Monday, 1 March 2010

Using, Challenging and Developing Conventions - Album Cover




-In order to evaluate the way in which I have used, challenged and developed conventions of real media products on my album cover, I thought it would be influential if I compared my final album cover to that of Avril Lavigne's album cover "the best damn thing" as she was my main inspirational music artist of a pop/rock genre.
Using and developing conventions...
-Firstly, both album covers have a similarity of using a bland coloured background to make the actual album cover elements more unambiguous to the audience, which resulted to be very successful, according to the comments I received off of my peers in my media lesson. A few quoted that "it caught my eye subconsciously" and "I noticed the graphic use of art instantaneously". This made me feel confident about using this particular convention from Avril Lavigne's album on my own album cover. Also, I did not realise until evaluating my album cover and comparing it to Avril Lavigne's album "the best damn thing", that the font used on my album cover for the name of the band, "The Lighning", was also similar to that of Avril Lavigne's font of her name. This is a relatively bland type of font, however it could be a way of illustrating the originality and individuality of both the "The Lightning" and Avril Lavigne as an inspirational teenager pop/rock princess. Another factor which is similar for both album covers, is the way in which both covers stick to the specific colourscheme, which only consists of a few colours. This can relate to the theme of the music genre, as rock music generally uses a few instruments on stage when performing in front of an audience, which is on most occassions a set of drums a possibly 2 guitars at the maximum. Therefore, each colour could represent a musical instrument. Additionally, the parental advisory label which appears in the left hand bottom corner of "The Lightning's" album cover is a well known convention on many album covers of all genres. Therefore, I decided to use this convention as a way of making the album cover appear more realistic.
Challenging conventions...
-Ways in which there is a constrasting view, is the fact that in my album cover for "The Lighning", there is the use of graphic art, whereas Avril Lavigne's album cover only consists of an image of herself with a straight face, which could also be considered as ''moody', which is a stereotypical portrayal of teenagers. However, usually on most pop/rock album covers, there is never only one image of something which represents the band, which I decided to demonstrate on mine. This was my attempt of challenging the conventions of real album covers of a pop/rock genre as this is a very differentiating convention I decided to experiment with. I decided to put this into practise as it would make apparent instantaneously the genre of music of my album. Also, I wanted to see if it would attract people whos preferred genre of music is pop/rock as this would not be the average pop/rock cover. I have come to also realise that Avril Lavigne is also challenging the conventions of a pop/rock album cover as the front cover is focused on her, especially with the white background to make her stand out even more, this is a convention used by mainly R'n'B albums such as Taylor Swift's ''Fearles'' and Rihanna's ''Good Girl Gone Bad''.
To conclude...
-Overall, I feel that the creation of my album cover has worked relatively well with the combination of my music genre, also in using the conventions from real media products of the same music genre to help "The Lightning" progress into a successful and youthful band.

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