In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Conventions: “A custom or a way of acting or doing things that is widely accepted and followed”. When it comes to conventions in music videos, there are two different types of conventions, Technical Conventions which relates to styles of camera, editing and sound (can be diegetic or non-diegetic, part of performance obviously but also part of narrative in some cases too). There is then Symbolic conventions which relate to Mise-En-Scene, costume, props, location/setting, colors, lighting, make up, arrangement of band members, performance. In this evaluation task I will be exploring weather my media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products from the same music genre. The genre of my media product is “Alternative RnB”, bellow I will be comparing firstly my music video to other “Alternative RnB” music videos, I will next compare my album artwork to that of other “Alternative RnB” artists and then I will be finally comparing my website to the websites of other “Alternative RnB” artists.
Music Video Comparison
Above, one can see a video I have made, which shows our music video which is: Without U by Fredo Fahrenheit, which is the video at the top, it is being played along to other music videos by actual Alternative RnB artists, to the left is: Coffee by Miguel; And to the right is: My Love by Majid Jordan featuring Drake. Miguel is is an American recording artist, singer, songwriter and producer, from Los Angeles, California. Majid Jordan is a Canadian record producing and performing duo composed of Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman. They are signed to OVO Sound, the record label co-founded by rapper Drake, producer Noah "40" Shebib and Oliver El-Khatib.
Fredo Fahrenheit Miguel Majid Jordan
Bellow one can see 9 screen-shots from the three different music videos, 3 for each one, I will bellow that be comparing 6 different elements amongst the tree shots as to discover weather my music video is using, developing or challenging forms and conventions of real media products. These 6 different elements are as follows: Set Design, Camera Work, Performance, Costume and Make-up, Editing.
Screen Shots: Top - Fredo Fahrenheit (mine) , Left - Miguel , Right - Majid Jordan
First Set of Screen Shots:
Second Set of Screen Shots
Third Set of Screen Shots
Set Design
In the first three set of screen shots one can see the set design of all three music videos, and it is pretty clear to see from plain eye that these 3 music videos all have similar set design. It is clear that a symbolic convention of alternative RnB music video’s is to have a female character along with your lead male singer on a bed in a room. As can be seen in all three of the first screenshots, all three set’s have similar props, firstly a bed, second a duvet and thirdly pillows. It is clear that all three different sets are slightly individual, for example in the Majid Jordan music video, the walls are covered in a crinkled plastic tarp, in the Miguel music video there is a big blue LED cross, where as in our music video we have decided t go with a more basic hotel room look, with for example a big framed painting above the bed. Judging from this so far it does seem that our music video does follow the conventions of a Alternative RnB music video.
Camera Work
Both the second and third set of screen shots seem to show that are similarities between the camera work used in our music video and that of Coffee and My Love. For example in the second set of screen-shots, specifically between my music video and Majid Jordan’s there is similar camera work used, both shots are MCU’s and manage to capture the singers lip-sync by seeing the performers full mouth as well as both his eyes. This seems to be a technical convention of Alternative RnB music video’s to be able to capture the artists lip-sync. Another example of similar camera work between the three music videos is in the third set of screen shots; All three shots are of the singer and a female character, and they have all filmed it similarly. All three shots are CU’s and are taken from aside profile as to get one complete side of each of the characters faces as to be able to convey the emotions of both parachuters at the same time, this is also so done because it gives symmetry to the frame making it visually appealing; This is clearly a technical convention of Alternative RnB music video’s which my music video seems to follow. Once again from what I can tell so far my music video does seem to follow pretty well the conventions of an Alternative RnB music video.
Performance
As can be seen from all three sets of screenshots, the performance element of our music video abides by the symbolic conventions of Alternative RnB music video’s because of the similarity in the performance between the three music videos. In the first set of screen shots, when it comes to character positioning, all three shots have the female character positioned on a bed, and in both my music video and Miguel’s music video the female character is actually sitting on her knees, and in both as well the female character is looking directly at the male character. In the second set of screen shots, we can also see how my music video follows the symbolic conventions of an Alternative RnB music video in regards to the singers performance. In all three screen shots the singer is lip-syncing, in all three screen shots the singer is looking in the general direction of the camera, therefore acknowledging its presence, Alternative RnB music video’s clearly are not the type where it is like movie the performers act like the camera is there, on the contrary they perform to the camera. Still in this second set of screen shots, we can see that all three singers use hand movements in their performance as to accentuate their performance. The third set of screenshots in my opinion best shows how my music video follows the symbolic conventions of an Alternative RnB music video in regards to the performance; In all three screenshots we can see the male singer performing his lip-sync whilst looking at the female caricature and at the same time caressing her face, clearly having the male singer perform to a female character in the music video is major symbolic convention of this genre of music videos as all three videos are so similar in that regard. Once again it is clear that my music video, up to this point in the comparison process, clearly abides by the conventions of Alternative RnB music video’s.
Costume and make-up
It is clear to see from the first set of screen shots that there are similarities in regards to Costume and make-up between the tree music videos. The main symbolic convention which is followed by all three music videos, is that of the female characters costume. In my music video, the female character is wearing a sexy and provocative night gown, in Majid Jordan’s music video, the female character is wearing what appears to be a quite revealing piece of lingerie, and in Miguel’s music video the female character is wearing simply a bra and a thong. It is obvious to see that using and showing off the female characters’ sexuality and sensuality in order to attract male characters is a major symbolic convention of Alternative RnB music video’s, and my music video follows this convention perfectly. When it comes to make-up, if one looks at the second set of screen shots, one can see that little to no make-up is used on the main singer, where as some music genres such as pop and rock conventionally often put a lot of make-up on their male performers as to add individuality, Alternative RnB artist seem to conventionally like to stay the way they look normally, as is the case for such genre’s as Rap and Jazz. At this stage in my music video comparison my music video seems to follow all the conventions of Alternative RnB music video’s very strictly.
Editing
Album Artwork Comparison
In this part of this evaluation task, I will now be comparing the Album Artwork which I have created for my artist, to the album artwork of real Alternative RnB artists; The artists in question are, firstly PartyNextDoor, who is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer and rapper who is signed to Drake's OVO Sound record label. Secondly Tory Lanez who is a Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, director, and fashion designer from Toronto, Ontario. PartyNextDoor’s album artwork is the one with the male dressed in all white with a black background and it is for his mixtape PartyNextDoor Two, and Tory Lanez’s artwork is the one where there is a male leaning against a wall infant of a door and it is for his project In For It. At first glance when looking at all three of the album artworks side by side it is clear to see that their are some similarities and that at first glance one would say that my album artwork follows the conventions of Alternative RnB album artwork.
Album Artworks: Top - Fredo Farenheit (mine) , Left - PartyNextDoor , Right - Tory Lanez
When looking more in depth, firstly comparing my album artwork to that of PartyNextDoor’s one firstly notices that the editing and manipulation of the photo’s are similar. Both album artworks have used a “speed blur” effect, which is an effect which can be found on Adobe photoshop or Pixelmator, which stretches out the photo and blurs it out. I believe the reason that PartyNextDoor, has gone with this stylistic choice on his artwork was because he was following the general conventions of an Alternative RnB artist, which is to be slightly more unique and to standout, because they are more experimental then say a norman RnB artist and therefore this has to be reflected in ones artwork. Therefore where possibly a normal RnB artist would use a simple photo of themselves as the cover for their album, PartyNextDoor has chosen to be more unique and experimental with his artwork. This is what I tried to apply to my album artwork, I wanted to make it a bit more experimental and unique than what I would expect from a normal RnB artist, so instead of just leaving my artwork as a photo of the singer in the garage, I played around with it and the effects on photoshop and managed to create something a lot more unique and special. This definitely goes to show that my album artwork follows the conventions of Alternative RnB album artwork.
Evaluation Task 2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Bellow is a video of me and my group looking at evaluation task 2, exploring how effective our main product is as well as our ancillary products. Due to the size of the video I created, it has been upload in two parts which can be found bellow, part 1 first and part 2 last.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Bellow are screenshots of all the past feedback which I have documented on my blog that me and my group have received, it ranges from the first pitches for the concept of our music video all the way to showing rough drafts to people as to get there feedback on how to improve the music video in the post production stage. The feedback which I have received was very important and helped me develop my products (music video, digi-pac, website) into what they are today. It is important to get feedback from people all through out the stages of pre-production, production and post production. The reason for this is that firstly if you show your products along the way to people there opinions can help you improve your product, especially if you show it to people who are experienced in the media industry because they can give you advice from the knowledge they have acquired over the years, knowledge which I might not have had enough time to acquire myself; An example of this which is noted bellow is when we pitched our music video concepts to Luke, who is an experienced music video maker, who knows what might and might not work based on his own experience, his advice heavily helped us move our idea from something which would have been too hard to make, and make well within the time constraints which we were given. Another reason it is important to get feedback throughout all the stages of the creation of your products is that it will appeal to your target audience more. We achieved this by showing drafts of our products to people who fall within our target audience which is male and female teens aged between 17 and 22 and who are rather artsy and are not interested in more mainstream music, sometimes that was even just members of my own group. So bellow you can see a lot of past feedback which we have received:
Bellow is a video I put together of a focus group which I carried out after the completion of our products as, to see what peoples opinions were on our products. The important thing to note about the focus group which I put together is that all the participants are all a part of our target audience for our product. We split the group equally between males and females because we believe our products will equally appeal to both sexes for different reasons; we interviewed 5 girls and 5 boys, so 10 candidates in total as to get a wide spread of opinions. The 5 females were: Molly who is aged 18 years old, George who is aged 17 years old, Emilie who is 17 years old, Celine who is 17 years of age and finally Lizzy who is also aged 17. The 5 males which we interviewed were: Olly who is aged 17, Purdy who is 18 years old, Jonty who is 17 years old, Gabe who is aged 17 and finally ben who is also 17 years old. We asked the focus group members several questions, firstly "What genre do you think all these products belong to?", secondly "Is it evident that all these products belong to the same artist?", thirdly I asked "Any criticism's about the album artwork?", we then asked "any criticisms about the website?", next we asked "Is the website easy to navigate?", we also asked "Any criticisms about the music video?", equally we asked "After looking at all of these products, what type of person does our artist seem like", we also asked "Would you consider any of these products boring?". It is clear that with these questions, we manage to get feedback on all of of our products, and importantly it is feedback from our target audience. Watch the focus group video bellow:
We got a lot of useful feedback from our focus group. We got a whole range of answers when it came to all of our questions, which will help me improove the products as to make them more fitting to the taste of my target audience. It also helped me get an over all feel for how my target audience felt about each product. The general consensus was that everyone liked our products, except for a few slight things on each. Bellow you can see some graphs which I have created, as to try and make a visual aid to understand the feedback which we have received. First of all I made a graph for the question "What genre do you think all these products belong to?", as can be seen bellow I got one response which said that they believed are products were for the genre of Grime, I had a response saying that they believed that my products were of the indie genre, 1 response saying they believed it was a part of the rock genre, 1 and a half responses saying they believed it to be a part of the Rap/Hiphop genre, 2 and a half responses saying they believed my products were from the Alternative genre, and finally I had four responses which was the majority saying that they believed my products were of the R&B genre. As can be seen from the graph the majority of people thought the genre of the products was either Alternative or RnB, this is very good because the actual genre of our products is Alternative RnB, so that means our products look like what they are meant to look like. Another question I made a graph for was "Is it evident that all these products belong to the same artist?", and as can be seen from the second graph, 100% of the candidates said they could tell that all the products belong to the same artist. This is very good because, this is the response I wanted, it is important that all the products look like there from the same artist so that there is no confusion. and the final question I made a graph for was the question "Is the website easy to navigate?", and as can be seen from the third graph 100% of the candidates said it was easy to navigate; This is very positive feedback because it means that they can find everything that they want to find on the website and that they can do it easily which is very important when creating a website, if the audience member cant easily find what they want on the website then they will get frustrated and leave it. You can see the graphs bellow:
Bellow are questionnaires which I handed out to 8 people all aged between 16 and 18 years old which is our target audience age, and I also split it equally between males and females because our target audience reached both males and females. on the questionnaires I asked several questions, firstly I asked "Is it evident that all these products belong to the same artist?", "Is the website easy to navigate?", "Is everything you would want to find on an artist website, on our website?", "Is the use of the color red effective?", "do all these products appear to belong from the same genre?", "Is the font used on the artwork legible?" "Do our products look professional (as if they would be made by an actual Alternative RnB artist)?", "Do you like the album artwork?", "Do you like the website", "Do you like the music video?". 6 out of 8 of the people being questioned said that it was evident that all our products belong to the same artist. All of the people we questioned said that our website was easy to navigate. 5 out of 8 of the people we questioned said that everything they would want to find on an artist website was on our website. All of the people we questioned said that the use of the color red was effective. 2 out of 8 of the people being questioned said that our products all appeared to belong to the same genre of music. 5 out of 8 of the people we questioned said that the font we used on our album artwork was legible. All of the people we questioned said that our products looked professional. 7 out of 8 of the people we questioned said that they liked our album artwork. 7 out of 8 of the people we questioned said that they liked our website. All of the people which we questioned said that they liked our music video. The evidence for this can be found bellow in the form of photos of the questionnaires i handed out.
Overall I think that the feedback that we received is indeed quite reliable, because it comes from members of our target audience, who were giving sincere opinions on our products, and I think this is evidenced by the fact that the candidates were not holding back, and would give us negative feedback when they did not like something. One thing we did when choosing our candidates for our focus group was make sure that none of them were our friends so that they would not be biased or afraid to give us negative feedback, we made sure we did not personally know any of the candidates. One problem which can be observed from our target audience though is that they are all aged between 17 and 18 years old, now whilst this is good because it falls into our target audience demographic, it would have been able to get people aged a little bit older until about 22 years old because our target audience is people aged between 17 and 22 so it would have been good to get people who were a bit older but still in this age range.
When looking at all this feedback in regards to the music video specifically a lot of strengths were pointed out in our music video. Most people as can be seen in both our video for our focus group as well as in the survey hand out sheets said they had no criticisms about the music video which meant that they liked it the way it was and would not change it. Specific pieces of positive feedback we got for the music video can be seen in the focus group video where for example, Ollie says that he very much likes the use of red lighting and likes the way we based the color schemes for our other products on this. But there were a few pieces of constructive criticism which were mentioned, primarily in the focus group video. One piece of criticism about the music video which we received was that it was maybe slightly to simple and for certain people with for example maybe not a very long attention span could possibly get bored looking at our music video, and this was mentioned at least twice with the responses from Emily and Jonty in the focus group video. Another piece of criticism which we got about the music video was from Ben in the focus group video, who said he got confused by the hotel room scene and would have liked to possibly see what happened before it or after it as to get some context for the scene. I think that the encoding and decoding model which Derives from the work of Stuart Hall at the BCCCS, which is a theoretical model, which is based upon the notion that the audience do not act as a “mass”, but rather as a collection of smaller groups defined by social and ideological elements. This is very evident when it comes to our feedback. When we picked the members for our focus group we did not take in count there personalities, who they hung out with and what they liked, and if we had we would have probably obtained a much more cohesive set of feedback where most of the answers were the same. But instead we got people from all different types of social categories as to get a wide range of feedback from all the type of people which fall into the guidelines of our target audience. Therefore we got in some instances for example in the question of "Any critisms about the album artwork?", where the answers were heavily varied and this is clearly because as explained by Stuart Hall, who says that people no longer respond to things as a group but more as individuals or smaller groups of people. The uses and gratifications theory also applies heavily to the feedback we received, for example the uses and gratification model when it comes to Diversion which is the escapism from mundane existence, purely for entertainment, it applies a lot to our feed back because that is what our music video and products do; Its a music video without much of a background message to it and the main purpose of it is to simply just entertain the audience with out much thinking. when it also comes to Personal Identity which is where the audience identify with characters and situations and thereby make sense of one’s own life and views. This also influences our feedback because it also affects our audience, our music shows the love and attraction and sensuality of a male and female character, and our target audience of teens will be able to relate to this heavily and thus will make our audience like the music video more. In conclusion from all of the feedback which I have received in all forms and all through out the process of the creation of our music video, I definitely feel like my products are successful overall because the feedback shows that most people like our products, even if they have given a few slight criticisms here and there. What I have learnt from this process was that it is very important to get feedback when creating a product from both experienced members of the media world because they have experience and can advise you well on what to do; I also learnt that it is very important to get feedback from your target audience all through the process of creating your product, because in the end you are creating the product for them, so if you constantly keep getting opinions from members of your target audience you will be a able to mold your product around your target audiences tastes.
