Wednesday, 30 June 2010

Pop genre example

Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music orientated towards teenagers, usually consisting of catchy short songs. Popular pop music artists currently include Jason Derulo, Usher, Katy Perry and Example. I have chosen to research and evaluate Lady Gaga's song Poker Face.


This video typically conveys representations of the pop genre. Camera angles show many close-ups of her face, long shots/establishing shots when dancing with other backing dancers, and Lady Gaga is always at the centre of the screen, surrounded by others. There is also a mirror/split screen used to split up the shots and these always contain a close-up of her to suggest dominance. Editing again shows a lot of close-ups using slow motion, especially when coming out of the pool. Zoom, tilt and panning always concentrate on Lady Gaga as you would expect from her music video, and the four way split screen focusses even more attention on her. The costumes are always over the top and different hairstyles show her to be a fashionable icon. Typical conventions such as gambling and half-naked men and women dancing portray Lady Gaga into her chosen genre. Huge dogs and a rich setting of mansion holding a house party are more typical conventions. The sound used in this video is just the song, with no interruptions. These four tools portray Lady Gaga as a powerful woman, who is rich and a typical popstar, all key conventions for the pop genre.

The CD cover is basic, and supports the music video clearly as one of the images from this was used for the CD cover. The text is clear and bright to make it stand out, and the picture shows Lady Gaga in a typical costume in a rich bacakdrop to emphasise how rich she is - typically a popstar thing to do showing off money.

Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Initial Brief: the Brief and Initial Ideas

The first option we could choose from to work on this year was a promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

  • a website homepage for the band

  • a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)

  • a magazine advertisement for the digipak

We chose to make a website homepage and a cover for its release as part of digipak in order to develop a broader range of skills throughout media studies. We also didn't want to make a trailer for a movie as it would have been very close to what we made in terms of last year.


Our initial ideas consisted a rap song and use of costumes, and to make the video funny and joking about serious rap videos by making ours a joke, however this idea is very broad.

Initial brief: Media A2

This year I will be studying media at A2 level, and my group consists of me, Tony Myers and Kiel Ormesher. We have already had two meetings and have decided to produce a promo video, aswell as a webpage for the band and a CD cover for the song chosen. A promo video is used to promote the band and their song, and the digipack we will be making contains the CD and a cover for this. The blog will be split into three different sections - research and planning, construction and evaluation. I will also be using different colours to highlight which part of the project the examiner is reading amount; the music video, digipak and website. Key words will also be highlighted in bold. Our company is Called In The Bin Productions, following on from last year and our logo is seen below: