Rough Evaluation Question 1

Media Evaluation

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

I chose the song ‘You’re a Zombie Now’ by the American artist ‘Sam Hart’. As the song is about zombies, I found it only fitting to include zombies in the video itself. 
I am quite fond of zombie movies and so because of this background knowledge the basic conventions of zombie films is obvious, people encounter zombies, there’s an attack scene, someone usually get’s bitten and they might die. I knew the films, but not the music videos, so I researched into this and found several that all fitted the criteria.

One was by a band called ‘Keep You Honest’ the song ‘Lose Control’. The song itself is not about zombies, but the video goes very well with it. It’s shot in a cold season where there are no leaves on the trees and the characters are wrapped up warm, the video has a ‘cold’ feeling about it also, a grey tinge to it. I think this adds suspense to it and makes it more daunting.

In my own video, this was majorly enhanced as the whole video was made in black and white. Another convention was in key parts, the scene was put into slow motion, in some of the attack scenes in my video I added a slow motion effect to draw attention to what was happening and to increase anxiety.

My music video is purely narrative, much like ‘Keep You Honest’ was, however all the other music videos of this genre are a mixture of narrative and performance of the band so this breaks that convention; as well as the fact that a huge majority of ‘zombie’ songs are usually heavy metal, or pop punk, whereas ours is acoustic. Acoustic music is normally shown as being calm and tranquil, with relaxing videos, most likely with the singer themselves performing and playing guitar.

My music video breaks all those conventions. The artist is not shown, the song itself gets quite angry in places and this is depicted in the video and the storyline isn’t exactly relaxing. Not what you would expect from an acoustic song.

‘The Nearly Dead’ are a pop punk band whose song ‘Never Look Back’ is not about zombies either, but the video features a narrative, as well as the band playing and members themselves as victims running away from the undead. The video varies from the above as it is quite comical in places, so it has a comic factor which neither ‘Lose Yourself’ nor ‘You’re A Zombie Now’; though the latter is more light-hearted about it in the lyrics.

For the digipak I decided I would in fact make a sleeve instead. I made this decision because they are becoming increasingly more popular with artists such as Gorillaz and Laura Marling using them for their albums. They use a lot less packaging which is good for the environment and are a simple way to hold a CD. For a unsigned artist I think sleeves are a particularly good idea as they are so cheap and easy to manufacture; when a artist is starting out, the last thing they want to be doing is spending a lot of money on the packaging for their album/EP/single, and a cardboard sleeve is the best way to go in my opinion.

I made the sleeve cover myself and designed it like a map in a homemade kind of style. The reason I did this was because it fits in with the conventions of zombies stories, the character s are always trying to find a safe place, where it’s zombie free and have protection, so to elaborate on the video, this shows where the characters were planning on heading.
 I got the homemade idea from a Jeff Buckley EP cover (which is also a CD sleeve), it is simply a napkin with a coffee ring on it and someone had written the title and the ink had been smudged off. Then a digital image of the artist had been planted over the top. I thought it was great idea and something so basic. The back cover is just as simple with the details, producer, record label and the track listing, and again another picture of the artist.

I used the same idea for the magazine poster so that the audience would become familiar with the concept and relate it to the artist – a bit like a logo or motif.

On both the products the same typefaces where used for the song title and the artist’s name, I thought it was important to keep consistency throughout the advertising and digipak. Bands such as ‘Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ have a famous logo which fans all over the world will look at and understand, sometimes the logo’s will change when a new album come out or the band ‘re-makes’ themselves, but it’s something all the fans will notice.