Our Final Video!

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

The task that we had was to create a music video, a CD digipak and a magazine advert for a chosen song what we had found. When finding the song we had to look on the

internet, we first came across Inflowential on unsigned.com, but the song we chose wasn’t on the site, we looked more into the band on the internet and their myspace and came across their song ‘Wherever we go’ and we all agreed on choosing this song. The main purpose of creating a music promo is to promote the song, album or even the artist themselves. Throughout a music video if you were referring to the genre of our band which was Hip-Hop/Rap you would expect fast paced shots throughout the video. But many videos are different because of the genre, and relate to the song and the genre. For example if the music was a lot slower the changing of shots would be in time with the song, so you wouldn’t expect fast paced shot throughout a slower song such as a classical song. Most promo’s include narrative as well as performance, music promo’s do this so you can see the artists emotions through the song, performance is normally used to tell the a story what is to do with the songs lyrics, for example; would be one of professor green’s songs, ‘Read all about it’ with him performing throughout and also their being a narrative and a story being told throughout the video, as you can see below –



The conventions of a music video in the genre Hip-Hop/Rap relating to camera work would be fast paced shots, also with different ranges of shots, such as close-ups, mid shots, long shots. For example the close ups will be used for performance of the band or the singer to show their emotions when singing the song throughout the video, whereas a long shot will be used maybe at the start of the video to set the scene if there is going be any narrative throughout the video.

Also the typical conventions with editing throughout a Hip-Hop/Rap music video would be fast paced transitions from one shot to another. These are also mainly used in this genre to keep in time and in beat with the song to make the video as effective as it can be. Also with the editing some videos might just keep it in colour but they can also use black and white which can help emphasise a certain mood in the song or particular scenery throughout the video. The most typical conventions of Hip-Hop/Rap video would be things such as the use of alcohol throughout, well known clothing, expensive houses/hotels, fast expensive cars, attractive women and location is normally rough graffiti area’s where you expect gangs to be or in party atmosphere to show off their money. Examples of this are artists such as 50cent in his videos where he is the main character throughout, like in his video ‘Buzzin’ with another artist they are both in the video throughout with flash cars throughout to show they wealth, which is one of the typical conventions in a Hip-Hop video.

This screen shot shows many conventions of a Hip-Hop/rap music video.

When creating our music videos there were many videos that stood out for us which has had an influence on our final production, but the main videos and artists what had the biggest influence was Rizzle Kicks and Kanye West. Rizzle kicks influenced us because of the genre of our music was very similar to most of their music and their videos are very simple but effective, by using very simple camera shots and editing techniques to make a good music promo.

Our second influence was Kanye West and his music videos with all his different effects throughout, a prime example of this would be his song Good life, where during the video he uses all different effects to emphasise the lyrics throughout the song, this influenced because we wanted to get the same effect across to our audience with all the different editing techniques

Looking at the screenshots above from our video, it shows that we have used a wide range of editing and camera techniques throughout our video. We used green screen and typography throughout the video to use different editing techniques than usual. The video what mainly influenced as said before was Kanye West – Good life, this was one of our main influences because of the wide range of shots used, the different editing techniques such as green screening and typography which you can see from the videos below –

When planning our production there was plenty of places we thought of, but in the end we all decided on choosing Peterborough, we chose Peterborough because it has very urban look about it and all of us knew a lot of very good places for shots throughout our video what could work really well , on the day the shots came out really well finding some great locations such as –

Digipak and Magazine adverts –

Digipaks are a type of CD/DVD packaging made out of card or other heavy paper/cardboard material. Most digipaks can flip open like a book, or it can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left, with the CD in the centre portion.

Conventions of a digipak –

-          The name of the artist

-          The name of the album

-          Track listing

-          Record Labe;

-          Credits

-          Wesbites

-          Logo

-          Barcode

Typical conventions a Magazine Advert –

- Name of the band

- The name of the album or song

- The venue if it’s an advert for a tour

- Eye catching images and text to get people’s attention

- Links to websites, phone numbers both to book tickets if the advert is advertising the bands tour

- Reviews/feedback, things such as papers rating the album or band out of five stars.

- Tour/performance/release dates

Here is an example of a Chase & Status magazine advert, as you can see the magazine advert is an exact copy of the digipak and their album cover, the similarity will help people relate the band to the songs on their album and you can get the same technique of the eye catching yellow colour works. If our group was to take influence we would have to think about adding bright eye catching font or eye catching colours in general, also the use of using the same design for both the digipak and magazine advert may be something we could possibly do to attract people’s attention.

These are our magazine advert and also our digipak, I feel these work well together because they promote one another and can catch people’s eye to get their attention –

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

The products we chose to create as well as our music promo were a magazine advert and also a CD Digipak. All three of these were used as a promotional package to promote the song, the video and the artist. I felt that our digipak, magazine advert and video well together because they all promoted one another, for example the magazine advert promoted the Digipak which promoted the music video, they all worked well together to promote everything as a whole. I also felt that our CD/Digipak represented the band well because of the look of the cover; it was very similar to the video throughout, it had the same look to it, with the rough and run down area with graffiti on the walls similar to shots in the video.

If both of these products were to be seen they could be seen anywhere to do with music such as iTunes, music websites, stores and social networks such as Facebook and twitter and also YouTube.

There are two ways these products can be promoted which are through traditional media ways and new media ways. The traditional way is when it’s done by sending your track/video to music stores, music channels and music magazines, this way your product can be seen traditionally by people watching the music channels, people buying their favourite magazines and going to local record shops. The new way is mainly through the web using sites such as YouTube, Facebook and also programs such as iTunes, with this new technology you can see what other people are viewing on YouTube, see what your friends are liking on Facebook and also finding who is in the charts on iTunes. I personally prefer the new way that the music industry is promoted because most people have access to the internet in every household, this gives people opportunity to find their favourite music easily see what others are doing by using social sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and  see what’s in the chart. One problem with this appraoch is that not everyone has the internet our signed up to sites such as Facebook, but with the traditional approach its alot easier to attract a wider audience then using the online way.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When we first started to gather audience feedback, we started by doing a questionnaire with questions asking the audience what they would expect form a music video, what was their favourite music, what’s the best location for a music video and many more.  We did this to see what the audience would expect from our video and to get the best possible feedback we could to make the best possible video we could. When the questionnaire was done we created pie charts and tallies so we could see what people would want from our video a lot easier.

This is an image of the results of the questions we did for our questionnaire and I have put them into a tally so you can see what people prefer, referring to location, genre of the music and how people feel what makes a good music video.

The response what we took from this audience feedback was too take into account the thoughts of other people, especially the people from this questionnaire because they are the people going to be watching our video and being the audience. 

 

The final part of our audience research was to find feedback from people for our music video we did this by using the technology’s available such as Facebook and YouTube. By doing this we gained a lot of feedback with comments such as – “awesome video man!”. These are some screenshots of our videos comments and responses on YouTube and Facebook.

One of the main things we have learnt from our audeince feedback is too keep experimenting more with what we do in our video, for example the variation of shots, the green screening and also the typography. Just experiment in different ways to make a more effective video then what we have already got.

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

 Firstly when looking for our track we used unsigned.com, this website was used so we didn’t break any copyright rules. This website allowed us to look at artists who were not signed to record labels, allowing use to use their track for our music video.

When contacting the band we used their Facebook page as well as the MySpace. By doing this we came across their email and emailed them asking for permission for the track. The band manager got back to us and gave us permission to use their song and we went from there. Another technology we used on the internet was YouTube, we used it to look at past students videos from the school to give use influence on what we could do when creating ours to get to a similar grade. 

From when I first started media I feel my video shooting skills have developed well from the start of the course, this year the music video has helped me develop them a lot more. I felt this happened because of the different range of shots and the number of them we had to use, from close ups to panning shots, we used these wide range of shots to create the best possible video we could.

I also learnt how to use iMovie a lot better by going into different editing techniques to make our video as good as it can be. But the one program I fell I learnt the most on was Photoshop because it was my task to create the magazine advert. I had never really used Photoshop in a lot of detail, but now I feel I am confident in using the program when it comes to creating products such as magazine adverts. The only major problem i had was when first using photoshop, it was tricky to get used to at first but then i feel i got a good grasp of how to use it and then could complete our ancillary tasks.

One of the other main technologies I used was Blogger, I used this last year as well but this website allowed me to present our ideas and work. By using this website it allowed me to post all of my work on. But one of the main sites that help use the most was as I said before is unsigned.com, this site allowed to find the band and then through search engines allowed us to do research on our band and look into their songs, allowing use to find our final song we used – Inflowential – ‘Wherever’.

The main benefits of posting and exhibiting our video on sites such as YouTube and Facebook was gain as much audience feedback as we possibly could, to find out what our audience thought and to find out what we could do better if we ever did it again.

Costume

Throughout the song, the protagonist will be wearing chinos, vans, and a coloured hoody, which is typical to what the chilled hip-hop actors wear, such as Rizzle Kicks. This causes the audience to infer that the actors are 'cool' and relaxed about life. This is the vibe that we aim to portray in our music promo.

An example of where the costume is worn could be Rizzle Kicks. In all of their videos their costume is typical to our target audience age range. Their actions and clothing usually cause their followers or fans to mimic them as they want to be like them.

Typical conventions in urban clothing:
-Coloured Skinny hoody
-Chinos
-Vans
-Graphic Tee
-Beanie or baseball Cap

Questionnaire Tally

This is an image of the results of the questions we did for our questionnaire and i have put them into a tally so you can see what people prefer, refering to location, the genre of the music and how people feel what makes a good music video.