because they help to steer you in the right direction and they give shape to your

understanding of conventions has developed.

product. Once you have your initial idea you can then move away from the conventions and challenge existing ideas to make the product really your own. I understand now, that conventions arent always as strict as I thought they were previously and that you can allow yourself to break the rules every so often to be creative.