Evaluation Question 4- Georgia Wilde

Question 4- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

This year we had a brand new HD camera to use. This meant our work was better quality in picture, it took us less time to upload things onto the computer, it was lighter to carry and hold, and the audio quality was also better.

This year we had a better knowledge of the programmes we were using, such as FinalCutPro, SoundtrackPro, and Blogger. Therefore making it easier for us to edit and complete our blog.

We uploaded our work to Youtube and Facebook quicker and with greater ease than last year, when everything was newer, and slower and harder. 

Example of HD camera we used.

Evaluation Question 3- Georgia Wilde

Question 3-What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We posted our video on Facebook, and got some really positive feedback. Obviously the target audience for our video would be our age group, young people, but i think even the older generation could appreciate the hard technical work we hard put into our video.

Facebook feedback

We also posted our video on YouTube, and got 3 postitive comments back from there...

Positive feedback on YouTube

We also posted our video on a member of our group's younger sister's Facebook page. We did this to get some feedback from an even younger age group, the 'tween' generation.

Feedback from 'tweens'

As you can see it went down very well with this age group, they all seemed impressed with what we'd done and we were very pleased. Our artist Kaneo also got to watch our video for his song, and a member of our group spoke to him online and he seemed pleased with our efforts, as it had successfully promoted his song and made him look good too. 

Evaluation Question 2- Georgia Wilde

Question 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think they are very effective together, all of our album artwork and our magazine advert come from screenshots of our actual video. Therefore tying in the entire 'Kaneo' debut product. People would recognize our album cover from watching our music video and visa versa. 

Evaluation Question 1- Georgia Wilde

Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media texts?

We used the convention of black & white, to show the past, as in other existing music videos. Such as The Script's 'Breakeven' where they use colour for the past, and black & white for present. 

Colour to represent past

B&W to represent present

We developed the convention of using random shots throughout the video as such other videos do, in the end it turned out our 'random' shot related to the rest of the storyline and narrative, so they weren't that random after all...

This started out as a random image

For example, at first, we filmed a random shot of a clock ticking, to speed up, as we thought it would look cool and random, but in the end we used several throughout the video, to show that she was waiting for the boy as he was late. 

We challenged the convention of having the actual artist or performer in the video, as in the end it just turned out to be a story of a boy and girl in love, with Kaneo's song in the background. Some people think that a key convention of a music video is the artist, but some videos, including ours go against this idea. 

Video by 'Flobots- Handlebars'

For example, a band called 'Flobots' brought out a music video for their song 'Handlebars' where the entire video is in cartoon, and does not show the artists. The cartoon storyline relates to the lyrics of the song, it just does not show the artist, which we also chose to do.  

Evaluation Q4

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


Over the last decade or so, the introduction of the term 'cloud computing' (see link for explanation) has had a great impact on media, meaning that computers and the internet are replacing the old style of book format.

Research

The internet is an endless source of information and considering the brief for the A2 part of the course is to successfully produce a music video of an unsigned band, and create a digipack and advertisement to match. The internet was invaluable in researching similar bands, aspects of black music history and its impact upon the music industry.

My media blog was an enormous aid in creating a 'live' effective portfolio into the A2 part of the media studies course. it enabled me to create a visualisation of my ideas and get prompt feedback, advising me on other research areas to look at.

Research is so important for the second year as you have to be able to actively identify the 'generic rules' for each genre. So research was vital in creating a successful music video, with an effective Digipack and Advertisement. Luckily for me I have been in contact with an artist called Kaneo Rees for a number of years through, at first Bebo and then more recently Facebook, he is an independent artist; and is affiliated with 'Taylor Gang' this is Wiz Khalifa's musical clique and I had already heard their music and was enthusiastic about it . I used sites such as YouTube, and google to listen to my artists music for free. I also used a program called Spotify; which is similar to iTunes but it streams music instead of downloading it.

By using google I was able to expand my research, whether it was magazine related, video related etc. Just at the click of a finger I was able to get hundreds of pages of information on the artist, and learn more about Kaneo's influence. When I had chosen the track 'I Can't Do This Anymore', I then started to research similar artists and because the artist can experiment with a mix of genre's I had to be disciplined. Collating this information would have been harder without the use of Blogger, it is a an example of cloud computing and means that its 

Post production, I wanted to see if my music video had audience appeal. I used websites such as Facebook to collect information and share it with over 500 people instantly. Something which prior to the age of the internet could not have been achieved. I got fantastic feedback when I shared it over Facebook, with the target audience's liking it; because the majority of my friend group was the 16-25 demographic. I also got my mum, dad and younger sister to share it, to see how their generation responded.

The feedback again was good with one person commenting on it saying 'wow'; this surprised me as i had not targeted this demographic in my research. However what really astounded me was that after two weeks of it being on youtube, I learned that eight random people had shared it, commenting on how fantastic it was.

Planning

Planning is another factor in the success of a good production; in terms of both digipack and advert and the music video. Fortunately now in the age of technology we have the ability to capture ideas immediately and review them instantly. This benefit meant that I knew whether I needed to reshoot; to achieve the result I wanted. Also as it was on a mobile, I was able to instantly upload it to my blog via the 3G internet service now available.

Television and video technology is now such a big part of the internet, people from anywhere are able to access the materials they need for free most of the time.

 As I was studying R&B, a genre that has recently been gaining more and more exposure; so the mainstreams pay much attention to it, via radio e.g Radio 1xtra. Channel AKA and Flava on Sky was a vital resource for identifying generic rules and concepts within the urban genres. As channel that plays UK Hip Hop and Grime music back to back all day; in one sitting, I was able to pick up concepts straight away. From this I was able to craft an idea on how to challenge and develop the genre by focusing on the lyrics. The music channel did it a large part of the work for me.

Construction

You have to complete a music video and create an advert and digipack from scratch; this means using loads of media technologies. Software was was never a big barrier for me as my music video wasn't shot in the highest High Definition (1080i), meaning the school computers were sufficient enough to support the format in which I had shot my footage in. I choose to use Final Cut Pro an editing program designed  by Apple to edit my video. Final Cut Pro is a fantastic program and helped me scroll through hours of footage through the features it posses. The browser is a fantastic feature because it allows you to scroll through your video files in minutes, this was an essential for me because I had an extremely large of data to catalogue and edit. It also poses two screen's which allow you to see the video in 'raw' and then in finished; and allows multiple functions in order to crop and edit between screens. This feature would have been so important if my video was continuously full of lip syncing.

Evaluation Q3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We posted our video on Facebook, and got some really positive feedback. Obviously the target audience for our video would be our age group, young people, but i think even the older generation could appreciate the hard technical work we hard put into our video.

Facebook feedback

We also posted our video on YouTube, and got 3 postitive comments back from there...

Positive feedback on YouTube

With the use of Facebook and other related social networking sites, there is the ability to showcase your work to a mass of people that perhaps may not have watched it because of lack of knowledge of the genre, artist or particular song, We used one of our group's younger siblings to try to show a younger audience's reaction to the same media text as a different demographic. Luckily, the video seemed to evoke the same sort of responses that the older people were showing.

Feedback from 'tweens'

As you can see it went down very well with this age group, they all seemed impressed with what we'd done and we were very pleased. Our artist Kaneo Rees also got to watch our video for his song, and I spoke to him online and he seemed pleased with our efforts, as it had successfully promoted his song and made him look good too. 

Evaluation Q2

How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?

It is very important for a music video to stand out and be noticed by the target audience in order for it to result in . A music video acts as a platform to advertise and promote the artist/group as well as the song.

Therefore it is vital that the video itself and magazine advert reflect the cd cover, for easy recognition by the audience.

Someone may enjoy a music video which encourages them to then buy the single or album, and will expect it to be easily accessible, rather than it meaning they will have to go out of their way to find it.

The cd cover should share some kind of attributes recognizable by the audience to the music video and any other advertisement, and something that connects the two things together.

This is even more important for new artists as it creates a type of identification for them that the audience can relate to and establish is unique to them. An even stronger link must be made between the product and its advertisement in order to encourage the necessary sales to promote the new artist and get them noticed.

For example, the cd cover for Taylor Swift's Love Story, shares a likeness to the video.

A very direct link is shown between the two media texts and this makes it easier for the audience to make a connection between the two. There are many features of the video screenshot that are in the cover, for example; the way in which Taylor is dressed, her hair and the setting with the pillars prominent in both.

This is similar to ours but in the case of our front and back cd covers we decided to lift the images directly from the video to show that correlation even more vividly,

Back cover

Front cover

For the magazine advert to be majorly affective, there has to be a large amount of correlation between it and all the other parts of the 

media text that has been created for the artist. It creates a link between them so it is possible to recognise one of them, this visible link will increase the potential for record labels to make a lot of money.

Evaluation Q1

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

The advanced brief was to successfully create a music video. My media product, the music video and the ancillary products -  the digipak and magazine advert - is in the musical genre of R&B. In order for me to have successfully realised my music video media products using conventions typically associated with this genre. It was necessary for me to conduct research to understand what is associated with the genres. Because the artist that I had chosen (Kaneo Rees) had a relatively universal sound I had to no trouble conducting the research into the roots of the music, looking into artists like Ne-Yo, Chris Brown and Kanye West. These artists are similar because they can both sing and rap. Kaneo's sound is dominated by piano and the sounds that they create. Although the song of his that we chose to use (I Can't Do This Anymore) has roots in electronic, I only know this because of contact with him via Facebook, so may not be apparent in the final cut. The location below were an initial inspiration for setting.

The inspiration that this video created was to do with the urban setting creating a desolate and dark place to reflect the nature of the song's messages and values.

Illustrating the Gunther Kress theory, meaning; R&B "audience's need/feel comfortable when visiting a common/favoured or appealing text" (Narrative) This is a natural situation of the genre of having a couple that the song is centered around.

Also the lack of coherent dress sense between the couple shows that the genre of R&B appeals to the masses nowadays whereas that wasn't so, when the genre was formed in the 1940's. Then the genre was created by African-Americans so for a large amount of time, until the genre was metamorphised into what we know nowadays 'Contemporary R&B', the genre was exclusive to them with few exceptions.

The use of black and white to represent the past isn't necessarily associated with the genre of our artist but with such performers as: The Script

The genre of this group is another one that has become largely popular so an amalagmation of the two's conventions could potential result in something that could cross boundaries and appeal to many different people.

In my video to make the narrative of the video performance based like a story or journey (montage), where the lyrics and visuals are the focus of the video captivating the audience; utilising Andrew Goodwin's theory that audiences find interest through a clear relationship between the lyric and the visual.

The concept of genre is something is very hard to adhere to in the media text of music video with what seems to be every other video seems to take what we know as certain conventions and invert them so the very idea of 'conventions of music videos' is a lucid term.

This being the first video from the artist there are certain rules that are supposed to followed, and the fact that we aren't being managed by record labels means that we don't necessarily need to adhere to them. The main one is to feature the artist to make him apparent to the audience, we couldn't do this, so we inverted this to create a hugely narrative based piece.

Evaulation Question 1

There are no longer a set of defined conventions to be followed within the production of a music video, and over time the definition of it has become a lot more vague:

-  'a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song.'

-  'a motion picture produced to accompany a song, for promotional or artistic purposes.'

Although, most music videos can be categorized in terms of style, and therfore would fall under the subcategory of either 'performance based', 'narrative based', and 'concept based'. Ours falls under the categories of narrative based. This means it includes an embedded story displayed through the narrative of the video.

The most important thing for an artist to acomplish when producing a music video is providing the audience with a particular impression or understanding of them, which they can interpret and identify with within a short space of time; around 3 minutes. for a first video for an artist, this is even more important, as it also offers them the chance to introduce themself. We deiced to challenge this typical convention, by keeping the identification of the artist a mystery, and not actually including Kaneo himself in our video. We thought this would draw more attention, as it would attract the audience and intregue them to find out who he is, and more about him.

Typically, different videos of different genres tend to contain 'live' footage of the artist themself playing the instruments that can be heard in the song. this is genrally associated with videos from genres such as indie, rock, etc. As our style of song and artist fitted more to the contemporary R'n'B genre (a music genre that combines elements of hip hop and R&B) where the style is usually more narrative based than performance based, and we didnt have access to anyone who could play a piano realistically, we decided we would elliminate this element of performance.

We also found a list of conventions usually typical to a music video of our genre online, and used this as a guide in order to make the peice conventional to an R&B music video:

Shots: CU, MS, LS, Two Shot, Low Angle - This makes the artist look scary and in control.

Text: No text.

Colours: Colourful, Black and white scene if there singing about love stories or flash backs.

 Editing: Jump and stright cuts. Mainly jump cuts.

Evaluation Question 2

It is very important for a music video to stand out and be noticed by the target audience in order to encourage a success. A music video acts as a platform to advertise and promote the artist/group as well as the song.
Therefore it is vital that the video itself and magazine advert reflect the cd cover, for easy recognition by the audience.
Someone may enjoy a music video which encourages them to then buy the single or album, and will expect it to be easily accessible, rather than it meaning they will have to go out of their way to find it.
The cd cover should share some kind of attributes recognizable by the audience to the music video and any other advertisement, and something that connects the two things together.
This is even more important for new artists as it creates a type of identification for them that the audience can relate to and establish is unique to them. An even stronger link must be made between the product and its advertisement in order to encourage the necessary sales to promote the new artist and get them noticed.


For example, the cd cover for james blunts' you're beautiful, shares a likeness to the video.

A very direct link is shown between the two media texts and this makes it easier for the audience to make a connection between the two. It appears that the image on the front cover of the cd is a screen grab of part of the video.

This is also the case with our front and back cd covers.

Back cover

Front cover

Our magazine advert also shares the same recurring image as the front cover of the album - a screen shot from the video. This is so the audience can establish a link between the two, and when they see the advert, they can go into a shop easily and recognize the album from the magazine advert. This established connection, in the real record industry, would help to boost sales as the consumer would want the cd to bee easily accessible to them, and may not bother if it was difficult to recognize or find.

Evaluation question 3

Throughout the production of our video, we kept in very close contact with the target audience. This was in order to gain feedback from them, allowing us (in the planning stages), to understand what they would expect or want to see, aswell as being able to constnatly improve our peice whilst the producion was in progress.

To begin with, in the planning stages, we created a survey to find out what people associated wih a music video from the same genre (R'n'B). From this we found out that the majority of people thought of R'n'B music video to be associated with a lot of black and white shots as well as lots of attention on females, and focusing largely on a love story narrative.

As we began to construct our video, we go a few of our friends to watch it, and realised the narrativ of i was for too complex and created a lot of confusion. we modified this by cutting parts out and filming new footage in order to simplify it, therefore allowing the narrative to be more easily understood and the overall feedback of the video to be much more positive.

Once we had completed the video, we managed to gain audience feedback by putting our video on the social networking site Facebook. We posted it as a link, so people all over Facebook could watch it, this way we could generate a response from the target audience we had already previously identified in our research and planning as they are of similar age to us, with similar interests. Within the first night the total views went from 0 to 144 which showed it created a large amount of interest. People left feedback on the link in the form of 'likes' and comments, and this helped us to generate an understanding of audience opinion of the finished piece.
The type of comments we received were as follows...

We also uploaded the link onto my 13 year old sisters Facebook in order to retrieve  some feedback from a younger audience, as We felt these were also the type of people that would be a potential audience for the video. The feedback we got from them was all very positive, but also a lot more vague than it was from people of our age.

Overall, we were very pleased with our feedback, as the maority of it was very positive. the fedback rom eople o our age was very different to that of my sister friends, as it was much more in detal, and looked at from a media point of view. This was due to a much more advanced knowledge in media as a whole, as many of the comments came from people who are also media students, and therfore much more experienced and have the ability to understand more advanced concepts of media at a higher level. This helped us to take into account which parts were the most popular with the target audiece, and to generate a much higher understanding of what worked well, and whether the general idea of the video was understood and portrayed in the narative of it.