Album covers - Maroon 5

This album cover has many different codes and conventions that can relate to other media products. The typical conventions of album covers are involved for example, artist name, album name and an image of the artist. The text all stands out as its in a relatively bold font, quite large and on a dark background. The text is strong, written in a 'hard' font. The large 'M' on the back wall tells you straight away who your about to listen to. From this you know this is Maroon 5's album.
The positioning of the artists is code, the lead singer is positioned centre front, with the guitarist and drummer positioned further behind. The least important band members are positioned furthest back and appear the smallest. Another way of telling the lead singer apart from the rest of the band is his personal body language, he is the only one standing upright with his arms beside him, the rest of the band members are in mid action. This suggests the importance and seriousness of him.
The mise-en-scene is unrealistic and a bit quirky which reflects the nature of the band's music and the artist's themselves. Their costume is code for sophistication, the band members are all well dressed which tells us they take themselves seriously but the body language shows they also have a fun, playful side.
Having the drum kit, sound systems and guitar in the image suggests the importance of music, this is the band's life, they live for music.

Reach for the Stars prelim

Before we could do anything with the creation of our final coursework piece we had to create a preliminary task, this helped us in so many ways. We were able to experiment with brand new cameras, software and see how we worked as a group. As we are all friends this really helped as there was no need to spend time getting to know each other, we all know how the each of us work and know we all get on well. The fact that I was the only one that chose moving image for our AS coursework I was the only one to have really used these cameras before. I showed the rest of the group how they worked,  how we attached it the the tripod and how to extend the tripod to the different heights we needed. We used a brand new programme, final cut express, to edit our video. None of us had used this before, so if it wasn't for the preliminary task I know we would really struggle with the final piece.
It was really fun and enjoyable making this video as we were able to have a lot of fun with it before having to get serious to make the final exam piece. We tried to experiment with different camera angles and found the lip syncing really interesting. As none of us had done this before it was very strange to do, luckily for me I was a huge S Club 7 fan when I was younger so did not have to learn the words were as some of the others in the group did. The first time we tried filming the lip-sync we were all a bit embarrassed but quickly overcome this and realised that it was actually a lot of fun.
When it comes to creating our final piece I hope to make a video 100 times better then this one, using a lot more angles and edits. I know we will have a lot more time to do it and have longer time available with the equipment. Having this as a practice has really helped and I think this will show in our final piece.

Song choice and storyline

Since discussing our choice of song titles yesterday, we all went home to think over night and came into school the today to decide our final choice.
We have decided on the song Shark in the Water by V.V. Brown, we all felt that it was quite an unknown song but a song we found we all liked. We felt we could work well with this and with the members of our group create a story line to suit the song and lyrics extremely well. We sat and watched her music video over and over until it was drummed in our heads. We have chosen to create a story line very similar to the one V.V. Brown followed herself.


We have decided that our band is going to involve us 3 girls; myself, madeleine and lucy. We will all be involved in the performance half of the music video as well as the narrative. Jack will also be involved in the narrative as our story line will be based around him.
V.V. Brown's version of Shark in the Water is a metaphorical record about anxiety, and was inspired by Brown's experience with infidelity by a past boyfriend. We have decided to reflect this in our own video. Jack being the 'Shark' and us three girls being the people he is messing around.

Song Choice

As a group we have been trying to chose a song to create our music video to. We had a lot of difficulty doing this as a few of the group members do have different tastes in music. We were thinking of doing a typical boy band song such as Backstreet boys or Boyzone, as we thought this would be extremely fun to make, but all agreed in the end that it would be very 'cheesy' and felt we could show our talent better using another song genre. We then thought of maybe doing an older song, a club classic but we decided that the indie genre was very 'in' at the moment and all agreed we felt we could gather lots of inspiration.

Now we had chosen our genre, we had to chose a song title. We all sat going through each others iPod's until we cut down ideas to a few song choices.

• The XX - Crytalised
• Tracy Chapman - Fast Car
• V.V. Brown - Shark in the Water
• Train - Hey, Soul Sister