Jolyon's Evaluation

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

Since we have produced an indie-R&B-soul music video, it was important to ensure that I analyzed many different music videos made by professional music artists who made either an indie, R&B or soul music videos (or genres which are similar).

Therefore I analyzed the following music videos using Goodwin's theory:

R&B music videos

• Cee Lo Green – Bright Lights Bigger City
• Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song
• Bruno Mars – Grenade
• Eminem – Not Afraid

Indie-rock music videos

• Avi Buffalo – What's in it for?
• Ben Kweller – The Rules
• Johnny Flynn – Kentucky Pill
• PJ Harvey – A Perfect Day Elise

R&B-soul music videos

• Mariah Carey – Obsessed
• Alicia Keys – Fallin'
• Rihanna – Rude Boy
• Whitney Houston – I Have Nothing
• Gnarls Barkley – Going On
• Chris Brown – Yeah 3x

Alternative hip-hop

• B.o.B – Airplanes

I also analyzed a CD cover which I thought would be useful to look at so that I could get a good idea of what most CD covers would normally have (eg a bar code, a track listing, price, the company logo, etc). This was a CD cover by Amy Millan, which I looked at in detail so I could come up with an idea as to how I wanted Sophie (our music video artist) to be presented on the digi-pack and the magazine advert.

Our media product uses some of the conventions of indie-genre themes in the sense that our digi-pak, magazine advert and our music video showed images of objects that are formed naturally (eg bubbles, trees and grass) which you would expect to see in a standard indie-genre album. We also used bright colours for the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert (a whitish-pink and whitish-green) which matched up well with the whitish-pink colour of the artist's scarf on the outside front cover of our digi-pak.

However, we also challenged some of the conventions of standard indie-genre music videos by using a brick wall as a background on the inside-front cover of our digi-pack, since brick walls aren't made through natural processes, and in most indie-genre music videos you normally have someone playing an instrument in the background, but in our music video, our artist skipped and moved around in a forest background and played with piles of leaves, which makes our music video unique in that particular aspect.

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

All three parts of our media product work together as a promotional package because they all represent the innocent nature of the artist and portray her as a cheerful person, and they all show some aspects of nature (such as bubbles, trees, leaves etc).

The bright colours that have been used are another feature which all three parts of the package have in common.

The concept that we were trying to communicate is the idea of the natural environment encouraging the artist to be playful and innocent, and that theme has been kept constant not only in our music video, but in our digi-pak and magazine advert as well.

The target audience (which would consist of males and females aged 9-20) would be successfully attracted by: -

• The bright colours and the editing techniques we used (eg making some of the shots sparkly, slowing down some of the shots, and using cross-dissolve transitions) would make our artist's movements seem graceful to the audience, and therefore our audience would find the music video very entertaining, especially since short duration shots were used to match with the cheerful mood and steady pace of the song
• The bright colours and font we used for our magazine advert match up well with the kinds of colours you would expect to see in a natural setting (eg green and whitish-pink), and since the artist is wearing a whitish-pink scarf and she has been brightened using an effect, this makes the artist the main focus of the magazine advert since she is the brightest thing in the image, which draws the audience's attention to her which therefore makes the magazine advert look appealing to our audience.

• What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When we showed our initial pitch to our other class members, the feedback we were given was that we needed to think about how we were going to make our location look as if it is taking place in a dream, as the world shown in our song isn't supposed to be a real one since the song is about a dream world, so when we got around to doing our editing, we learned about this effect that could make some of our shots look as if they have bright sparkles in them, and we also learned how to adjust the colours of some of our shots, so we were able to make some of our shots look very appealing and make certain shots in the music video look “dream-like” because of this. Originally our initial pitch had been criticised because we didn't have a set narrative for our music video. However, this turned out not to be an issue because after doing some research, we discovered that the majority of indie-genre music videos have no narrative whatsoever, and use many shots of natural locations and the artist performing in those locations, which is exactly what we have tried to do with our music video.

When we uploaded our rough cut for our peers to analyze, one of the problems they noticed was that there were some background noises in the music video that shouldn't have been there, so we had to check over our music video again to get rid of those background noises. The camerawork was also criticised for being unsteady, but this is because the camera had to be moved in various directions to ensure that the artist could still be seen in most of the shots and show her every movement, so if the camera hadn't been moved around a lot, the focus on the artist wouldn't have been as good and therefore our target audience would lose interest in the music video.

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

For our music video, we used Final Cut Express to speed up some of the shots, add cross-dissolve transitions, cut bits off of certain shots, and added a fade in from white and fade out to white transitions at the beginning and end of our music video respectively.

Using Photoshop, we were able to use the magic rubber tool to get rid of any background colours from the images we added that we didn't want, and we copied and pasted images from Google that we thought would be appropriate to have in our digi-pack and magazine advert. We were also able to manipulate the colour scheme of our picture of our artist that we used for the inside front cover of our digi-pack by making it a greyscale image, but then we used the magnetic lasoo tool around the scarf she is wearing, and adjusted the colour of the scarf to make it a bright pink which matches up well with the bright pink we used for some of the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert. Also, another colour we used for some of the words in our digi-pack and magazine advert was a whitish-green colour, and the font type we used for the words on our digi-pack and magazine advert are very similar, as we wanted some writing that would be ideal for representing an indie-R&B-soul genre promotional package.

We used some stills cameras to take some pictures of our music video artist (Sophie) in different parts of the college campus, and we used the HD Camcorders to record the footage for our music video, which consisted of some tracking shots and some zooming in and zooming out to follow the artist's movements effectively and from many different angles. This made it possible for us to have a variety of different shots in our music video (such as panning shots, high-angle shots, wide shots, etc), and since lots of shots in our music video have similar short durations, this means that the audience wouldn't be looking at one particular action happening or one location for too long, which is good because this means that the audience doesn't get bored of what they are watching, which makes our   music video very unique and succesful in that aspect. Since we had to take our pictures of the artist in a very short amount of time, this somewhat limited our creativity since we didn't have the time to pick a location outside of the college grounds that we could use to do this, and therefore we had to take the pictures in whichever parts of the college grounds looked best for our photo shoot.

Final Cut Express however, gave us many opportunities to be creative when it came to the use of cross-dissolve transitions, and the way in which our shots were put together to create motifs which recurred throughout the music video, which is what standard indie-genre music videos normally have.

Using Blogger, we were able to type in comments about particular music videos that we had analyzed and uploaded some images to many of my posts to make them look more interesting, as well as a CD cover example that I thought would be useful to critique. It was also useful for me to learn from what my other group members had analyzed, such as ideas for our magazine advert, target audience research and what we learned from the filming sessions we took part in.