The document summarizes how the media product uses conventions of real music videos and magazines to develop the genre of indie/rock. Key conventions included close-up shots of band members playing instruments, shots of the full band, and angled shots to depict a live performance. The music video also featured the protagonist by a river as seen in another video. The digipak and magazine article used fonts, images and layouts inspired by other bands to appear professional and clearly represent the genre.

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

2. Our Music Video
We created a music video for the song ‘To Anyone’ By Crystal Whites. The genre of this video is
indie/rock, we needed to ensure we followed the typical conventions to evoke realism in our video.
According to genre theorist Williams; ‘Genre is the ‘Formats and formulas’ used by media
producers to construct texts which create meaning for an audience.’
Through research and planning before we created our music video, we found certain music videos
we gained inspiration from. For example:
1) Jamie T – Shellia. We liked the scene in this video of their protagonist
character walking alongside the river. This was incorporated into our music
video narrative where we featured our lead singer and a girl by the river
Thames shot in Central London.
Furthermore, we decided we wanted to feature our band shots on the top of a roof. This was taken
from previous music videos by bands such as ‘The stripes’ and ‘Finger Eleven’ This is shown below
in both their videos:
2) The Stripes – Hometown Girls 3) Finger Eleven – Paralyzer
However, due to difficulties we faced, we were unable to feature our band on top of a roof. This lead
us to having to figure out a new location.

3. We used conventions of previous music videos in our own music video, for example these are stills
from the band ‘The Stripes’ – ‘Hometown Girls’
1) Close up of Guitar playing 2) Close up of drums 3) Close up lead singer4) Shot of the whole
band
These images show how we have attained inspiration from The Stripes and the way in which we
incorporated these into our own music video. We felt they were important conventions of a
indie/rock genre as they allow an audience to easily analyze what genre is being featured. We
knew if we used these various shots, they would be helpful in evoking the indie/rock genre of our
own music video.
Another way we have evoked the genre of Indie/Rock, is by including a range of angled shots.
These included high angles of the band playing the different instruments, low angles looking up at
the band playing, side angles, eye level shots of the lead singer. These are important as they depict

4. Furthermore…
This is the opening 5 seconds to the music video
by The Stripes, for their song ‘Hometown Girls’ we
saw this and loved the way they featured their
band name and song name in the clouds, while
subtly showing the skyline of where most of their
music video will be filmed.
We decided we wanted to present our
opening in a similar way to this, therefore
we used a scene from our narrative, which
focused on our lead singer standing by the
river looking out.
Our text then appears in a big bold font in
order for it to stand out and look
professional.

5. Our DigiPak – Front and back cover
This is our DigiPak front cover. We edited this image in
photoshop to remove slight blemishes and increased the curves
level to make it brighter. It took us a while to decide on an image
for our front cover, we created a first digipak and it just didn't’t
look how we wanted it to look, therefore we made another one
and this is what we created.
We have gained inspiration for our front
cover by ‘The Stripes – Snapshot’ Album
cover. They went with the simplistic yet
bold font in the colour scheme of red
white and black. We found this effective
as it is simple, but allows our band to
stand out.
We chose this picture cover as our inspiration oppose to other band covers, as it focuses
on the band members filling the front cover. This contrasts to albums by the Artic Monkey’s
for example, as they have just their lead Singer on their front cover.
This is our DigiPak back cover. We decided we would use the
same image as the front, just faded using photoshop. I felt this
would be a successful idea as it brings continuity to our digipak
as a whole. We included our album track list on the back of our
digipak which is a predominant theme throughout all digipak
back covers.
We also included the necessary elements for a digipak, including
our music company logo and a bar code. These add realism to

6. Our DigiPak – CD cover
This is our album CD. We went with a simplistic image to feature
on our CD.
Our CD cover just features our lead singer, we chose to not
include any institutional information because we wanted to
continue our theme of being simple. We researched CV covers
before we started and we found
a couple we liked. These include:
These are both CD image examples from the
band ‘Artic Monkeys’ We chose these are our
inspirations due to the simplistic element they
evoke. The second image of the cigarette buds
reinforces the genre of their band, highlighting
a bad boy representation.
This is a clever technique of didipak’s as the
audience are able to identify the genre just by
analysing the pictures the band selects to
represent their specific album.
This contrasts to these album
CD covers by the Beatles and
Curacao which include a lot of
writing and don’t give much
away about the genre of their
albums.

7. Our DigiPak – Lyric Booklet
These are the two pages inside our digipak which represent out lyric booklet.
We selected two images to use then faded them down using photoshop. This was effective as it
allowed continuity between the back of our digipak and the inside. We also kept the theme of
featuring the band playing as the images behind the lyric text. We kept the text the same
throughout our digipak, as it created a sense of realism and professional quality. This is
because real media products wouldn’t change their font on every page as it looks quite childish.
Therefore we kept the heading fonts the same, and the lyric fonts the same.

8. Magazine articles we have been inspired by…

9. Our Magazine Article
On the top of our cover we have presented
our bands name – it is written in a bold font
to stand out to our audience.
Underneath we
have our album
name.
It is written in red to present synergy with
our digipak front cover, as the font style
and colour is the same. We chose this as
we felt it stood out well and contrasted
effectively with the black.We have included a
Quote From NME:
We felt this added a unique quality to our
magazine article, furthermore we placed
the NME logo below to emphasis the
quote. This is also red which matches our
album title.
We gained inspiration for including an
image of our album single front cover, from
a real media product. This was the
magazine poster for The Stripes’ album.
We selected to write the text in white with
a black border to make it bold and
therefore stand out to our audience.
We have
written at the bottom in the middle a
website page for our band. This features
on the magazine article for a lot of bands
and gives our magazine a professional
element.
We have purposely included social
media logo icons, as these are popular
with our target audience age group.
We chose to feature an image of our band playing to put as our
magazine advert image. This was because we wanted to reflect how
the indie/rock genre focuses a large amount of their music videos