Ruksar's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Our music video develops conventions of real media products in many ways as well as challenging it.

Firstly our artist that we picked from a variety in mind on how he would look. This totally met the criteria of the conventions of an RnB artist such as Neyo and Chris brown; that are currently doing well within the music industry.

While we were doing research on our genre which is RnB, we found that these artist dress in a casual form, such as wearing jeans, t-shirts, hats, jumpers etc.

Our group came out with a very imaginative music video at first and then later realised it would not meet the conventions of our genre. So we took a look at many other RnB music videos, such as Chris brown-Forever, we realised he had a dance routine, the locations were of city like backgrounds with fountains etc. We therefore, used some of the ideas in this music video to help us meet our conventions, such as in our music video we used the city areas and fountains and also had a dance routine.

Most of the music videos we watched had a dance routine in it, so we thought we definitely need to have a dance routine otherwise it would not meet the conventions to its highest expectations.

Another thing we had noticed was that in the RnB music videos a lot of voyeurism was used. We had noticed how all the girls were shown and portrayed as sex symbols and overly exposed. In our music video we challenged this Voyeurism as we didn’t use it as much as normal music videos would do. This was due to noticing that voyeurism creates controversy within the public, which could then lead to the music video being banned, which has happened before for example, Rihanna's music video recently being banned due to over exposure and voyeurism being used throughout the music video.

However although we didn't use voyeurism to the full potential, we had used some elements such as the girl flicking her hair, and the dance routine. We felt that if we added little elements of voyeurism it would still attract our targeted audience.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

By being told from others and audience we have noticed that the combination of our main product and ancillary tasks combine very well together. The reason for this was because we used similar colours and familiar clothing of our artist in both the tasks and music video to help the audience to recognise the artist.

Also the pictures we used for our ancillary tasks were taken during the period of time when we were filming for our music video; this was in the city areas, so it could meet the conventions of our genre. We even added a small picture of our CD digipack at the bottom corner so the audience would recognize what the album looks like.

Our CD digipack has pictures of our artist wearing clothes worn for the music video, which then creates a strong link between the two products. We captured this idea from Rihannas music video, where she has recently dyed her hair to bright Red, and so on the album cover she is showing and is being noticed/recognised by her new look from the Red hair, in order for her audience to link her music video to her new album.
We linked our ancillary tasks together by using similar colours and the style of the font. For our artist the hat was the symbol of reorganisation, similarly to Neyo.

The audience feedback was positive although there was a comment saying that they didn’t think that one of the ancillary tasks did not go as well, so our group made more magazine adverts including a picture with our artist wearing a hat to make the advert more familiar with the audience.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We had carried out different yet many ways of gaining audience's feedback. We, before filming, pitched our song and filming/video ideas to different classes who enjoy RnB music videos and asked for feedback and what they liked or disliked.

Not only did we pitch our ideas by going to different classes but also used the media source Internet. We “Facebooked” our pitch and received many comments, and mainly the feedback was on how challenging the opening of our music video would have been. Due to this feedback we acknowledged as a group to what the audience was saying and took it into account, which then lead to our group deciding to change the opening of our music video to our artist being in a room listening to his own song through headphones and dozing off.

Another feedback we received from the audience was impossible to take into account and to meet as they imagined the video to have 'Loads of lights, and should be held in a Club with a choreographed dance', we was unable to find a club within our deadlines given but did take into account the light and dancing.

The audience helped us by encouraging the idea of the hat to be the best selling point of our artist, as the style of wearing a hat is now in fashion, such as artist, for example, B.O.B, Bruno Mars, Neyo etc.

Nishad's Evaluation

In What Way Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products?

Our music video develops conventions of real media products in many ways. Firstly how our artist looked totally met the conventions of an RnB artist as we kind of copied the style of Neyo, who is one of the current top RnB artists. When we were looking at artist form the RnB genre, we saw that they usually wear very casual clothes like jeans, shirt, jumpers etc and now there is this new trend of wearing hats or caps. When we were looking at current RnB videos on thing we realised is that most of them have the lyrics and they visual linked together, usually they do what they say. For example in Chris Brown’s “Forever” there’s this one part where he says “I won’t let you fall girl” and you see a lady falling from a building and he’s trying to save her, similarly what we did was, in our music video there’s this one part where the lyrics is “I jumped back for a minute to fix my face” and you see the person in a toilet looking at the mirror fixing themselves. This is also part of Andrew Goodwin’s music video theory in which he said to make a perfect music video there needs to be a link between the lyrics and visuals. He also said that, every video must have voyeurism but we challenged this form as we didn’t really use much of this in our music video and this was mainly because adding voyeurism crates some much controversy in the public which can lead to the video being banned from TV. There have been so many issues like this for example Nadine Coyle’s debut video was banned by MTV because they say it had too much voyeurism. Another reason why we didn’t use too much voyeurism is because it was really hard to find anyone comfortable to do anything of that sort. Although we did use some voyeurism such as flicking the hair, dance moves so that there was some element of voyeurism in our video.

How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?

The combination of our music video and ancillary texts has been very effective as the all linked together well. In our magazine advert we took got a picture of our actor wearing what we wore in the climax scene in our music video, we took this picture near canary wharf so that you can see the city behind him because the city is the location where most of our music video is shot in and by having him wear what he wore in the actually music video will help the audience instantly know which song is being promoted. We even added a small picture of our CD digipak at the bottom corner so that our audience what the album looks like when they do to buy it. Our CD digipak has pictures of him wearing all the different clothes her wears throughout the video, creating a link between the two products. We go this idea from Rihanna’s music videos. Just recently she dyed her hair to this pink colour so she had to have a new album with her new look on it, in order for the audience to link her current music videos with her album. To link the ancillary texts together what we did was, we used the same font style and used similar if not the same colour scheme.

What have you learned from the audience feedback?

The audience feedback as helped us a lot during the making of this video and we also learnt a lot from them. From the very beginning process of the project we had the audience on our minds which is why as soon as we selected our song, we made our classmates listen to the song and asked them what they thought of our music choice and what images came into their head as they heard it. By doing this we found out how people have different ideas and thoughts and listening to these feedbacks it inspired us to make our final video. We tried to meet every feedback given to us but some were kind of impossible like this person told us they thought the main location of our music video is a night club. Most people said that they thought our artist should look a bit like, “Craig David, Usher” but most of all it should be a person who’s young and black. RnB artist are mainly young and black so we made sure the person we choose to star in our music video is also young black. Due to audience’s feedback we completely changed our CD digipak. At first our digipak looked like this *picture of digipak* we showed this to the audience via “Facebook” and people said they thought it’s too blue and they suggested using different colours, as blue made it look like an album cover of a Pop genre.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The new media technologies had made researching very easy and simple because of the internet and YouTube we were able to easily get hold of any music video we wanted, to look at the conventions. Having a blog helped us a great deal, every decision or idea we had we, just uploaded on the blog and let the audience decide on what they thought, putting up polls etc and asking them to vote. We advertised our blog on Facebook and more people started to check out our blog. If we was to do this project just a couple of years ago we wouldn’t of have the internet to communicate and show our idea to the audience. We would have had to go around, asking people face-to-face, even then to get a full response we would have had to do a regular screening of each stage of our work and ask people to watch it to give feedback which would have been very time consuming and finding people who would come every week would have been quite difficult. I-movie was just perfect for us because it was very simple to use and editing videos was a first for all of us, although we have had some practise using this software before in our AS media work. We were able to do all the editing techniques we wanted to such as the cross dissolving and overlapping clips. Our college did by HD cameras for us to use but we only had one of them to work with and five groups sharing it so we thought the best option would be just to go for the normal camera as we all used it before and new exactly how to use it. One problem we came across when using tapes is that some of our work got distorted due to the tape being over used. We tried to bypass this problem as much as we could and this meant re-shooting a whole days work again but we couldn’t go back and re-shoot the restaurant scene so we just had to stick with the slight distorted clip on the actual music video.

Audience Response

Audience Reaction To Video

We showed our Final Music Video, to the other media class and filmed their reactions as they were watching it. At some points you can hear them saying “ah” as they are amazed by the creative transitions making the girl vanish and the laughter is mainly because they artist/actor, Michael, is a student in our college and they most probably didn’t expect to see him on the video.

Final Music Video, Low Quality

After showing the music video to family members, we decided to change some sections around. For example we took out a section in the dance scene because many of them thought we had too many of the similar type of shot. As a result we added a close up of the actors walking away from each other.

Music Video, Low Quality (1st Draft)

This is the low quality version of our music video, which is why some of the transition, effect etc might now be clearly seen

Shooting 11/02/2011

Today we have filmed our final scene that we had left, which was the dance outside at night. Due to the fact that we did have lighting props with us what we had to do is find a location which was well lit already. We did the dance near the fountains in Jubilee Place. This location was perfect as it was well lit and not many people where around. At one point during the shooting local police officers came and stopped us from recording, asking us for ID, luckily as it was Friday, we had our college passes with us and we explained that we were A-Level media students, to which they allowed us to proceed with the filming.

Costumes- Final Dance

When deciding for the costume, for the final dance scene, we told our artist to preferably wear a suit or tuxedo, as we wanted our audience to see intertextual references with the way 'Ne-yo' (proffessional music artist) is usually dressed in his music videos. We also told the female actor in our music video to preferably wear a dress, however on the day we realised that the dress did not suit the image that Michael was representing. Therefore, we quickly got her changed into a more elegant dress and jewellry before going out to the shoot.
<--- First Dress <--- Second Dress Th costumes matched, and looked much better together after the change of dress.

Shooting 26-01-2011

Snap Shots Of Filming


Today we filmed the main dance scene which took us quite long to shoot because our actress, Ruksar, did not know the dance moves so Michael had to show her. We got one of the dance students to help choreograph the dance, which was extremely helpful as me and Rahat were completely blank. We had planned to film in the drama room but unfortunately the room was being used by the lower school students so we used a class room instead, although the change of location had forced us to slightly change our music video and now we have have added another location where we will do the dance again.

Rough Cut

We have finished the rough cut and we shall upload very soon. We stayed back till 5pm today to get it done. There are sections missing such as the dancing and ending which we will film next week. After making the rough cut we realised we might have to re-shoot some parts as the background looks to gloomy and grey.

DIFFICULTIES: Distortion Of Footage

We faced a few difficulties in the production of our music video, some scenes had become corrupt due to overused tapes, the scenes included the common room scene we did for the beginning and ending of our video, and the start of the restaurant scene in the bathroom. We overcome this problem by re-shooting the common room scenes however we could not access the restaurant again so we had to make do with the corrupt clip we had of Michael (Actor) in the bathroom.

Shooting- 20/01/10

Today we recorded the beginning scene of our video. We left this towards the end as the location was in our college common room, and it was easily accessible. Some difficulties we faced was that we had to move around some of the furniture in the common room including the snooker table, chairs and television, in order for us to have enough space to place our tripod and camera. This was also quite time consuming as the furniture was heavy. Although the scene was only 24 seconds, it was quite time consuming aswell as we tried to have a various range of shots.

Shooting-16/01/10

On this day we went to Trafalgar square and Trucadero Arcade centre to record some of the scenes. In Trafalgar Square we faced some difficulties as it was a tourist area, we found it hard to record scenes without people in the background of our shots. We faced a similar difficulty in Trucadero as it was a quite popluar arcade, we had to wait for some of the games we wanted to use for our video. Some people kept coming infront of the camera because they most probably thought they will be on the news or on TV which did kind of annoyed us but we stayed calm and none of our clips got ruined, so its okay. Now all thats left is the scene in the common room in college and the dance scene which is also going to be in college

Shooting 15-01-2011

Today we filmed in Trafalgar Square and re-filmed what we did in Namco Arcade Centre, in Trocadero. Due to it being a Saturday there were no district line services from Tower Hill to Upminster as they were doing some maintenance work on the tracks. So we decided we will take the number 15 bus although it took us longer to get to Trafalgar. When we got there we had to wait for Rahat to come as she had one of the cameras. Once we started filming in Trafalgar, one of the main problem we faced was that people kept coming in front of the camera while we were recording and we couldn’t really do anything about it as it is one of London’s main tourist site, so that was a problem we expected, however some people did realise we were filming and walked around us so that they didn’t ruin our shots. When we got to Trocadero, the lighting was much better than Namco and we could clearly see what we were filming on the cameras. Another problem we faced when in we were in Trocadero, is that they had loud music playing from all the arcade machines so when we were trying to film inside there, Michael was finding it really difficult to hear the song and lip sync with it. This is why we had to re-shoot each shot couple of times, but when we looked at each clip later on, it looked fine.

Shooting-13/01/11

Today we went out and filmed the restaurant scene. All of us finished college early so we thought today would be best. The first restaurant we went to didn't allow us to film because they had too many customers, and some people might not feel comfortable with cameras on them while they eat, so we walked to another restaurant nearby where they happily allowed us. Nishad and Michael went into the male washroom to film one part and then we ordered two meals and filmed our actors. Watching it back straight after we were sure we filmed everything we needed to. We didnt have to worry about other customers becuase the owner of the restaurant allowed us to film on the 2nd floor of the place where there wasn't many people around.

Shooting-08/01/11

Today we met up at 11 to go to Westminster Bridge on the underground and start filming. We walked around looking for a right spot to film: a place where the background was 'nice' and they were not many passer byes. After filming the 1st part of the song there, we watched the it back and realized the weather was dull but that's something we couldn't fix so we decided to go and film the next scene which was at Nemco . The lighting there wasn't great but we filmed what we needed to and decided to call it a day.

After uploading the footage in college on monday it was obvious we needed to re-film for many reasons but mainly the lighting so we decided to back the following Saturday to a different location in the same area and re-film.

Artist Profiles

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Ruksar Miah- Female actor
This is the female actor we used for our music video. We decided to use a female actor with similar aspects of the singer Nicole Scherzinger. The basic criteria of Nicole was a tall asian girl and we used Ruksar as she fit this description. We also had Ruksar act similarly to Nicole in the video, such as the way she walked and her dress sense in order to increase the intertextuality between her and Nicole for the purpose of our audience.

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Michael Kabati- Male artist/actor
This is the male artist we used for our music video. We decided that we wanted our artist to have similar aspects and the look of Chris Brown/ Michael Jackson/Neyo. We chose this look as it's currently the look that is most popular in the male music industry. We used typical characteristics of famous music artists and reinforced it into our video. For example the artist in our video wears a hat, we took this from Neyo, as he is usually associated with this look.

New Actor

We Have Found A New Actor!!
After Deji decided to just leave us in the middle of the coursework, we have now found a new actor. Hes names Michael and he goes to our college which will really help when we need to communicate to each other. We are all really excited and happy that we have found a new actor after searching for days and stressing out over the situation. Now finally we can start shooting our video and make the CD cover and Mag advert.