Evaluation

     For my production pieces, I created three tour posters that explored the evolution of the Punk Rock genre, for this I produced two traditional punk posters, and one more evolved punk poster. I took this approach to demonstrate the changes in genre conventions from the 1970's to the modern day. I drew influences from my research investigation from the bands The Clash and Blink 182, I also gained visual influences from the band 'Sex Pistols'.
     From my research investigation I concluded that early punk was much more rebellious in lyrical content and bands beliefs and behaviors. Bands discussed themes such as anarchy, political and social debates and inequality, where as in modern punk, bands discuss more personal problems such as losing girlfriends, rather than the issues that are relevant to the collective. I aimed to illustrate this through my production work.
     For my first piece I produced a tour poster focusing on and projecting original punk, taking influences and visual signifiers from The Clash. I wanted the audience to decode with the preferred reading and decode the band as very rebellious, and 'hardcore'. The imagery used for this tour poster is very traditional, a three man band standing in front of an old dilapidated building with a very dirty door to show their gritty surroundings, a typical convention, discovered in my investigation. The filter used on the image gives it a very gritty grainy effect, used very commonly on Punk posters. I made the image look like it was a piece of paper stuck onto the tour poster with ripped edges, along with the tour date at the bottom, I did this to show the untidiness of the poster, that they don't care about their appearance and that there are more important things to focus on, which was a common Punk ideology during that era. The colour scheme is desaturated and contains a rough texture, however, the text colour at the top is pink, I constructed this as it is the common colour that The Clash use, once again using references from original punk bands. The font at the top of my tour poster isn't the same, I used a mixture of 3 different fonts to write 'Tickets available online now', this makes it look messy and untidy, a constant theme of original punk. These are all Punk signifiers that help connote Punk ideology. One criticism I have of this poster is that one of my band members is wearing a hoodie, this is not a typical punk signifier, which may mislead my audience when decoding.
     For my second piece I produced a tour poster based on the Sex Pistols, I wanted an audience to be able to decode the piece as a Sex Pistols influenced punk poster, and I feel as though I have achieved this. The colour scheme is very typical of the Sex Pistols, yellow and pink. The background of my poster is a bright yellow, the font of my text is brown and pink, it gives off a very similar vibe to the Sex Pistols, and I feel my re-creation enabled my audience to decode the poster as Punk. The image I used is a close up of the male singer shouting into a microphone, straight away enabling my audience to see what genre of music this is, it also portrays the singer as very angry and emotional, he may be expressing his thoughts of politics and anarchy through lyrics, commonly expressed in early punk which I found out in my investigation. Even the tour name signifies the audience of the style of music, 'drink tea and die', it shows that Punk is very anti-monarchy, since my poster was based around the Sex Pistols it felt essential to include a reference to monarchy following up their track 'God Save The Queen'.
     My third and final piece is completely different, it is based on contemporary modern Pop Punk, and gained influences from Blink 182, to show the differences between the era's and the increased individualistic nature of contemporary punk lyrics, a finding from my investigation. The image used is quite different to the others, once again the text contains a three man band, but for this poster I took 3 separate images and cut them out and stuck them next to each other, they are all cut out very neatly and have had a spot removing tool on their faces, to make them look as good as possible, I did this to show how perfect they all look, and they care about their appearance, my audience would be able to see the difference between this and my other posters and see how punk bands has evolved. Another small icon to emphasise how Punk has turned feminine, on one of the band members shirts is a love heart, this would never be seen on someone like The Clash, this was done intentionally to show how things like that are now acceptable in Punk.