'Describe how your analysis of the conventions of real media texts conformed your own creative media practise. Refer to a existing range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time'

I found existing conventions of real media products to be increasingly influential during the development of my products and skills. Researching these existing products allowed me to gain a creative interpretation of the different styles and ideas already used and therefore allowed me to develop them through my own. Albert Einstein quoted "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources", this could suggest that not just media products but all products take ideas from different sources and use or develop them to create their own.

One of the main conventions I used within my foundation portfolio product 'Music Magazine' was the 'Mode of Address' to my audience. I used quite typical informal language e.g. 'The gig was mental!' which directly speaks to the reader as they relate to this kind of language with their friends and musicians. This was primarily on my contents and double page spread as this was where the reader is more noticeably reading and concentrating about the information they are being fed. This is something many magazines within the 'rock' genre do, it relates well to the audience and also similarly uses the language the artists use when interacting with their fans. To also gain the audiences attention I used layout conventions consistently used by existing magazine front covers e.g. on Kerrang, Q or NME. This was the Golden Spiral and 'Z' format, knowing how these work and are used on existing magazines I could layout my magazine in a similar way to engage the target markets attention on the model, masthead and cover lines.

Another convention I developed from existing products was the use of text repetition taken from NME's 'The best bands of 2010', this is were the band names were placed behind the front cover image, making the cover very busy and intriguing. Using this on my magazine I created a 'Bands of 2012' front cover, using the impact 'Font' to look bold and stand out to the audience. This idea of text repetition I took forward to my advanced portfolio, when creating my Digipak front cover and inside 'Thankyou's' sleeve, I used text repetition again but taking further influence from Paramore's 'Riot' which used the montage of text more excessively than the previous NME magazine. Along with this I developed the text font from the previous straight bold 'Impact' to a more scrawny handwriting font. This was because the two media products had slightly different needs to supplement their target audience. The digipak needed the font to be representative of the bands genre and relate to the audience whereas the magazine needed to the font to be bold and easy to read to gain the audiences attention. When moving on to do my Poster for the same band at my advanced portfolio I wanted to re-create the scrawny busy page environment. I started to do so using Photoshop but however when looking and researching into other band posters and album covers I came across Arctic Monkeys 'Suck It And See' which consisted of nothing apart from the album title in the middle and a small circular logo showing the band name in the corner. I developed this minimalism theme into my product, keeping the scrawny handwriting font but having only a few words on a plane white page, artist name and album along with a review in a vertical format.

When creating my music video at an advanced level it was critically important to analyse existing music video's of the same genre. Looking into Indie-rock bands like Oasis's 'Supersonic' and Arctic Monkeys 'R u mine?' I saw the convention of a black and white colour scheme. It was something really common within these bands other music video's and many others and therefore I decided to use this within mine to reach out to the same audience that have an interest in the filming and technological changes that can be achieved.

Real media conventions were essential in the development of my products, they helped me obtain advantages and disadvantages of excessing product conventions and through this allow me to select the appropriate ones to make my products a success to their apposed target audiences.