Evaluation

Media A2 Evaluation

For my A2 media project I had to create a music video production. The music video chosen was J Cole Lost Ones, me and three of my other peer’s chose this song because we thought it would have a great story to plan behind it. I felt this choice of music was a good one because it was appealing to a target audience that was within our age category of 16-25, being teens our self’s we had a good understanding on what other people our age group liked in taste of music.  

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

I realised that certain aspects of our video need to be similar to other established music videos to be able to target our audience we were intending to. In order to this, I had to look at other artists with videos in the same music genre. For example Drake Worst Behaviour. I want to follow these conventions so our video is deemed professional acceptable and recognisable but I still wanted to challenge the forms and conventions in order to convey a strong message behind the video. This would in turn make our video more recognizable, unique and establish our artists profile in a strong, clear way.

As a group we decide the narrative of the story would be about teenage pregnancy because that’s one of the most common problems young teenagers face in suburb London. We identified this feature and decided it was vital that we replicated it in our video. With research and planning we found the perfect song to our narrative fitting perfectly with the lyrics. As well as searching for our song we also had to do some background research on what Rap/R&B music videos look like and try and take some of the convention displayed their and apply within out own music videos so were following the typical conventions of Rap/R&B music. One video we analysed was 50 Cent 21 Questions; this music video had the mise-scene of a rap video the typical clothing a rap video would require such as hoods, big chains and jewelry etc. 

However we did subvert the typical convention of a rap video we challenged it with a style which is still appropriate towards our genre. One way in which we did subvert the convention is through lighting our video starts off with a dark lighting and very gloomy start then starts to get brighter towards the end of the video as it progresses through. This is challenging the convention because usually rap videos are straight forward, seen as a way to express an individual’s feelings and emotion with lyrics. Lighting is one technique I took into consideration when I was creating the video I had to understand that lighting plays a very vital part in how a video is shown because you have to match the mood towards the situation and the narrative so that’s one element I learnt during the processes of creation.

I learnt that planning ahead of production was a very key move because in order for me to understand these conventions and how I could challenge them but still keep it realistic to rap genre I would have to have done deep planning into the genre. That’s why me and my group done questionnaires research analysis on other rap music videos so we get a very good understanding on how we could start developing and constructing our own video to the genre.  

Referring back to Goodwin’s theory about:

  Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal video, dance routine for boy/girl band).

  There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting).

  There is a relationship between music and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting).

  The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style).

  There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

  There is often intertextual reference (to films, tv programmes, other music videos etc).

   

 We understand Goodwin’s theory of music videos and we try to follow his theoretical understanding of music videos I personally think we applied it into our own music video but of course we challenged the conventions to make unique to the genre.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
To produce our poster we used the software adobe Photoshop. The design of the poster was inspired by our research into rap music. I looked into poster of rap artists and saw how they laid out their own posters I found out that they keep it very simple with the font and text and also often use dark colours that were a similarity I found when researching posters. I understood these conventions and applied it into our own poster with me and my group member Swaleh we were set the task to do the poster as we delegated roles.

 As you can see we followed the convention with the darkness and also a white background show light and dark because this has a very strong link to our music video which has a lighting narrative to it so we thought we’d continue the theme and apply that in out poster. When taking the pictures for our poster we had a hard time thinking of a pose that would appeal to the video, our first draft was a picture of Swaleh holding a condom however I felt that is was to simple and not effective I understood that it contrasts with the video but it somehow didn’t feel good enough for a front cover that’s when I told Swaleh to go and take another photo. Swaleh then found a pose and background that was appealing, as you can see it looks like a person who has a lot on his mind and looks much stressed. When it came to editing the photo on Photoshop I found the perfect effect to go with the photo the black and white theme similar to the Scarface the world is yours poster, I liked how it was simple one side black one side white which has a lot of meanings depending on what the narrative is so we applied the theme into our own poster and it turned out to fit perfect with our narrative. When cropping and neatening up the edges of the photo we found that the wall comes effective with the image and chose to leave it. We then started to plan out what font we were going to use and we came up with this style:

I chose this font because I felt that it connected with what we are trying to show. Its pattern of curls and twists show the confusion and on going problems and this is why I felt that this font would be a very good one to choose as font.

 In addition, me and Swaleh also recognised we needed a parental advisory sign on our poster due to the swear words within our video.

I had to put this in with the poster because our choice of song has some swearing within it which is relevant as we are targeting an age group that are combatable with swearing.

Because we distributed roles to share out the work evenly because we had a team member that pulled out due to an illness we gave the digipack over to Yasmin and Louise to do in their own time.

What have you learnt from your audiences?

To gather feedback on both my productions; music video digipack and advertisement, I got other teachers and students that I had never met to give feedback and to write a few notes on good point and things we need to improve on, on a sticky note, I did this to see if my understanding of audience’s had been effective; especially in targeting the right demographic. I used this research method because it is qualitative and dichtominous meaning I was able to gather opinions and data through data and opinion. This was effective; a clear difference was shown in each person’s opinion. I chose to use students studying in sixth form because I felt I would be able to gather some more professional constructive criticism by using sixth form students as they are more mature and have a clear understanding on this topic and genre and to understand the generic concepts behind productions. Most of my audience feedback is on video as I chose to show it through video content, because I felt it was easy to communicate and get a message across to them and also it was easy for them to address their feedback as well.

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

The iMacs were our most commonly used media technology, because they contained all of the software we needed to edit our footage and ancillary texts.
IMovie was used to edit all of our footage for the music video, because it is a fast and easy-to-use program that allowed us to add inserts, text, transitions and effects over various clips of footage. The program also allowed us to speed up or slow down any footage we wanted to, which really helped when we worked on lip syncing the piece. Using it in a pair was a lot simpler than we first thought, because we were able to both view the footage. As I was more experienced with the software, I did a lot of the actual editing, with input from my partner. We were able to make decisions on different lighting effects and text inserts to create a better video.

The iMac also had Adobe Photoshop installed, which is photo editing software. This software allowed us to create our digipack and album in its entirety, and because it was such a fiddly thing to do we were able to take the Macs home work on it at home on the same products. Adobe Photoshop was the main reason that we attempted so many drafts of our Poster, as it allowed us to add many different effects that we wanted to experiment with. The original drafts were a lot less impressive when we made them with simple techniques, but as we familiarised are self’s we Adobe again thanks to YouTube sources we knew more about how Adobe worked, we were able to create a more engaging Poster.

The digital video camera we used was very convenient, because it allowed us to easily record over our useless footage, such as when the lighting was incorrect. It also meant we didn’t have to rewind the tape to watch our footage back, as it was all saved on to the camera’s hard-drive. This also meant that we could import the footage straight from the camera, and didn’t need to look after a tape as well as the camera. It allowed us to import the footage at home and email it to the iMac for editing, which sped up the process massively.

In summary I felt we have done a successive job even though we had a person pull out on us because of illness, we still pushed on as a group worked around it caused all of us to push even harder to get things back on track and to make sure things were going to be done before deadline day, overall everything went to plan and managed to keep pushing onwards though the delays.