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.

Evaluation

Q1-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media texts?

Theory and concepts related to the form and conventions of music video

· Stephen Hill article from the Media Magazine-‘How Video didn’t kill the Radio star’

· Andrew Goodwin’s features of the music video from ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’

· Post-modernism-the idea that everything is borrowed

· Intertextuality

· Genre-does this concept apply to music video anyway?!

· Pastiche

· Parody

· Industry conventions-any rules for a first video? Video as marketing device.

· Impact of the DIY aesthetic and ‘YouTube culture’ on the form

· Relevant print terms for the ancillary texts

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

· Textual analysis and deconstruction of your products to demonstrate their effectiveness-what you did to ensure an effective combination?

· Demonstrate you understand why this combination has to be effective-launching a promo package/new artist into the market/audience identification/representation of the artist to an audience

Q3-What have you learned from your audience feedback?

· Analyse responses in detail-what is the feedback from the target audience you identified in your research and planning?

· Are the responses different outside of the target audience?

· Does audience preference for a particular style of music affect their appreciation of your video?

· How significant is your audience feedback? Do you agree with the comments or not? Justify your answers

· Does the feedback reveal anything about differences in gender/age?

· What are the factors that make a great music video in audiences’ eyes?

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

· No theory as such for this one but consider the key concepts for Section 1A of the exam e.g. creativity/technology/use of conventions from real media texts

· Describe what you used and the role it played in all stages-could you have been as creative without the technology?Were their conventions of the form that you couldn’t create because of the technology we are limited to in college?

· What things were made easier because of technology? Was anything more difficult?

· Summary of the ways in which technology is affecting your media practice

Final Cut

Digipak Final

Here is our final draft of our artist's album covers - front and back.

Front.

We made our front cover by screen grabbing a shot from our music video. We then used a variation of effects and colour correction to reinforce the idea of an urban style 

surrounding. We also changed the brightness and contrast of the image, so that the illuminations created a counterbalance, to the darkness of the cityscape. We wanted to create a 'city glow' effect and we managed to achieve this by turning up the saturation.

Back.

Again, we took a screen grab from our video, and edited it so it had a direct correlation with the front. we used filters such as film grain to create a more visually alluring effect. 

Magazine Advert.

We used the same image from the cd cover to construct the magazine advert. This was so the audience could make a connection between the two, and find the album form the advert easily.  

we added a bit to the top using the same filter, as well as creating a flash light effect to emphasize the entire point of the piece - to advertise the release of the album.

Inside Cd Inlay.

most recent rough cut

To Do List

• shoot the rest of the piano shots
• shoot the 'happy' black and white shots (wine & laughing)
• shoot possible argument in past (B&W)
• redo our digipak
• do evaluation questions
• edit rest of video

too much really! ahhhhh help us :(

First Rough Cut

Here is a rough cut of our footage so far, we still have a long way to go. Adding performance footage and more narrative will help this...but we feel we have made lots of progress. We have changed our narravtive, so that anything in black and white is in the past, and anything in colour is the present. We are gonna show shots of Kaneo and the girl in happier times, laughing and drinking wine, then more shots of present, him turning up late and standing her up. Originally we wanted to be more abstract are arty, but we feel this is a better way to go. 
Also we changed the opening, so that the beginning is actually the end. So we'll use that opening shot at the end also. 

Work update.

After looking through our footage, our group has decided to heavily change the order of certain shots. This will mean that our final piece will look considerably different to our animatic posted several posts before.

animatic

This was made to show that our ideas are starting to take shape, its not the finished article.

Work Update 29.11.10

At the moment we are trying to complete our animatic, its almost there, but the editing and cutting is so much harder than first expected! We have all the images ready to upload for our storyboard. Then once we've done all that, we will be ready to commence filming.

possible album back cover.

This album cover that I have created using an image found on google inserting the same layers as in the other draft that has been made. although we cannot use the image above, we may choose to recreate it to get the same effect. We used 'The Pretty Reckless' - Light Me Up's album cover as inspiration. This is because both covers use shocking images that are meant to provoke outrage.

Artist Update.

Kaneo has recently become part of Wiz Khalifa's musical entourage, Taylor Gang, named after the Converse Chuck Taylor shoes. Due to this, we are looking to incorporate elements of their style into the video if possible, due to the large influence he has had on our artist.

Digipak amendments.

Because it is not possible to use a non-original image as part of our work, we can't use the album back cover that we have mentioned in the post below. We intend to recreate it, to the best of our ability due to the fact that we believe that it is perfect for the artist and the message we are trying to portray.

New Ideas for video.

Throughout the video, there will be a narrative alongside some interspersed random images. these random images may not as random as first thought with their being some sort of correlation with them and the lyrics of the song. We thought as a group that the protagonist should be in front of a line of women that were masked, apart from one whose face is showing. In the beginning of the film he will be shown talking to one of the masked women and then throughout the rest of the film, he will make his way down the line to the unmasked woman.

1st draft of the back cover

This is the first effort of our back cover which has the tracklist on it featuring all the songs on the cd inside. It also has the hyperlink to the artist's facebook channel on it; this is due to the fact that he is an artist that uses viral methods to his advantage a large portion of the time. It also has the parental advisory label on it, his music has swearing and features mainly adult themes throughout.

Mid Production Evaluation.

Conventions -

The genre of R&B music videos are similar to hip hop in the way that many often portray women in revealing clothing in simple settings. The videos also generally portray wealth and power through the use of jewellery, clothing and flash cars.

Main production task and ancillary tasks

The different parts of our task that we will do needs to have a coherent theme throughout whether it be the same colour palette or the same theme as in the case of Janelle Monae with the ArchAndroid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ArchAndroid_(Suites_II_and_III)

In our instance, we have decided to use black and white in our video and also incorporate it into our marketing and advertising with our magazine advert and album digipak.

Media technologies

At this early stage, no video editing software has been used, but will feature heavily later on in the project. at this point, we have focused on using Photoshop and similar products. 

Digipak Draft 4.

Draft 4.

This is our final draft, and i think we've definately got it perfect. We found a font again from the site 'DaFont', and changed it completely so that it fits with the new background, and its more graffiti and urban, than the last one. We feel that writing the word 'Trademark' is more clear to the buyers that that's the name of the album, rather that just the letters 'TM'. Overall we feel our final album cover really reflects and represents our artists image.