Finished evaluation of coursework

1. Media evaluation
Ed Boon

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Question 2
How effective is the combination of your main
product and ancillary texts?

9. This is our magazine advert

10. Our digipak

11. 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.

12. Question 3
What have you learned from your audience
feedback?

13. 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.

14. Pre production research- interviews
we 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.

15. 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.

16. Post production feedback- the
positives
We 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. Question 4
How did you use media technologies in the
construction & research, planning & evaluation
stages?

21. 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

22. 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.

23. youtube
We 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. camera
We 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.