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

Our final music video uses, develops and challenges typical forms and conventions of music videos, particularly because we have a girl band, which is unusual with our indie pop music genre.

Conventions of our music video:
I have created an annotated version of our music video on youtube, outlining the conventions of music videos, much of which fits in with Vernallis theory, that we have used in our own.

As mentioned in the annotations video above, the themes of films used in our projection allowed us to represent the lead singer in an interesting way. The audience may not understand every reference but the relationship between the projection and the music video may be interpreted in different ways by the audience. Here is a video of our whole projection reel:

Challenges:
We are an indie pop band, which is not a mainstream genre, and also not often associated with a female band. Although there are female fronted indie bands, it is often the case that the band members are male. We challenged this as every member of our band is female, but we also challenged the typical roles of female artists, by not being overly feminine, meaning we had to think about our image and branding carefully. We decided on deco-grunge clothes in order to ensure we seemed feminine, but with an edge; this included denim shorts, black dresses, lots of chains, and chunky boots, which became a significant part of our outfit. It is clear we are not only marketed through our identity, but also the music, which is key to our band. 

Here is an image showing the outfits we decided on
in one set up of the video; dresses, and chunky boots. 

From looking at other female fronted indie bands, we took some of the inspiration for our infinite white setting in the hospital scenes, from Florence and the Machine's video for 'You've got the love,' in which she uses infinite white to represent a dreamlike set up. 




The gif on the left shows a clip from You've got the love which we took inspiration from, and the gif on the right is a clip it gave inspiration from. 



We took inspiration from the start of the project in order to influence our set ups within the video, our performance and our style. We took inspiration from 'This is Gospel' by Panic at the Disco for our hospital scenes, and looked into other female artists to influence our attitude and style.


The gif on the left shows a clip from This is Gospel that we took inspiration from and the gif on the right is our scene that was infuenced by it. 






Our music video was for a debut album for our band which meant it was important to stand out, and hook the audience. We felt our image, and the name of our band was quite catchy and made us seem 'different' to other bands of the indie genre. Our name 'Chaos killed the Dinosaur' is a reference from a film Heathers, associated with a girl that spirals out of control, and this reference fits in with Arianna and her role as the crazy lead singer.

Website:On our website we followed conventions typical to most artist websites and we took inspiration from other artist websites, especially Lorde and Lady Gaga. 

The image above is of our website on the left, and Lady Gaga'a website, that we took inspiration on the right and the conventions of websites followed on each.

Conventions of artist websites followed on our website:

• Band member profiles
• Tour dates
• Social media links - facebook, twitter and instagram
• Photo albums
• Downloads
• Competitions
• News and info 
• Consistent branding colours
• Album cover and pre-order links available on every page

The website was designed on Wix, a flash based website rather than a website built with HTML code, which meant the website was easy to create, and navigate but at the same time limited our possibilities with the website. Our branding and image continued onto the website, with our black and red band colours.

Album Cover:
To decide on what we wanted the album cover to look like as a group, we first all sat down with pictures we liked and that inspired us, along with other album covers. As a group, we wanted something unique and different to conventional female artist album covers. Typical female artist band covers usually have a front cover image of  the whole band, however ours is a close up of the lead singer underwater. 

On the left is a gif of the front, back, and inside covers of our album cover, and on the right is images and other album covers we took inspiration from. 



 
Conventions followed:

• Band name and album title down the spine
• Song names on the back
• Album and band name on the front cover
• Band colours creating branding
• Institutional info including barcode, record company label, website
• Bold, eye-catching photos

On the back of our album cover we used a bold photo of Arianna, our lead singer, topless but without sexualising her body. We decided to take a non-sexualised photo due to lessons we had in class on how females are portrayed in the media, and we wanted to challenge the convention that females are portrayed as 'sexy' and very 'feminine'. The water theme was consistent across the album cover and we felt the neutral expressions on all members of the band stood out (as a debut album must) and would catch a viewers attention.