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