Draft Evaluation Question 1 // Sachin Mistry

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

Whilst creating my music video, digipak and advert, we first started my research booking for inspiration from other music videos, digipak and advert which other students have made and also professional media product. This was an essential part of the research process as it gave me an idea of what style we wanted to go for and how we wanted our media products to look. 

Digipak - For my digipak, whilst looking for inspiration I discovered some specific conventions which I tried to emulate as I thought would work really well as a concept in my digipak design. For my front cover there was a lot of going back and forth from design which I had seen on the internet and testing them out on my band members. But the album cover I kept going back to the 'Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca.' 

This particular front cover caught my eye because of its simplicity and the ability to intrigue the audience as it did with me. I wanted my front cover to have the same effect on the audience and so decided to use a number of the conventions which feature on this particular cover. As on the background of the Dirty Projectors album, it features a simple grey background which I adopted and also used a grey background for the cover of my album cover as well. Also with this front cover the symmetry which has been used in this album cover caught my eye because the artists faces and their bodies lined up perfectly, which I like because it represented a sense of being too perfect with an album cover which I really liked the thought of doing. So when it came to creating my work, I used guidelines on Photoshop which helped me to achieve these perfectionate line on my digipak cover. When I positioned the text on my digipak cover I also used the guidelines for my media product so that the text was lined up perfectly.  

With my original cover, I used the original photo which hadn't been edited, as it I was simple and replicated the two shot of the Dirty Projectors albums. But when I made my draft magazine advert I noticed, as I used the same images, that because George (one of the band members) was standing slightly behind Max (the other member of the band) so what I did was cut them out in Photoshop and then also used the guidelines to enlarge George slightly so that the heads are the same size, along with their nose, eyes and chin level with each other. So I then used this technique on the front cover which made the cover pop more and it made everything even and in-line with each other.  

Advertising Magazine Poster - As I started to design the advertising poster for my band, I analysed a variety of existing poster which stretched from a wide range of genres. I did this instead of just looking at indie rock posters because I wanted to get a field of what some of the others look like and although they do not fit my theme I could incorporate some of the design elements which they might have used to create theirs. When looking at my other professional posters and ones that students made, I inspiration isn't that clear but what I did was mess around with the different layouts when I was making it on Photoshop. I knew I wanted to use my album cover on but I didn't know how to implement it. I knew that I was going to have a white border and then I decided to cut out the band members because one of them looked out of place and small due him stand behind the other during the photoshoot. I then lined them up and positioned them behind each other as I tried to make it look as natural as the original photo, and then similarly like the draft album cover which I made I made the text centralised on the poster. I also included the band logo as well on the poster so that when audiences look at the cover they will instantly recognise the band or next time they see the logo they will recognise that it is Alcazar, because the band logo represents them as a brand as well as a band.  

Music Video - We watched videos from various different genres to make sure we were certain on our decision on the genre we wanted our song to be. We then looked at videos from Imagine dragons, Amber Run, The 1975 and the Milky Chance etc.. This helped us discover the type of video that we wanted to produce. At the start of the research for the making of the music video we knew that we kind of wanted to make a narrative/ illustrative video because we had a storyline in mind which we felt was really strong and wanted to convey this through the way we filmed, and the shots we used in the video.  

For our preliminary video we made a performance video of the 'Arctic Monkeys - I bet you look good on the dance floor,' I really liked the filming and editing process of this particular video but I wanted to make something more complex which had more meaning and can actually reach out the audience like a narrative video which makes sense and has a story line. We have quite a few fire scenes in our video which represents the 'Spark' or the 'light' in our video. I see the lights and the fire as a metaphor like a person, the person which is represented by the light is trying to help the boy who is feeling depressed, but they are also a reminder of the happiness which he used to enjoy and thrive in the moments with his friends.  

I feel like the music video which we made is not original but unique in the aspect that the scenes which we used to put this music video together really emphasis the meaning of the song and the lyrics. In addition to this, our video is different to the original as it is about a person who is so tired up in himself that he cannot share his feelings with anyone as he is full of anger, and it gets to the point where the robot is another part of him and actually hurts him in the end which represents him self harming.