REAL MEDIA TEXTS

REAL MEDIA TEXTS

"Explain how significant were the Conventions of Real Media Texts in your development of creativity across your 2 years of production work."

Conventions are important when creating real media texts because they give guidelines to the production of my work. Conventions are stereotypical and basic elements of the media text, in this case my music magazine and horror trailer, which allow the product to be recognisable for the audience. They need to be followed in order to structure a familiar product that the target audience expects to see so that they will purchase it. When I first begun creating my media texts I didn’t fully understand the purpose of conventions and semiotics, particularly in horror trailers as there is commonly a sub textual meaning. However, now I am able to explain and analyse the significance of those conventions and how they have enhanced my creativity.

In AS my brief was to design a front cover, contents page and double page spread of a music magazine of any chosen genre. I chose to create an R&B magazine so in order to fulfil the requirements I looked at similar magazines of the same genre to find the conventions of the magazine. After looking at magazines such as Vibe, Billboard and NME which showcase R&B artists as well as others, I found that magazines of these genres often have a minimalistic layout with the main dominant image being positioned in the centre, along with a bold masthead to make the magazine familiar to fans. Additionally, the costume worn by the artists is often colours that connote the mood or message they’re trying to convey. For example in NME, alternative R&B artist, Zara Larsson wore mainly pink clothing which shows her target audience that she may be trying to promote femininity within the genre. In my work I my artist was dressed in a burgundy top, black jeans and accessorized with a gold watch to show his wealth. The burgundy chosen for the top has connotations of passion and love which is conventionally the topic in many R&B songs also.

In Year 13 my brief was to produce a horror teaser trailer based on any subgenre of horror and to do this I first had to identify specific conventions of horror and my chosen subgenre. In general horror trailers include gloomy mise-en-scene, an unknown antagonist, a montage to show disruption and the transitions range from slow to fast pace with fade to blacks and jump cuts. Also my chosen sub-genre was a slasher film and the conventions that need to be included are having stock characters such as: the final girl, the jock, the dumb blonde and a male antagonist and also scenes of gory and explicit violence. I looked at trailers such as The Blair Witch Project, Carrie (2013) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) to know the conventions and they used frequent cuts to blacks in all. In Carrie texture shots of a city on fire are shown to convey that there will be destruction and in TCM they include scenes of male and female protagonists running and screaming but never show the antagonist and the clips are mostly in low key lighting. Similarly in our trailer, we include a montage of our characters running and screaming and all of our clips are in low-key lighting to connote imminent disaster.

In conclusion, I believe over the past 2 years my skills in using conventions have developed because I now understand that their primary purpose is to make the product easily identified to the audience and their secondary purpose is to convey subtexts to the audience that they will understand. My work was influenced by various real life media texts so it hasn’t been original but because I took those influences and merged the ideas to form one new original concept.