Evaluation

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

Our production, Rum and Redbull, is a dancehall music video. Our style of presentation was developed from silent movies, almost like slapstick comedies, to make the audience aware of the social / fun element of drinking Rum and Red Bull. Everything is one long party.

However, our narrative format and structure follow the established forms and conventions of concept driven music videos by largely ignoring the narrative element, although our scenes are clearly related to the song lyrics. The only deviation to this is that we have included a DJ to set up and link between all the scenes. As a further deviation to concept driven music videos we have also included some shots of a performer lip-syncing the lyrics, which is very typical of dance hall and music video productions more generally. We have also adopted a voyeuristic approach regarding one of our female actors, showing her legs and dancing to attract the male gaze. (Mulvey 1975)

Atypically, our music video did not use a group of sexy, professional female dancers. Instead, we focused on normal, everyday people getting intoxicated and high on Rum & Redbull. The audience can connect with these characters because they are the same as them and not celebrity or people of a higher status.

Throughout our video the main focus is not on the men but the girls and how drunk they are becoming. This is a convention for our sub-genre because many dancehall music videos concentrate on women rather than men, Tony Matterhorn’s – Dutty Wine being a good example of this. Conventionally, in our video we use many close ups, not only of the characters, but also the product, as well as set-piece sequences, for example in the party room and at the graveyard.

Our camerawork follows conventional technical codes by using a variety of shots and angles to portray a sense of personal connection between the audience and actors, long shots establishing the scene and closer shots to feature the characters and their enjoyment of the party. We achieved this by using many short takes to keep our video fast paced and confusing, connoting that everyone is getting more and more drunk. Our aim was to position the audience to identify with the main characters, as well as keeping up the pace and intercutting of sequences (from the DJ to the party to the street begging scenes) which allowed us to create a party-going atmosphere for everyone. Some of our sequences draw the audience into the action, by using point-of-view shots as below.

The editing we used follows the traditional style of music video editing, with transitions being mostly straight cuts between the beats of the music as we felt that this could allow the visuals to compliment the music. The whole of the track has a fast rhythm and is really energetic so therefore we could not really use any slow gentle transitions as this wouldn’t compliment the music. We wanted to establish the mood of the music straight away by having the party scene as the opening to our music video as this allows the audience to establish the main reason for the rest of the music video.

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

I feel that the combination of our music video and its ancillary texts worked well as we learnt some of the key elements of branding such as; brand personality and brand position. We put these elements to good use to make our main product look professional. In our music video we tried to differentiate ourselves from what already existed in the current trend of music videos, by not featuring dance artists for example. Therefore we wanted to do the same with our ancillary texts. So, for example, we wanted simple yet shocking designs for our digipak and poster rather than over doing it with lots of text and pictures.

We also decided to have the key theme of the Jamaican flag colours (red, yellow, green) throughout all our ancillary texts as this made a clear link between the Jamaican artist (Beenie Man) and our products. The use of this also helped to keep a

clear relation between all the products and so there is a continuation of the mood from the music video to what the digipak and magazine advert have; the bright Jamaican colours complement the fast paced and lively music video. Throughout all our products we have used a key logo which is the bat as this represents rum. This is the logo of Bacardi rum. By using this logo we have instantly put a stamp on all of our products so everyone knows that they are all linked together.

Our digipak follows several established forms and conventions of other digipaks for example it has the name of the artist, the name of the song, a key theme, price and lyrics. Many artists choose not to have their picture displayed on their digipak or album so we didn’t feel like this would be an important factor to include. We wanted to concentrate more on selling the song and our music video rather than selling the artist so this is why we came to the decision to keep our digipak design sweet and simple yet eye catching. We decided to use the ‘black splat’ on every side of our digipaks as we all agreed that it looked like someone had just opened a can of Redbull and sprayed it everywhere, linking into scenes of can’s being opened in the video. Personally I thought it looked like someone had been sick which also links to our key theme in the music video about being drunk.

Promotion was a very important part of our ideas regarding the magazine advert. We decided that by using a snap shot of a character from our music video, people would be able to make the connection between the image on the advert and the video. Therefore this would attract a lot more people to watch our production. As a group we thought that having our pasty faced Michael Jackson lookalike as the front cover would attract a lot of attention from our target audience as he was very famous and easily recognisable. Accordingly this would catch the public’s eye and they would be interested to see the music video. Our magazine advertisement follows established forms and conventions by showing the name of the artist, the title of the song and a release date. These are all important towards promotion as they let the public know all the details which will lead them to the digipaks. We felt it was important to maintain a sense of continuity so when the audience see magazine advert and then the digipak, they will be able to recognise that the two ancillary texts come from the same video.

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We learned from our initial research stages that our target audience would be mostly males and females aged 13 – 25yrs. This was largely because Dancehall hasn’t been around for as long as other music genres and has only been receiving mainstream success since the late 80’s. We found that people of this age range usually keep up to date with the newer artists and latest music. Our research also indicated that the targeting particular ethnicities would be irrelevant as the sound appealed to all the people we surveyed. However I was not surprised to get a lot of good feedback from Caribbean people as Beenie man comes from Jamaica and Dancehall originates from there as well. Our early target audience research also showed us what kind of music our target audience more generally enjoyed and what they liked about music videos. For example we found out that their favourite genre of music is RnB and they prefer fast paced songs. We also discovered that they like xyz and xxx to be featured in music video scenarios.

With this research very much in mind we then tried to create a music video that would really appeal to our target age range. To help achieve this we used a mixture of actors that were in the same target age range group and also of different ethnicities so it would appeal to everyone. This allowed us to form a link between the target audience and characters and also gave our music video a comical side as we aimed to try and get the audience to laugh at the fact that similar crazy things happen when they are drunk. In our script development, we included the use of particular camera techniques. For example, close up shots and point of view shots to position the audience within the situation. This was helpful as it allowed us to incorporate actions of the characters with particular camera techniques to emphasise a particular mood that we wanted to focus on.

(MAKE DIAGRAM BIGGER, SO PEOPLE CAN READ IT BETTER, AS ABOVE)

As you can see from above, the audience feedback we gathered was really positive but at the same time, people still pointed out ways in which we maybe could off improved our main product.

Regarding our main product a lot of people have said that our narrative was a bit too confusing and that they didn’t understand what was going on until we explained it to them. This was quite disappointing as this is what our target audience felt was a really important convention of a music video yet we were unable to properly fulfil this.

Everyone was really impressed with our ancillary products. They liked how we had made a clear link between our products and would definitely be interested to

purchase the video after seeing how professional our magazine advert and digipak designs looked. Several people told me that they liked the front and back cover for the digipak as it was straightforward, with many artists nowadays similarly keeping to a simple design.

Professional digipak

However we did receive a good amount of positive feedback regarding our music video. One person said that they really liked the editing we had used on our video, for example the speeding up of some scenes as well as the slow motion. A lot of people have commented saying that they think Beenie man would be proud of this production. One person suggested to “simplify the video by maybe removing one or two scenes, for example the begging scene; and instead make the party scene longer so it is simpler rather than jumping from one scene to another as this is what confuses people.” I find this to be a good piece of audience feedback as if I was to start all over again with this production I defiantly wouldn’t try to cram as much in and actually stick to maybe developing two or three different scenes.

We feel that all our end products successfully met the OCR brief as we were able to comprehensively follow as well as challenge forms and conventions, whilst maintaining creativity and innovation. We were also able to demonstrate a degree of excellence in technical skills such as framing and keeping hand-held shots steady, alongside continuity editing with a meaning that is clear to the audience. This makes me feel like our music video could actually stand up well against professional products.

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

The majority of our research was achieved by gathering information via the internet and search directories. We found out that using search directories like Yahoo as opposed to search engines like Google gave us a lot more relevant information as the websites given are actually analysed and categorised by humans whereas the results given by Google are collected by a computer programme called robots which just gives people results from a match off any website that has the same words typed in the search box. Google still has provided us with relevant images and some

useful information. Another extremely good new media technology that we used was Youtube (www.youtube.com) which especially helped me with my textual analysis. I selected a music video that I wanted to analysis on Youtube because of its wide variety and easy access. The use of facebook also really helped me during the target audience research because I was able to gain a large sample size as people seem to be more lenient about giving up their time whilst on their computer as oppose to in person. I think this is because they can be doing other things whilst taking a survey on a computer. For the planning stage, we used our mobile phones to take pictures of locations on the days we were filming.

For the construction of the music video, we used the Canon XM-2 Camcorder. To get the best out of this digital tape camera, we needed to know how to set up several controls like how to insert and play back a tape, and how to adjust the white balance so our recordings would be clear in each location. We also learned how to use used manual focus, which allowed us to capture clear shots from different distances with the option of pulling focus when required. We also used the Canon’s manual exposure adjustment for example when our DJ is dancing in the studio.

During the editing stage, my group used Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Most of the techniques that were required had already been learnt during our AS thriller film opening sequence project. So, we were able to very effectively use the log and capture feature whilst playing back our tape though the external video tape player. Another new technology we used in the construction stage was Adobe Photoshop for our print production. This software wasn’t that new to me because I also study photography. For the digipak design I was therefore able to used different tools (the crop and blur tool) very effectively to manipulate and edit the front and back cover to exactly how I wanted it.

Generally, as well as for the evaluation, we had to upload all our work on to Blogger. However, I used Slideshare most of the time as this was a lot easier and quicker to upload documents and pictures all at one go.