Evaluation Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stage?

Evaluation Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stage?

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Q3-what have you learned from your audience feedback?

With regards to audience feedback, we had to create a questionnaire at the beginning of our coursework to mainly gather general information on what the audience would expect to see in an RnB/Hip-Hop music video, which in theory would guide us on who our demographic audience were going to be in order to get the necessary feedback we initially intended from our construction stage, finalised digipak and advert, and music video. I decided to use a class of A2 students who were also studying media because I felt I would be able to gather more professional constructive feedback, and by using a media class, it could have potentially allowed me to analyse fair honest feedback that would generally not be passive due to experience.  We realised that an average age range of 16-18 years olds are most likely to watch and RnB/Hip-Hop context. This allowed me to therefore confirm the target audience in which to base our music video on, however to have detailed evidence that this was correct, I handed the questionnaires to 9 pupils from age ranging 16- 20 years of age. I used 5 boys and 4 girls; however I didn't feel that it would create a negative impact towards the feedback.

 Our initial intentions were to not focus our music video purely towards a specific genre because we wanted to promote our video to all genres creating a bigger target audience thus leading us to more varied feedback. We also didn't decide to choose more males to females or females to males when it came to the questionnaires. This was so that we could generalise our feedback fairly and honestly.

When we gathered the results from the target audiences questionnaires, there was one particular question that we were keen to look into in terms constructive feedback. This was the question “what in your opinions worked best throughout the music video”. From the results of the music video expectations question it showed that varied use of camera shots (such as shots of the performer and artists singing), locations, actors, and narrative were most frequently put down as the answer. This was vital to us as it allowed us as a group to decide and take into consideration, what aspects of the music video worked and what would need changing to successfully appeal the video to our intended target audience.

 In the second question which "what did you enjoy most about the music video. Why?", we noticed that the most common answer was the narrative and how the excitement of the enigma kept the audience entertained and Intrigued to find out the conclusion and whether the narrative had a deeper meaning behind it. 

From the results of these questions we were then able to make bar charts to mark the percentage of each answer given. This was good in terms of gaining an insight into the consumption of music videos and gaining a variety of different answers/results in which we were able to make a decision on what we needed to include in our music video/ancillary tasks in order to target an audience effectively.

Another question we were able to convert into a graph chart to gain an easier perspective on the results was for the question "what would you rate the music video out of 10?”.

We were very pleased and surprised with the results from this questionnaire as we were a bit sceptical on how they were going to judge it. As we can see the majority of the pupils rated our video 7/10 with even a few pupils rating it 8 and 9/10. This gave us great confidence as a felt that we had achieved our intention of creating a video music that the target audience would enjoy.

During the process of our music video, we frequently received feedback from our teacher and pupils within our media studies course. At first the majority of the feedback which was said a lot was of the ratio of narrative to performance shots. Over the months we focused purely on the narrative part of the video with only very few performance shots. We took this into consideration and within a few weeks, we gathered enough quality creative performance shots and replaced some of the unnecessary narrative with the new creative performance footage. However we still needed to focus on intending to stick to the conventions of an RnB genre music video consisting of a balanced ratio of narrative to performance shots. Another criticism that the majority of the pupils said to improve on was the too frequent uses of natural lighting. They explained that we were too dependent on using natural lighting and didn't at that stage explore the uses of artificial lighting. This we took into consideration and explored new ways and techniques of using artificial lighting. One example was of the performance shot of the singer tom. We decided to shoot his performances in a music studio to empathise his importance as an artist and allowed us to use the new lighting techniques.

However there were a few shot in which we wanted to keep for the finalised video. We had to overcome this by editing the footage on the editing software after-effects, to enhance the brightness on the particular shots.

we were very keen on finalising this footage as it created a sense of isolation yet, the water empathises the relaxation of the shot which could possible aid the audience to reflect of what the singer is saying.however this was the shot which people stressed most about how it was too dark and couldn't precisely see the lip syncing from the singer. therefore we used the lighting effect tool on after effect to highlight the artist and brightened his appearance.

We uploaded our finished music video onto websites such as YouTube and Facebook with the help of our parents and friends as well. We collected all types of feedback such as constructive and critical feedback as well as positive feedback. Here are some images of the feedback we received off the website Facebook:

The feedback we received from facebook were all very positive, however there were some more constructive responses than others. Despite this, I personally was very grateful and surprised to receive as many comments as we did, which were all fair and very positive which we were pleased about.

One comment in particular was in my view a exciting and professional positive feedback:

"Loved it!! Showing the social degradation and breakdown of respect in modern times, but proving that not all young people are the same. Liked the 'concrete jungle' juxtaposed to the open country and feeling of freedom, giving a feeling of hope and escape from the inner city social problems."

In my opinions it is clear that this comment is very professional and has clearly been taken into much consideration about what the person was going to write. This was perhaps the most informative comment we received as it was positive, yet they completely understood the message we set out to portray. This suggests that not only have we achieved the right target audience, but we were able to get the appropriate responses we wanted from them.

We then uploaded the video onto “YouTube” to try an increase the amount of views and increasing the percentage of getting any constructive feedback.

Despite getting over 300 views from the video, we only received two comments on YouTube.  Not only this, but the comments though pleasing and positive, did not provide us with any constructive feedback. The reason why we uploaded our music video to YouTube is because we wanted to access a wider target audience and also to gain as much constructive feedback as we could to help with the evaluation of our music video although we did not achieve any constructive feedback.

We also wanted to receive as much constructive feedback as possible for our ancillary task. Therefore we created a similar questionnaire to video, except for the ancillary task. We wanted again, to gather onset opinion towards the digipak and magazine advert

 I handed the questionnaires to 9 pupils again, age ranging from 16- 20 years of age and I used 5 boys and 4 girls, yet I didn't feel that it would create a negative impact towards the feedback.

We decided to be more personal on their own views of our digipak instead of just general questions. This would be more difficult to summarise, however it gives us more detailed constructive feedback that we can rely on.

We asked a similar question when observing our music video questionnaire. We ask "what do you most likely expect to see from an RnB digipak music album?”. We decided to use this question to create it into a closed questionnaire which the result we received from the pupils, allowed us to create a graph to show the results and what they indicated.

We noticed from this graph that everyone who took part in completing the questionnaire said that the names and the artist/s and album are the most likely convention to see within a digipak music album. Surprisingly only 4 pupils said that colour is likely to be seen from a music album, and only 3 would expect to see a logo. These results gave us a brief but constructive feedback to take into consideration and the highest priority (which we achieved) is to include the name of the artist/s and they're album.

After reviewing all of the feedback I received there were many aspects which I was pleased about, all were very constructive and we were praised by how professional our music video turned out to be. Also the audience admired our professional editing which they said suited well with the pace of the video, and how clearly we sent the message across to the audience. The locations worked surprisingly well for example the train station shots worked well in conjunction with the narrative and lyrics of the song and also the concert worked very well as it made the video seem much more realistic. I also felt that the performance shots worked well with the use of varied shots such as hand held shot to empathise the fast paced sequences, low angle and high angle to suggest importance and status, and the use of tracking shots used on the main character in the running sequences and in the concert.


Overall I was pleased with the surprising amount of praise given with regards to the professionalism we created towards the digipak and magazine advert. When analysing the ancillary task questionnaire results, I notice that the questions were more open minded thus allowing the pupils to write more constructive and detailed feedback for myself and my group to observe. An answer that one of the pupils wrote was that the digipak created a message of awareness and an objective to try and reach a personal goal. This is exactly what I was hoping for as a result from the questionnaire as it shows a clear indication that the audience understood the message we tried to send out. One constructive feedback I received which I thought was useful was that in the question “how could you improve it?”, one pupil commented saying that the artists and album’s name needed to be bolder, and also more creative editing was needed on the front cover of the digiapk. I agree with this comment and do believe if given the opportunity, to correct these suggestions which could possible enhance the professional appearance towards the digipak. 

Evaluation Q2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

evaluation question 1

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

our finished A2 music video:    
                                                The Black Eyed Peas - Where is the love

During the Research and Planning stages of our production, we spent a lot of time as a group looking into the conventions of our chosen genre. This was difficult as we felt that The Black Eyed Peas crossed multiple ranges of genres - from Hip Hop to RnB and even Pop, which were therefore challenging classify it into one specific genre. I therefore decided to try and merge conventions associated with these genres and analyse them.

The first video that I will compare with our production is:

akon - ghetto

Immediately it is clear that this song is suited towards the R&B genre. It shows that just by observing this screenshot of  the music video Ghetto, we have met the R&B genre which shows how similar the conventions in both music videos will be.

This video falls into the RnB genre. Immediately we can see conventions here that were also used in our own production:


Location was very important with my video. I utilised urban locations with the majority of my shots being filmed in Market Rasen and Lincoln. In this video of Akon " Ghetto", they have acheived a similar outlook and have merged these locations within his performance to establish and emphasises his iconic status whilst showing his 'ghetto' roots - often seen in the genre. Even though we have also used an urban setting we decided to challenge the convention by using it to give a realistic perspective of these urban locations and imply the clear lack of wealth within our video, fitting in with the title 'Where Is The Love'.

There are also frequent use of tracking shots of the singer walking in Ghetto which have appeared in other numerous music videos. This indicates that because the artist is in the middle of the shot, all the focus is on him and what he is doing which is promoting himself but also with regards to the narrative, creating thinking space for the artist. Our video has developed this convention and used this shot to establish the situation he is in, allowing all the focus to be fixed on him but also leading the videos narrative.

In 'Ghetto', natural lighting is used throughout the video similar to our video in terms of open areas where no artificial lighting is used. This convention is used in many R&B/rap video, however it is almost always accompanied by artificial lighting used inside locations such as in clubs or studios. We attempted to develop this convention whilst trying to balance it out so it can suggest that in these urban locations, not everything occurs outside.

Another camera shot frequently seen is a handheld shot. At 1:52 in the video, you can see the one of many handheld shots of the artist's direct performance to suggests a rugged scene portraying the artist and shows that he is not formal and quite rough.

Whilst some of our performance shots are still, the vast majority of them are handheld. We used this convention to portray the artists rough personality and to increase the pace of the video to make it more dynamic.

Akon-Ghetto

Our music video-Where is the love

I will now compare our video to this next music video:

Eminem - Lose yourself

What instantly makes this artist and song stand out is that Eminem himself challenges the convention of black males dominating the R&B/Rap/Hip Hop industry. This is something we challenged too, with the same outcome which is to create a more unique approach towards our R&B/Rap genre. Costume was vital towards the authenticity of our urban style music video. In Eminem's video of  "loose yourself, he wears quite run down, plain clothing all throughout the video, again similar to our video. We set to use only plain, quite scruffy clothing to portray the main character's lack of wealth and to relate it to his background experiences and personality. When looking back at our video we had certainly met this convention for the main character/artist however in terms of the other artists this was more difficult which meant we had to try to develop this bringing in costumes for the artists and characters to help to the realism of the video.

Another convention  we met is of the main artist performing in front of crowds of people at various gigs. At 2:25-2:26 in Eminem video lose yourself; I admired this particular performance because of the energetic vibe it created which inspired us to use this type of shot. We had to be specific on the amount of people the artist is performing in front of, however we established that any amount over 5 people are thought to be a crowd

Throughout the video we notice the convention of an urban setting, similar to our video. By looking at these R&B/rap videos that included the run down areas motivated us to finalize our choice to shoot in urban locations:

50 cent - In da club

In this video of 50 cent - in da club, it highlights numerous Hip-Hop conventions that we chose to challenge. For example, we challenged the convention of black males and glamorous girls that are so frequently used not just in this video but throughout the whole R&B/ Rap industry. We wanted to stand out from other R&B artists and a simple change in the lead performer demonstrated especially for the artist "Eminem" how much attention it can create.

comparison of white and black rappers

We challenged the convention of RnB/Hip-Hop race by using all white characters. This tally basically demonstrates the comparison of white rappers to black in the music industry. I have only chosen one professional white rapper artist. This indicates that he is a unique individual compared with the other black rappers which makes him stand out. We have partly used this for a similar outcome. 

50 cent

Akon

Jay-Z

Rizzle kicks

Snoop-dog

Will-I-Am

We also noticed that nearly all of the lead male artists within the RnB industry are strong muscular males connoting power and strength. Again we challenged this convention as the character in our video is not as muscular .compared to the other lead artists. The convention of R&B genre videos being set in urban locations is one of most common and perhaps most important convention in a music video relating to the realisation of the young and old generation living in these conditions. We analysed the locations we saw in this video of " In Da Club" and other various R&B genre videos, and developed a perspective towards where and how we are going to finalize our location. The characters from "In Da Club" are wearing a vast amount of jewellery or "Bling" indicating the large wealth that they have. We challenged this convention and insisted not to use any jewellery within our music video because we wanted to promote the lack of wealth characters have which added to the authenticity of our video.

Rizzle kicks -Down With The Trumpets

In Rizzle kicks "Down With The Trumpets", there were more or less even amounts of conventions we have used and challenged. Firstly with the use of natural lighting frequently used throughout the video. The vast majority of lighting is natural and when looking back at our video, the use of lighting between the two is very similar.

The video however like ours has balanced it out with artificial lighting. This is something with have developed over time when concentration on the lighting aspects of our video, and looking at Rizzle kicks video, the even ratio of lighting helped us understand the wider ranges of lighting used in a production.

A convention which is very common and what makes the R&B music unique is the upbeat tempo of songs with editing in the videos to match. In this video there is the distinct fast paced vibe created by the tempo and is reflected onto the amount and length of shots used. This is very similar to our video as we too related the fast paced, short shots to match with the fast tempo of the song. The reason we came together as a group was for our passion for the same style of music which in our case is R&B/ rap and particularly admires songs that are very upbeat. This song "where is the love" reflects our personality which is why we chose it. We wanted to create the stereotypical outlook on upbeat songs with fast paced short shots and not to challenge it to be slow paced at times because; firstly it would dampen the mood which we agreed would probably create a depressing feel towards the video which is not what we intended to do, and secondly we felt that simply if the ratio of slow shots overwhelmed the fast paced it would clearly end up making the video boring which was not a risk we wanted to take.

This video is very similar to comparison with Rizzle kicks videos get down with the trumpets with regards to the ratio of narrative to performance. The video consists of very little narrative in the video and almost all performance shot. We noticed that almost all R&B/Hip-Hop music videos consist of a ratio of narrative to performance shots, however we decided to challenge this convention partly due to the fact that the majority of the videos we had seen with-out an equal ratio of narrative to performance shots, made the video become very drag and boring and didn't get me emotionally involved within video. In our video we created it so that both the narrative and performance shot are levelled with equal importance including the right amount of focus on the band as well as the focus of the storyline, location and characters.

Wretch 32 - don't go

Within this video of Wretch 32 - "Don't go", we have challenged the convention of the amount of narrative used in comparison to its performance. As previously described, our video contains a vast amount a narrative but not too much to ruin the structure of the video, whereas this music video of Wretch 32 has no clear narrative but a series of cutaways. The lead male artist is smartly dressed which implies he is formal and wants to promote himself as a high class rapper to the industry. Again we challenged this convention to allow us to show to the audience the realization of people living in the urban locations. 

We used close up shots for a lot of the performance shots which this music video has also included. This is mainly to promote himself , be familiar, and express their importance towards the video., 

here we have a close up shot of the artist to indicate that we have met this convention within the specific genre:

Jay Z - empire state of mind

kayne west - all of the lights

In comparison to these two music videos, we have challenged certain conventions of the R&B/ Hip/Hop genre. For example, lots of R&B music video uses black and white effects to mainly give it a nice finish to the music video and to make it look more formal. We have gone against this effect and challenged it due to our simple dislike of the effect. These videos of "all of the lights" and "empire state of mind" included industrialised locations, whereas ours is quite urban locations throughout the whole video which challenges the convention.
Again the convention of the lead artist wearing excesses amount of jewellery appears in these videos, compared to the character's lack of it in ours. We wanted to promote the lack of wealth characters have in our video and not promoting the artist's reputation.

Digipaks.

Before we were able to create our digipak we firstly had to recognise the conventions used within the RnB/Rap genre towards advertisement. We found that an RnB/hip-hop digipaks included such conventions as:

• Record label
• Bar code
• Track list
• A image usually the artist
• The artists website
• Release dates
• A sticker saying 'Featuring..'
• Copyright logo
• Producer
• Artist's name, and song title also seen along the spine of the digipak.

For the front cover our main conventions we had to meet were the title of the band and song. We met this by editing the title on Photoshop to give it an authentic look with regards to our urban style video.
Utilising a powerful picture of the artist's face was a trend in digipack covers that I noticed straight away. In comparison to this digipak we see that the artist 'Eminem' has challenged the convention of an image of the artist. However despite this challenge the majority of the digipaks included this convention,which is why I choose to utilise this convention on my front cover. Our digipak portrays the artists as strong and powerful figures from the location they come from; Market Rasen. With comparison to Eminem's digipak, the track list and parental advisory is on the front of the cover. Firstly our digipak did not need the parental advisery because our video did not contain anything that could be offence to the audience. Secondly we decided to go against the track list on the front of the cover mainly due to our intentions to promote the band more than the songs.

We used all of the conventions we gathered from analysing various RnB/Hip-Hop genre digipaks. Perhaps the most vital was the back cover of our digipak which is where we found the majority of the conventions. The first convention we found and used was of the frequent use of the bar code. I used this convention by having to create my own bar code which gave the back cover a more professional finish. i went on  http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php to create my own customised bar code.

The next convention we found and met was the use of track listing. we met this convention by editing the track listing onto the back cover using Photoshop to make our digipak look more professional and to show what tracks are on the album and in what order. We tried to develop the font of the text so that it matched with the title of the front cover, however we thought by doing that it takes away the recognisability the title gives out and could create a common and uncreative outlook which could result in it not being as exciting and memorable.

The record label was another important convention we met however we did not choose the same record label that The Black Eyed Peas signed to partly due to the fact that we wanted to add a bit of customisation and not to make it too similar to the actual back cover of  the Black Eyed Peas album.

Magazine

The magazine advert was very similar with regards to the convention that we kept regularly noticing, these were:

•          Same or similar image to the digipak
•          Record label
•          Same font/colour scheme
•          Name of artist/band
•          Sticker saying "includes the single"
•          Name of song being promoted
•          Release date
•          Website

I decided to compare my magazine advert with one of the new 'The Black Eyed Peas' album magazine advert because it gave me a better insight into not just what the RnB/Hip-Hop genre would use, but what the actual band we are imitating use towards a magazine advert.

We met with the convention of using a similar or the same picture as to the digipak. We edited it however so that the background is dull yet the artist stand out with colour. We did this so this image which is used for the magazine advert can promote the artists more than the song because we wanted the audience to know what the band looks like to make them more recognisable.

One of the major conventions that set it apart from a digipak is the release date. We did not see any release dates on the digipak which led us to think that this convention isn't normally used within the RnB/Hip-Hop music advertisement industry. However apart from The Black Eyed Peas magazine advert, it was a very common conventions used within all genres. We wanted to use the same font as the title of the front cover of the digipak because even though i previously described how we didn't want the font to be used too often, we felt that because this was a different advertisement, it should include something to make the band stand out and be recognized which in our case was the same font.

Another convention we met was of the website. We met this because we wanted to give some leading information to the audience if they wanted to know more about the album or the band as a whole. Not only that but we felt by imprinting this onto the magazine advert it would give it a more professional finish, which it did.

Update on filming, 30th November 2011

Today are plans to shoot the concert sequence were going to be put into action. This was by far the biggest, most difficult and eventful filming we had done so far for the video. We were sceptical on how it would turn out because of so many problems that could occur and the shear unpredictability of the shooting. We were very determined to add this as to the video as it would empathise our creativity of shots used in the video, and also it is a vital scene within the narrative of the video. The lunchtime on the day we were able to gather around 60 students from years 13 and 12 and take them to the drama studio to start filming. There were three camera men filming and it was vital that they didn’t get in the shot of the others. Despite a few problems occurring such as people messing around and a broken microphone, we gathered enough footage to compress and observe the footage to decide whether to finalise it into sequences of events or re-shoot it. We were very pleased with the outcome of the footage and decided to finalise it into our video.

update on filming, 29th November 2011

For the last few days, I and the group sat down and had a serious discussion about the last gaps that were missing in our music video. What we had achieved so far was brilliant however there was something missing. We all had to try to figure out what it was and how that could turn it from great to brilliant. We watched back what we had already put together and there was a noticeable difference in the comparison of narrative to performance shots used. We therefore had to try and create unique way of shooting these performance shot compared to the shots already used. We are all a huge fan of Coldplay and throughout the lesson, decided to watch the song “paradise" to see what performance shots are used and whether it could inspire us to form some of our own performance shots, which it did. We saw an obvious idea that we never thought to include which was of a concert performance. We agreed that this is just what we needed to fill up the gaps, so we organised a date on Tuesday the 30th to create this concert scene for our video. We also further added this idea to fit in with the narrative of the video. We decided to lead the character into a concert where he is chosen by the band to come up on stage and sing. The band realises the potential he has and decide to let him join the band.

We had to dicded where to choose the location for the concert, and because i took theatre studies we used the downstairs drama studio to film. We adjusted the lighting and added some steps to replicate the stage of the concert:

i took a rough video to get a perspective on what type of shots we could possibly use for this scene.

final magazine advert

This is my final magazine advert we created. We found that by observing this there is a clear sense of importance from the artist which works well in relation to the urban background as it creates an effective contrast of dull and bright. We also noticed the brand identity between this magazine advert and my digipak cover and also the music video is noticeable and all has a similar aspect of urbanisation identification of the artist as we have set out to try and achieve a memorable looking band. I felt that the text 'The Black Eyed Peas' in gold combined with the background of the four artists works well and makes the magazine advert stand out towards audiences. The use of black and white and the artists in colour also stands out and makes it clear who the artists are and shows a clear relationship between one another.