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

The media product I have created is an underground, drum and bass, electro-rock band called The Storm including their debut video, album cover and website. To be able to construct a successful and consistent brand image we had to be aware of the conventions of our chosen genre in order to chose whether or not we would use, challenge or develop upon them.

Utilising Conventions of Real Media Products:

Developing and Challenging Conventions of Real Media Products:

Using Barthes Enigma Code

The main enigma throughout the video is present in the narrative. The whole narrative story is open to a certain amount of interpretation; we never specify the exact reason that the girl is stalking the boy, nor the reality of her character. As you can see, audience feedback gave mixed responses, but all adhered to our original idea of a boy battling with his past demons and then coming to grips with them and finding peace, symbolised by the switch in power then the kiss and fading of the girl at the end.

Album Cover

I feel that our album cover conforms to the conventions of drum and bass. As you can see by these examples, our logo is similar to many existing drum and bass logos, using an already established and identifiable modernistic style of font to appeal to fans of the genre, allowing them to recognise our band's genre without having to listen to the music. Hopefully this would create an interest for them, inciting them to check out the music. Our inside sleeves have pictures of each band member, with our lead singer taking up a whole cover. It is common to find the lead singer presented as a front man for the band, so we adhered to this convention, giving Eoin's picture more space. The track listing contains songs that we felt were reflective of our band's image. Natural, intense and enigmatic is exactly what we were trying to present.

Other conventions of album covers that we followed are:

The inclusion of a barcode, institutional information: record label logo/reference, copyright.

We decided to create our own record label, owned by Warner Bros, and named ourselves 'Pulse Records'. The logo was simple to make and looks professional. 

The Website

When designing our website, we aimed to focus strongly on the news updates of upcoming gigs. As drum and bass is a social genre of music, we felt it was important to present the opportunity to enjoy the music live as much as possible. This also adheres to our target market's needs and gratifications; a regular gig-goer, social, enjoys a good night out. As you can see from Nero's website, they have followed the same idea, strongly focusing on tour dates and upcoming gigs. Following conventions as we did for our video, we stuck to the presentation of live dates on our home page, just as Nero has done. As you can see, we also used the blue and black colour scheme shown in our other ancillary task, the album cover.

Our Website: