In the past two years I have created several media products as part of AS and A2 Media Studies coursework.

These products included a music magazine, music video, digipak album packaging and an album advertisement for a magazine. Within the AS coursework I created my music magazine, this was my first big project and involved creating a front cover, contents page and double page spread. Whilst producing all three elements I found that my research into existing texts and consequent knowledge of media conventions were really important. Having a good understanding of conventional elements within a music magazine, and more specifically one belonging to the pop genre, helped me to create a realistic and convincing media product. For example, the use of a barcode, price and date of issue on the front cover were all conventional items I had found on other products during research and they proved useful when enhancing the magazines credibility as real media product on a competitive market. Other conventional elements I had encountered helped me to make decisions on the overall design of my pages. For example, discovering convention layout schemes such as the 'Rule of Thirds' helped me to follow a generic pattern when organising each pages' content, these patterns and rules enhanced my products accessibility to the audience as it made the content clearer and easy to read. Colour choices were also heavily influenced by existing texts and their conventions; for example, the use of a three colour pallet on the front cover. The '3 colour pallet' was something I had found to be a constantly conformed to convention within pop genre music magazines, therefore it was an obvious was to ensure my product fitted the genre alongside existing products in the same market area. A restricted colour pallet gave my magazine a striking final look that would help it to stand out on a shop shelf and appeal to my audience; it also made me think more carefully about the positioning of certain elements, which minimised wasted space and unnecessary clutter. The research I had carried out prior to making my music magazine helped me to gain a good knowledge of conventions within this genre of media products; this knowledge helped me to understand the effect created by these conventions and how they could be applied to my own work in order to make it realistic and credible. I was also able to understand how they could benefit my work and enhance it's success as a product through proof in the success of existing texts that conform to these conventions, such as 'Billboard' and 'Rolling Stone'. Within the A2 coursework I created a larger amount of work across varying medias as I produced a music video, digipak and magazine advertisement. For these products the research that I carried out was much more extensive, looking not just at the 'pop' genre that I had chosen to work within, but also at a wider range of existing products from other genres, such as 'Indie'. This gave me a broader knowledge that allowed me to see the difference between conventions applied by the form of the product itself (i.e. a music video) and the genre it will belong to (i.e. pop). Making these distinctions allowed me to see more clearly where boundaries could be pushed and conventions could be challenges, without having a detrimental effect on the product and diverting to far from elements that make the product realistic. For example, in my music video, the inclusion of the artist is a generic convention applied to all music videos from any genre; I felt that changing or challenging these kind of conventions would harm the overall credibility of the product. Whereas, a conventional idea that applies to a specific genre, such as the use of bright colours and on-trend clothing within pop videos, seemed more lenient; these sorts of conventions could be challenged without effecting the products overall effect as a music video. Also, having knowledge of other genres allowed me to take influences and ideas from these genres and manipulate them to fit my own through the development of a convention. Developing a conventional idea allowed me to enhance

areas I felt were strong within my products, this was also something I had not considered within my AS work. One example of this within my A2 work is my choices of colours; the colours that I chose to use, specifically in my digipak and advert, were not bright and bold as the pop genre would conventional expect, instead there were darker colours and tones. However, there were still elements, especially within the video, that showed glimpses of the bright colours expected in a 'pop' genre product. This was therefore a development of a convention, as it was neither challenged nor conformed to.