The document provides an evaluation of a music video created for a hip hop artist named Crucial. It discusses how the video challenged conventions of mainstream hip hop by focusing on meaningful lyrics rather than money, cars, or women. Locations like graffiti walls and a projection room showing thought-provoking images were used. Audience feedback helped improve edits and select complementary ancillary texts like the CD cover and advert. The final cut received positive feedback praising the editing, lighting, representation of the hip hop genre, and synergy with the ancillary materials.

1. Evaluation By Nora Bulale

2. Introduction 1)In what ways your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? I will look at how as a group, we did extensive research and developed certain forms and conventions of Hip Hop genre, to suit our music video. 2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? I will look at how our CD cover and advert compliments our music video. 3) What have you learned from your audience feedback? In this question I will look at how our audience (who is the audience- everybody from the age of 15- 25 who likes hip hop music) influenced our music video. 4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? I will talk about the technologies I have used in the all stages of this coursework; the difficulties I encountered and how I overcame them.

3. 1)In what ways your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? I did a lot of research, read many articles and forums before I started to plan the look of my music video. Hip Hop is a very popular music genre. Hip Hop can be both mainstream and underground. Different artists bring different things to the game. Some artists songs can promote promiscuity, fame and money. Other Hip Hop artists have a lot more to say and rap about politics and real life. Nas is a very inspiring Hip Hop artist he does mainly underground music and his lyrics are controversial.

4. Our artist, Crucial, is very down to earth and his song touches on issues such as terrorism, politics and real life. So we couldn’t portray him to be very narcissistic and demeaning to women, like many other Hip Hop artists. Our product challenged the existing convention of hip hop genre. When evaluating our indicatives video we can see how our video picks up on the underground genre and turns away from the mainstream. The video is very performance based. The artists below, perform with a lot of facial expression and a lot of upper body movement which is a main convention of hip hop. Crucial performs like this in the music video. There isn’t much dancing in Hip Hop because the quality is the lyrics so most videos are very performance based. Crucial imitates some of these body language.

5. While me and my group did the research we found a lot of ideas for our music video which would be really helpful. We all liked the idea of using graffiti art which is “one of the four pillars of Hip Hop genre”. Graffiti has connotation of being rebellious and challenging and we liked the idea of challenging the conventions of Hip Hop music. Our music video didn’t have any sexy women, flashy cars, gold or any of the things that screams “Hip Hop”. Our indicatives videos helped us develop our ideas. Location of the shoot was very important we had to make it so that the genre is instantly recognisable by our consumers.

6. Locations of our music video include Liverpool street this is very common. One of our indicatives is immortal technique. He uses the graffiti background very effectively. This is a very common ground in this genre so we conformed to a level by using the graffiti in our video. One of our settings was in a room with a projector and our artist was in front of a white board. Images flashed in the board behind him and the colours really looked good. This idea was developed from a song called “Defeat me” which was one of our indicatives.

8. We have gotten inspiration from lots of different music videos. One pretty mainstream one had to be the part where we wanted a line from his lyrics to really stand out so we had him write it out. The line was ‘Man you ain seen terrorists yet.’ I have seen this in so many music videos one particular one is Eminem’s ‘When I’m gone.’

9. Another setting was our artist acting out in front of a camera. This confused many people, but in the song is “Straight up Hip Hop”. In these scenes he is subtly ridiculing superficial Hip Hop artist who talk about money, women and wealth which under values the genre because Hip Hop is about freedom of speech. This is the message behind the camera on camera style. His lyrics are very controversial and challenging he uses satire in some aspects; this careless attitude is the artist’s way of provoking thought from people. There is a very powerful message in this song and we tried our best to make sure that the song didn’t lose its meaning when we made the song. Our main consumers are young urban teens/adults. As the director I really tried to make my point across which is to illustrate a young fresh artist, who is really talented and to portray him in the best way possible.

10. 2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We gathered 30 people as a focal group to pick out the ancillary products that suited the music video the most. We asked a huge sample to receive quantitative and qualitative data from this group. We found that people responded pretty well to the bright vibrant colours of our Digipack. This is my front cover This is my back cover. that I have created.

11. This is my advert. Unfortunately our target audience didn’t select my digipack as best suitable to the video instead they selected this advert. Ariba’s advert was chosen to market our music video.

12. These are the front and back covers that were picked to go best with our music video. This is our inside cover that have been decided on. The back covers had synergy with the insides and the audience really liked it so this was the inside cover that they have chosen

13. What have you learned from your audience feedback? Audience feedback played a big role in my project. Before I even came in contact with my artist, he already had many songs on Facebook which were really popular. He got a lot of positive feedback and has established his audience. The link is for his facebook videos page, where you can see his songs and all the feedback gets from friends, family and fans. http://www.facebook.com/update_security_info.php?wizard=1#!/profile.php?id=100000512192839&sk=photos During the editing process of the music video after a first cut I asked a couple of people what they thought about the music video. I asked five people to come in one at a time and look at the music video. They were all media studies students but some were Btec students. Some of the responses I got were: -I really like how you used the projection, so original! -It’s hard trying to make a Hip Hop music video without having anything dirty, and it’s really creative, I rate that. -The use of colours really stands out, it’s bland in some cases, then the graffiti is really bright, I like the contrast.

14. -It’s not like a Hip Hop video I ‘ve seen, it would be a lot better if you had a narrative though because a lot of Hip Hop songs are telling a story but to be honest the pictures in the projection is a form of story telling. -It’s really good, you just need to do a bit more editing, some of these edits were a bit long, the song’s fast so fast edits would do it justice. I didn’t think much about the first cut of my video. I still needed to do some things with lighting and use other bits of footage that I still had. After another two weeks of editings I was ready to show my final cut of the video. This time I used the same five students, I also asked a couple of people who work with my brother, they write and perform Hip Hop songs and even compose the music. This time I had a set of questions to ask which were: What is your first impression of the video? Do you think the video represents the Hip Hop genre? Does the CD cover promote the song? Does the advert promote the song? I had opened and closed questions. I needed my responses to be qualitative as well as quantitative to give me a good idea on people’s thoughts of my video.

15. Feedback: What is the first impression of the video? -It’s much, much better than it was before, you really transformed it. My first impression is that it makes me notice the lyrics because the edits are really fast. -There you go now it looks a lot more professional. I really like the editing, that has been improved since I last saw it. -It looks more and more like a video now that you put in a lot but what I notice first is the lighting and the colours which I really liked. -I think it’s good, I like what you did with the pictures, its not in your face too much. -I like this final cut much better, there’s things in this one that weren’t in the other. I really like this one. -Great video, he’s a great rapper. He has rhythm and flow and the video’s good. -That’s a cool video, for a young person this is good. Everything is in sync my favourite is the beginning when you’re introducing the artist. -I have a mixed reaction, the video is cool but the guy seems pissed of like the world did him wrong. -This is cool, it should be on MTV. -I think he needs to act bigger, maybe have girls on the video or something.

16. Do you think the video represents the Hip Hop genre? Seven out of ten answered ‘Yes’ but three answered ‘No’ and I asked why and these are the replies I got. -Hip Hop means money, status and has a lifestyle he didn’t represent that. -He has a lot of confidence (swagger) but I don’t think it was Hip Hop, he just sounds angry. -If you want people to see it as Hip Hop, you need to have an arrogant artist, gold chains, something that shows it of. From these results I see that a lot of people have a narrowed view of the Hip Hop genre. I hope to change these views and show them Hip Hop is a lot deeper.

18. My findings were that after the couple weeks of editing the five students reacted much differently to the video which is great because it shows considerable amount of improvement. Some people even noted that I managed to make it look like a Hip Hop genre song without putting in anything such as flashy cars or semi naked woman. I can also see that a couple of people’s perception of the genre has being spoiled, because they think the proper conventions of Hip Hop music is to promote fame, promiscuity and lifestyle. What I have learned is that the Hip Hop genre is really flexible; you can get really creative with it. Overall I’m really happy with the feedback I have gotten from the audience because most of them have noticed how I challenged the conventions of the genre which was my aim all along.

19. Youtube feedback We have gotten a lot of praise and constructive criticism in Youtube. “The video as a whole is good, the editing and the creativity with the different settings and shots are very good. And maybe a stronger colour than pink? It clashes the vibe of the song and the strength of the lyrics but besides that the artist is really talented.” This is a quote from one of the people who gave us a positive feedback. We got 45 views on Youtube. We have used social networking sites to promote the video.

20. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? In the research stage we used the internet mainly. We did a lot of research into the genre so we used websites such as Wikipedia, we looked at magazine articles too. We watched a lot of videos on YouTube. We did a lot of research into our artist and his songs on FaceBook. We were lucky that we knew Crucial and that he went to Stanmore College because it made this so much easier.

21. In the planning stage we kept in contact with the artist, asked him questions about him and his music. I called him a couple of times on my phone and we emailed him the call sheets. Main technology used in this stage was mobiles and Msn.

22. In the construction stage I used a lot of different technologies. I took out cameras, tripods and lights from the college media department. We had to fill out forms that had to signed by our tutors before we could take them out. At first we were new to the equipment so me, Ariba and Estella took out three cameras, three tri pods and a big box of lights so that we could have a test run of the equipment. The day was very helpful because we learnt how to use the cameras, make shots in and out of focus, adjust the lights and how to get perfect tilts and pans. The tri pods were also not hard to use. The lights were a little tricky because they were big, we had a couple of accidents in which I kept tripping over the wires. But this meant that on the days we went out to shoot, me and the group knew exactly what to do and how to use the cameras so we could get straight to work.

23. We used the Mac computers in the media department to edit our footage. We used a program called Final Cut Pro. At first the editing was really hard. The footage first had to be logged and captured before we started. This was a big problem because I have edited before but I used a much simpler program. After a while editing came very easy to me, I learnt how to use many tool like modifying speed, blow up footage if I needed to get rid of edges and how to put edits such as dissolves in. But I decided that I wanted to do was to keep the editing simple. I concentrated mainly on the speed of the editing instead of style. I didn’t have any fancy transitions but I had lots of cuts because the song is really fast and intense in some places and I wanted the edit to match the speed.

24. Another programs I have used were Photoshop. I used Photoshop to create my CD cover, back cover and the insides. I have been using Photoshop a lot in the last four years so it was really simple for me to use it. I have also used InDesign a lot over the last four years and that wasn’t complicated for me either. I didn’t face many problems when making using these. I think they were really effective.