STAY ALIVEJOSE GONZALEZ
Q2 - How effective is
the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Throughout this course I have been challenged with the creation of three main products, a music video, digipak and advert all relating to each other. My music video was the initial piece that I worked on that the advert and digipak subsequently evolved out of. My music video ‘Stay Alive’ by José Gonzales follows the indie genre and is a song that can hold a variety of representation through its lyrics, I chose to adapt the lyrics to tell the story of two friends who’s friendship falls apart and ends in one of them killing themselves. My music video uses a variety of shots to tell a story of the journey of friendship. Therefore a large purpose of my music video is to create a narrative. This narrative then allowed me to set the tone of all my tasks. This was the initial step of creating a brand identity. The variety of shots used are reflected in both my digipak and advert as they use alterative
views of shots from the music video, this both creates a brand identity and allows the consumer to feel closer to the narrative of my music video, feeling they have more involvement in the story due to them seeing these images. I feel my ancillary tasks of digipak and poster are effective both independently and combined. I did not wish for the two pieces to be repetitive and use the same images, therefore I used varying images for each. However the style and colour scheme of the images were altered on Photoshop to fit the song and videos tone. This created a familiarity of images, which can then aid the brand identity as the images can be associated with the artist, song and video. The editing of the images also corresponds with the feel of the indie genre, for example I did not wish for the images to have a bright, vibrant look that is typically associated with the pop genre. Instead I opted for editing the images to have a misty, darker tonal aesthetic and kept this consistent throughout. Images were also editing to incorporate an appropriate amount of blur that doesn’t ruin an image but represents the uncertainty of the friend’s fate throughout the video until the end. Said images are also taken directly from scenes within the music video so consumers feel engaged with the story, further enforcing a brand identity for the 3 products. The use of fonts also helped establish a brand identity by using two consistently throughout. The main front is ‘FuturaHandwritten’. As pictured, this is the font I used for my title of my poster. I chose this font
as it is stylised whilst looking handwritten, as the name suggests. This creates a personal feel as if the protagonist, who within the video is singing, wrote it for his friend to see. Much like how the song can be interpreted as dedicated to him. The font is also featured on my digipak, although not on the title of the song as it is not a bold font and I wished for that piece of text to stand out, it is used on the artist name and the song list on the back cover of the digipak. The second font I used is ‘Bebas’ this is a bold front that I used on the front panel of my digipak and on reviews on my poster. This consistent use of fonts, much like my main font, aids my brand identity by creating familiarity whilst also fitting a purpose of making font stand out. This is crucial in both my digipak and poster as the purpose of both pieces is to create interest for the music video, so by making the products use fonts that grab the viewers’ attention it allows more interest to be generated towards my music video.
Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
T
hrough this course i have been tasked with creating 3 main tasks, a music video and accompanying digipak and poster. In order to make these products as authentic and professional as possible i followed typical codes and conventions within the music video genre.
F
irsty, I decided my music video would be of the indie genre. I chose this as music videos of this genre have a range of options and songs of this genre are well adaptable into a music video. I chose the song ‘stay alive’, immediately the songs title has strong implications that i wanted to play with, therefore ultimately my music video portrays the story of a loss of friendship then ends in a character killing himself. The indie genre is known for tackling or referring to issues like this one so it seemed appropriate. Audience was always a key consideration in my music video so if fans of the genre enjoyed deeper meanings behind stories then the indie genre seemed perfect for my video idea. Additionally, it order to follow the genre’s codes and conventions i had to research into other videos, a great aid of this was mise en scene. This means i looked at typical locations, how actors dressed and even the type of video it was. From this research i
constructed the look of my video accordingly, with clothing such as shirts, jeans and sweatshirts and i believe, although a simple detail to overlook, it lends to the genre created. Clothes are also symbolic of mood throughout my music video, for example flashbacks of happier times show my main character wearing brighter clothes, however the actor who dies wears mainly white clothes at happy times or alternatively black. This was done consciously as the colour of black has connotations of death or mourning so the use of the colour could be decoded to indicate foreshadowing. These factors then lend to the genre of my story, I aimed for the main theme to be friendship, however did not wish for there to be one objective genre the story can be applied to, therefore it follows conventions of hybrid genres, with moments of drama, comedy, love and then thriller/heartbreak. It should also be noted that conventionally stories depicted in the media have happy endings, with resolutions to all issues, this can be shown in Christopher Booker’s plots and Todorov’s 5 stages, in which all scenarios are resolved with harmony being brought back to the story, however mine only ends with the protagonist making peace and saying goodbye to his best friend. Evidently, my music video follows the conventions of a story telling narrative, whilst beginning and ending with a performance narrative to enlighten the viewer that the words within the song are those of the protagonist. This is a common convention throughout music videos that I thought worked well within mine whilst aiding narrative to allow the story to follow a circular narrative, beginning at the end and circling back to it, with the majority of the story being displayed via flashbacks. Throughout these flashbacks I wished to use a variety of narrative devices, a main one i incorporated was ‘Checkov’s gun’. This uses foreshadowing my positioning a picture of
a person, thing or scenario which is then later made more relevant towards the end of the text. I used this with my locations, for example shots of the pair of friends walking are then later shown with just one of them, indicating loss. Locations are also revisited with one the protagonist present, showing him reminisce. The ability to show both the past and the future shows that my story uses an omniscient narrative. Narrative must also focus on character portrayal, my video could be argued to stray from convention as it does not have a villain as most narratives do, as highlighted by Vladamir Propp. My story revolves around two characters with the primary character telling the story through the song, however the secondary character can be considered equally a protagonist. However a typical inclusion of a love interest is present towards the end of the music video and she can be interpreted as part of the reason the pair’s friendship began to fail, however this is not shown enough to make her a villain. The inclusion of a female love interest, only positioned in the story when with a male could lend to Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, believing women in media to only be shown through the eyes of men, without independence and often heavily sexualised. I decided the sexualising would not fit the tone of the video and did not wish to make the love interest seem manipulative or a ‘vixen’ but simply provide part of a reason why the friendship failed whilst also allowing audiences to theorise and decode potential other reasons, for example depression and the tablets, the one thing intending to keep him alive, were ironically the thing that killed him, although this is not explicitly shown but could be argued to be hinted at as a scene with him on his own had a dark tone and lighting, showing how mise en scene reflected his inner feelings when not with his friend. My other tasks were to create a poster and
digipak for my music video. Within my digipak I had to use six images to build the backgrounds, once again i wished to display my music videos narrative within this, therefore I chose images taken of pivotal locations and scenes to build the digipak. This is also due to these shots often being most experimental/ effective so therefore memorable. The digipak also uses stylised fonts and is made up of 2 main ones, the main font is bold and is used to display the album title, I chose to use a bold font rather than the same font used for the title of my advert as i wanted the text to stand out and didn’t have the availability of space to make the original text (‘FuturaHandwritten’) stand out, as it does in my poster. Although this stray from convention may prevent the creation of a trademark/ familiarity of the song through font, I feel the change is neccessary and the artist can still be associated with the font as his name on the first panel is still shown in this font. I positioned the album title at the bottom left of the front panel. This is conventional to most album overs, along with having titles in the middle, however I thought if I did this it would cover too much of the image and disregard its meaning, showing the two main characters. The second font is used to display the artist’s name and also the track list on the back panel, a typical convention, which each track being numbered and is displayed in the centre of the image going down as a list. The colours are purposely chosen to stand out from the background. A large amount of editing also went into the images to make them appealing at fit convention with the tone of the song and the indie genre in general. I feel the edits aid the images and allow them to be visually pleasing, so far less bland and plain. The poster is an A4 landscape image of the two protagonists. I wanted this image to not
match any image used in the digipak so took a separate one. The image is darker and uses the same font (‘FuturaHandwritten’) as the digipak, this is a noticed convention with a music videos related products, such as in Taylor Swift’s ‘bad blood’ video showing the title in bold red front and all promotional posters using the same. This is done to easily distinguish the text and relate it to the album/ video, creating a trademark/signature feature. Another convention I followed in the creation of the poster was the inclusion of reviews from related, known music magazines. The reviews are shown with a simple quote and then the addition of stars, I feel the positioned at equal distances at the side of the poster allows the text to stand out and look professional whilst not subtracting from the image itself. The quotes I used considered carefully, researching into typical wording of reviews and altering it to suit my music video and genre. This shows that I followed typical conventions whejn creating my advert. Also the inclusion of a release date was added upon final draft, this was an idea that was also generated from research into other real, contemporary examples and I believe it gives the poster a sense of professionalism. A stray from convention that I actively chose to not include is a website. Many music adverts provide links to the artists website, tyoicall positioned at the bottom boarder of the advert, however I decided to avoid this as the space is being used and i thought the inclusion of a quote is more effective than a website as a quote is also used in my digipak so the pair partner up.