‘Describe how your analysis of the conventions of real media texts informed your own creative media practice. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time’

Real media texts have helped me greatly in the creation of both my final media pieces. I was both inspired and influenced by these existing products and used elements of them in my own media piece.

For the creation of my first creative media piece which was a music magazine the first thing I did was look at and research existing magazines. To begin with I wasn't too sure on how to create a magazine so by looking at existing magazines I was able to build up an understanding on what goes into the creation of a magazine and what sorts of design elements I should include. The first magazine I looked at was 'NME'. This magazine was we're I gained most of my knowledge from and what influenced my own magazine the most. The main element of the magazine that inspired me was the colour scheme which was red, white and black. I decided I would use this colour scheme as I knew that because a successful magazine like NME used it I would be guaranteed a professional looking an d successful colour scheme. NME also covered the same genre of music I did so I knew. It would fit well with the genre. The second existing media text I looked at was 'Q' magazine. Although Q focuses more on mainstream music rather than my chosen genre I felt the layout of the magazine could work very well in my magazine so I took element of this layout and used them in both my contents page and double page spread. This included things such as where the text is laid out on the page , the placement of the images and the red banner idea at the top of the pages.

For the creation of my A2 pieces which where a music video, poster and album digipak I again began by looking a existing media texts. For this task my genre was 'heavy rock' which was something that I was fairly new to so looking at existing media prices in the genre was vital to give me an understanding in what the genre involved. To start with I looked at music videos in our chosen genre, as a group we decided our music video would be to the song 'Zzzonked' by the band 'Enter Shikari' so to start with I looked T music videos from this band. I noticed that live performances where a very common dependent in almost all of they're videos and in other bands videos so we decided we would also do this as we wanted to keep to the common element of the rock genre. By looking at existing videos I also noticed that dark/black and white effects were used on the videos to give them a lot more of a gritty feel to them. As a result of this we also opted to do the same as we wanted our video to have as many elements from existing videos as we could to make it look like a video you would expect from the heavy rock genre. One problem we did face however was making our video look like a live performance like in the real videos. We overcame this problem by coming u it's the idea of the camera constantly moving to make the environment in the video very busy and energetic to make it feel as though you were in a crowd.

To create the digipak and posted I was a lot broader with my research and looked at. Existing media products from many different genres as I wanted to combine elements to create something fairly original looking however as you will know this Ida very difficult thing to a achieve. One of the things I noticed is that minimalistic style poster and album covers where very popular and successful so I decided this would be the stating point for my own product. I then noticed that the use of a triangle shape was very common a lot of album covers this was used on album covers from bands such as: Alt-J, Bastille and Enter Shikari. To try and put my own creative spin on this I made the triangle upside down and made the cover image go inside the triangle to make the rest of the cover blank and minimalistic. For the poster I then used the same image as this was again a very popular thing to do as many real poster just used a larger version of the album cover.

To conclude I feel that real media products have helped me greatly in the creation of my products. Without them I would be very unsure on what sort of elements to use in my own products and be unaware of what makes a product successful. Existing texts helped me create what I feel are very professional looking products which would appeal to my target audiences and leave me with a successful product.