Creativity Essay

Creativity 

For my music magazine, video and digipack I feel I used my creativity to good effect. One clear limitation in all of the projects were they were in the music genre. I am interested in music and read music magazines fairly regularly so I did have an existing knowledge of magazines, music videos and CD digipacks. 

The theory ‘Media producers can learn nothing from studying the conventions of old texts’ is one that I disagree with. From other texts and further research a became aware of the conventions and features of each type of work. For example when researching music videos, Radiohead music videos were ones that broke the conventions, I realised this would have been difficult to emulate in my own work. 

For my magazine I looked at some of the popular indie music magazine, as that was the music genre I aimed my magazine to fit. NME, Q, Clash were a few examples of ones I looked at to get a feel for the conventions. I then looked at other magazines from different genres/topics. I looked at mens magazine Esquire and even the football magazine Fourfourtwo to get a wider aspect of magazine layout, conventions, images etc. These examples gave me a better knowledge to put different elements in my work. 

I used a fairly unconventional full-length body shot of my model for the front cover, this was difficult to fit cover-lines and other text around. I used a fairly simplistic colour scheme also. I used Adobe Photoshop in my magazine production, this allowed me to do anything really, the range of tools and it’s easy interface allowed me to show my creativity in full and I was not limited in this way. There is a theory: ‘‘technology has taken all the creativity out of media production’’. In the example I have given with my experience of photoshop I disagree with that theory as I believe it enhances creativity in media production. 

My music video was where I felt I was most creative. It was recommended to film in light conditions as lightning up a band would be hard. A decision was made to use car headlights for lighting, this would be a cheap and easily accessible alternative to professional studio lighting for example. Another difficulty with filming in dark conditions is that a poor quality camera would make the end product look grainy, therefore not professional. The camera that was available was a Canon 500D fortunately, which has superb video recording abilities. 

The fictional band that we created in our group was first intended to be ‘indie’. Leading up to the filming of the video we decided to change this. Rather than try and make our band members look unnatural and try to emulate an ‘indie’ vibe we decided to let them be like themselves a bit more. This led to them being more like a ‘britpop’ genre band, in particular our lead singer. Where other people may have tried to make their band members imitate a certain genre or artist, our creativity allowed us to come up with the idea of challenging this and allowing the band to be completely natural. This led to a more authentic end product. 

For my digipack and poster I decided to emulate and was inspired by Razorlight - Razorlight’s album cover. This cover features the 4 band members standing in a very simple black & white colour scheme. I used the feature of the 4 band members on the cover, I feel this gave an iconic look to the band. I was arguably most creative in this production as I feel I was most spontaneous, as a sort of impulse decision I decided to use a pattern on the inside covers. I had used a blue and red theme throughout so I decide to use these colours for the pattern. I repeated a block-shape on photoshop and was very pleased with the end product. 

For all my pieces of work in Media, I feel as though I have been creative in many different senses. I am definitely inspired by existing work, as I learn the elements and features of each type of product. I am also inspired in the way that, if I see something I like or feel will work well in my work, I will try and emulate or use that element or feature in my work. Rather than copy it completely and not be creative at all, I had to adapt these features to fit my work.