Using conventions of real texts

Whilst creating my AS coursework of a magazine, I had to analyse multiple different kinds of magazines. In order to gain a clearer understanding of the typical conventions of music magazines, I looked at all different genres and then focussed on ‘indie-pop’ in which I found there was a slight gap in the market. My magazine was based upon the idea of originality hence name being ‘Idiosync’ taken from the term ‘idiosyncratic’. Although it was original, I used the extremely popular magazine Q as my influence; this way I were able to use the conventions of this magazine in order to make it look as professional as possible. Especially for my contents page, I looked at the overall layouts of many different magazines and then adapted this for me own. I created an ‘Artist Index’ on the left hand side of my contents in order to allow easy navigation throughout the magazine. I also noticed that one main convention of contents pages, are a higher quantity of text to images. I decided to put a collection of different images within the centre of the page which will attract readers to the page. Surrounding the images was text supporting the text within the entire text.

All media products must have reasons as to why they are made containing specific conventions that are catered for the specific audience. These will differ from genre to genre for example, a pop video would focus mainly on the performer themselves and you would expect it to be very bright, quick paced and cheery linking to the song. This then contrasts to a typical rock video in which you’d expect to see a live performance with some sort of narrative following. ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry would be the perfect example as a pop genre and ‘Dance Dance’ by Fall Out Boy would be perfect for a rock genre video. Before creating my music video, the first aspect I had to consider was whether I wanted to use or challenge the typical conventions of the genre. I decided to stick to the sort of style that Kodaline use; they steer away from showing the band at all and focus mainly on the song, the meanings of the song and a narrative to go with it. For example, within the song ‘All I Want’ we follow the narrative of a man with a facial disfigurement and the troubles he faces within his everyday life.

 

Although I have not followed such as deep storyline as this, I still wanted to follow Kodaline’s typical conventions of a narrative. The narrative of my music video shows the life of both a male and female performer who were dancing partners in the 50s. The end scene then ties the music video all together as we see an older lady sat within a modern day household watching her and her partner’s dance routine back on the television. The photo frame next to the television is what tells the audience that this is what she was doing but is now alone and no longer with her partner. As ‘Love Like This’ was a

 

This relates to Andrew Goodwin’s theory and the six points her states all music videos should have. One point being that all visuals illustrate the lyrics- “a love like this won’t last forever”. Moreover, Goodwin also stated that the visuals and music intertwine on another as well. As the song is an acoustic version, it means it is much slower that the original and the pace is very calming and soft- in order to keep the music linking to the visuals I slowed every piece of footage down half speed so the shots did not look too quick and overwhelming as this would not have gone with the music.