Media evaluation

Ed Boon

Question 1

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

In his book “dancing in the distraction factory” Andrew Goodwin says one of the conventions is that there is a relationship between the lyrics of the song and the images in the music video. The song is dark and talks about loneliness and depression, with lyrics such as “still suicidal, I am” and many lines in the song talk about killing other people or being angry. So to match the dark nature of the lyrics we chose to film our video in a long and dark tunnel, as the star of our video is all alone in a long dark tunnel it symbolises the loneliness and depression which the lyrics refer to. We used post production- black and white filter to make the video into black and white, we did this because it emphasises the lack of light in the tunnel, and because the lack of colour in the video is appropriate for dark lyrics; which is a common convention of the genre. We were also able to have the star of our video go in and out of dark sections of the tunnel so that at certain points you can barely see him at all, which added to the dark atmosphere of our video. Our digipak and magazine advert carry on with these themes, they work with the video because they also do not have colour on them, they are simple and it is consistent throughout all three texts because they are all predominantly black and white.

As the star of our video was the only one in it, the focus of the video was completely on him, with lots of close ups, which would be good for the record label because it will increase his recognisability and his brand, which could potentially make marketing of the artist easier if his fans or people who have seen the video recognise him straight away. The genre of rap is dominated by men, so this is another reason we chose to have the star as a male rather than a female, also the surroundings may be dangerous for a female to be there as it is a dark tunnel so it may of looked out of place.

Using and developing

Our video works with common conventions of the genre, but it develops some and uses them in different ways, we chose to make a video that goes with the conventions so people can easily get an idea of the type of artist they are seeing and the type of music they are listening to. Steve Neale said that “Genre’s are instances of repetition and difference” and this is true for our video because we have used some common ones of the genre such as how we chose to film our artist miming with the lyrics and looking at the camera, the location that we used is the type commonly used in the genre and we have used a male rather than a female. These are all conventions we have used, but we have also developed some and this is where the difference comes in to our video.

Often in the hip hop genre there will be quite lengthy shots of an artist miming along with the words which puts all the focus on to them, so we developed this into shooting the whole video in one take so we had one long shot of the artist, this use of camera work is one way we developed a convention of the genre. we also experimented using areas with different types of light to have a different effect, and we continued this in the production of our digipak, where we also experimented with various shades of black and white. I think this and our use of camera work makes our video stand out from others in the genre, but it is still easily recognizable as a hip hop video because we have used a lot of the common conventions. Knowing the conventions of the genre made producing our product easier because we knew what sort of things we should put into it and how it should look. It is important for the audience to be able to recognize what genre a product is because they probably know which genres they like and will want to choose a product from that genre.

Common conventions of the genre that we chose to ignore

We can see here that there are some conventions we chose to ignore so that we could focus on developing the unique aspects of our video. These conventions are images of big expensive cars, attractive barely dressed women and big groups of people.

Question 2

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

This is our magazine advert

Our digipak

It is vital that the digipak, video and magazine advert share a similar style and themes so that people can see a clear link between the 3 of them, this will increase the overall recognisability of what they are all promoting and make it easy for the audience to relate to them. We purposely used the image of the tunnel with the cat head imposed onto it in both our magazine advert and our digipak cover because having an image that is consistent throughout our texts makes it easy for the audience to relate them together, and we used the image of the tunnel so that they can also relate it to our video. We also used the image of our star actors head in both our magazine advert and digipak to increase his recognisability and add focus to him, as we do in our music video.They all have a similar style to, they are simple and do not have much colour just like our music video, this similar style and also use of the tunnel image makes it easy for the audience to link our main product and our ancillary texts which would enhance the artists overall image and help to sell the album more.

Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Pre production research- online survey

We used the online website survey monkey to conduct our initial research, we learnt that most people who were willing to take part in our survey were white British teenagers. We found that they were very interested in technology and it was important to them to be able to watch music videos on the go on their smartphones, and from youtube- we made sure that we made a video which could be viewed in these ways.

Pre production research- interviewswe conducted interviews with 2 males in our target audience, we found out that they are interested in a range of genres, especially the various genres within hip hop. Our interviewees said that they expected the artist to address the camera directly in a video from the hip hop genre (to break the 4th wall). We decided to make this a feature of our video, because it is important for the audience to be able to easily recognise what genre something is so they know whether or not they will want to engage with it. Our audience said they expect this from a video in the genre, so we included it to make it obviously from that genre. This style of breaking the 4th wall and addressing the audience also makes them feel more connected to the artist. I got the impression from our interviews that our target audience may be more concerned with the artist and their brand than with the music they create, this is important because it made us realise that our main product and the other texts all had to work together to promote the artist as much as possible, this is one of the reasons we decide to focus all of the attention in the video onto our star.

Whilst in the middle of producing our video we were able to stop and show some of the raw footage to people in our target audience to see their initial reactions, it had the response that we wanted and they were impressed with the camera work and location, to key features of our video, they also had some helpful tips that we were able to consider later on whilst filming what became our final shot which we used for the video. They liked the moving camera element of what we had shot and encouraged us to use this even more, which is what we did when filming the shot which we all agreed was the best. When designing the magazine advert and digipak we also gave each other feedback as a group and also asked our friends and peers who were in our target audience to give feedback which they did, we used this to produce the best possible products for our target audience, and it also encouraged us that we were doing was the type of thing they would want and expect to see from a product in our genre.

Post production feedback- the positivesWe asked a lot of our peers who were both in our target audience and not in our target audience to give feedback on the video on facebook and in person, here are the main positive points people had about it:• The style of camera work was impressive, unusual and interesting to watch. • The location was very appropriate for the genre. • The use of different lighting was interesting and good the choice of dark song.• The clothes our artist was wearing were appealing to them. • It is not like all the other “boring” videos that you often see because it is different,

it does not have a conventional narrative and the camera work and the way it is all in one shot.

• One long take for the whole video worked well.• It had a professional feel to it.

Post production feedback- negative points

Here are the main negative points people had about our video:• At times it was too dark to see what was

happening.• No narrative to the video.• Too much of the same thing, not a lot happens

throughout the video.

Analysis of post production feedback

I think that some of the positives and negatives people had were about the same thing, like the lighting or the lack of a narrative, we expected this because they were unconventional techniques which we used, so it is natural that they will divide opinion. It is worth noting that more of the people in our target audience were the ones who had the positive points and the people who were not our target audience came up with more of the negatives, I think this just shows that our video and the techniques we used work well for our audience.

Overall audience feedback played a big part in what we chose to do throughout our pre production and production and I think the quality of the finished product would of suffered without it. We were happy with the feedback to the finished product because our audience were very positive about it, and we accept the negative criticism because you cannot make something that appeals to everyone in every way.

Question 4

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

I used the website- www.blogger.com for my blog to upload all the different parts of my work this year, including my research, planning, surveys, the finished products and this evaluation. Blogger was good because you can use it to upload all different types of things such as videos, images, text and links to other pages such as our survey. It was also good because you can customize it, I chose to make it suitable for our genre of music by having the side panels as pictures of lots of dollar notes which is the sort of symbol you see a lot in the hip hop genre. It is a public site to so anyone can look at it and people did from all over the world, this was useful because it meant that they could do the surveys and other interactive things that I put on the blog.

Blogger

Music channels

During my initial research I wanted to see a lot of real music videos from various genres to see what appealed to me and what I thought I would be good at making. I used music tv channels such as mtv, vevo, ak and kerrang to watch music videos from a variety of artists and genres, this helped me to choose what to do myself. I often watched music channels during the time I was working on my media portfolio this year, and it gave me some interesting ideas for our video, and I learnt from it. It was helpful especially during my planning stage, when I was able to focus on the channels that play videos from our chosen genre and get ideas from them.

youtubeWe used youtube a lot as a group because there was a lot of different ways which it helped us. It was useful in the same way as tv music channels were to find different videos, and also you can search for specific artists which enabled us to find a lot of tyler the creators videos all at once. We also used youtube during our post production, as we uploaded our finished video to it, this was good because people can easily comment on it with their feedback. We could access it on our mobiles as well so we could be researching while we were on the go, such as on a bus or train with time to kill.

Survey monkey

We used the website survey monkey to design our survey for part of our research to see what appeals to different people. It was easy to use and helped us to design a survey which looked professional and helped us to easily see the results of it. We posted a link to it on our personal social media sites and asked our friends to take part in it.

facebook

We used facebook to post a link to our survey monkey survey and ask our friends to take part in it, this was very successful and a lot of people did it. We also used it as a group to stay in contact with each other and send each other various files. We also texted and emailed each other for this purpose as well.

cameraWe used a digital nikon camera during our research and production. In our research we used it to conduct our video interviews and in production we used it to film our video and also to take the pictures for our digipak and magazine advert. The camera was good because it was easy to use and we could use it for both still images and for videoing. It was easy to transfer images and video from the camera to our computers because it is a digital camera. The camera also has a manual zoom and manual light settings which we used to experiment with different effects when filming our video, without these features we would not of been able to film our video in the same way. We chose to use a small lightweight handheld camera as well so that we could move around with it and keep up with our artist while filming our video.

Google images

During our planning we used google images to find an appropriate location to shoot our video, this was effective because we were able to see a lot of different locations quickly, without having to trek around them for real. Using google images, combined with our own local knowledge was how we found the location that we used, this is important because our location was a strong point of our video as it fit the genre extremely well.

Post production- editing

We used adobe premier pro to edit our video when we had filmed it, adobe premier pro is professional standard software so we were able to edit our video to a high standard. We imposed text onto the image at the start of the video and had it fade out, we also changed the light filters during one point in our video as we wanted it to get darker, and added a black and white filter to give our whole video a different look.

Ancillary texts- photoshop

We used photo shop to design our digipak and magazine advert, like premier pro it is a high end and professional software. It allowed us to easily crop and edit our images, and has a lot of options for editing the images.