Question 4

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

Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Question 2

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

Question 1

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

I was given a task to create a music video for a song of my choice, me and my group decided to chose the song 'Only Love Can Hurt Like This' by Paloma Faith, which is from the soul genre. Music videos are a visual form of listening/viewing a song are are primarily either performance, narrative or concept based. Music videos became  increasingly popular within the 1980's and hey are used as a tactic to promote the artists singing the songs, as they build relationships with the audience through exploiting and revealing their lifestyles and image. Artists aim their music videos towards specific target audiences and use conventions as a technique to appeal to them. For example within the soul genre, artists tend to give off a very oppressive and bleak atmosphere to represent their life experiences in order to attract and appeal to a more mature and conservative audience. Music videos also help the audience become aware  of the genre of the artist, this is useful as it can encourage viewers to carry on watching if they associate themselves with this genre. For example soul artists are normally shown to the audience in many high angle shots, this portrays the artists vulnerability to the audience, which allows the to figure out the genre.

Throughout my music video I ensured that there were many conventional soul elements, through using mise-en-scene our artist had numerous costumes that reflected our genre. She wore vintage, quirky clothing including; A big floppy hat, a black leather jacket, black boots and a light pink fluffy coat. The light pink fluffy coat was chose to portray my artists femininity and innocence, which encourages the audience to develop feelings such as pity for her. These pieces of clothing represent the individuality of my artist, as she stands out from the crowd and remains classy, this is stereotypical for the soul genre as most soul artists are old fashioned and creative with their appearance. They do this to represent themselves as independent as they subvert from the mainstream, this is effective as my target audience are not mainstream but of a similar culture to my artist.
My artist also has conventional makeup, she wore bright red lipstick throughout the music video and thick black eyeliner to bold-en her eyes. This is typical makeup for the women within the soul genre as it draws attention to the artists face and makes her look pretty and desirable but subtlety, I chose this as it causes the audience to remember my artist and be aware of her image.

Within the music video the settings I used were also conventional to the genre, the bathroom and bedroom scene allowed the audience to have an insight into the artists personal life, this is because they are very intimate areas within someones home. Using these rooms and showing how the artists reacts within these settings causes a relationship to be built between the artist and audience as they can relate to them. This also makes her seem more vulnerable, due to the revealing nature of where you sleep and wash is very divulging.

Within my music video the theme that I used was conventional to the soul genre, this theme was Heartbreak. The theme was evident throughout my music video in the scenes when my artist is crying into the camera, drinking alcohol to drown her sorrows and looking through pictures of her and her boyfriend while on her bed. These scenes are conventional to the soul genre as they promote the false need of love, they show how depressed and hurt she is now that she has separated from her boyfriend by capturing her upset on screen. This is a very common convention used within soul music videos by portraying the personal and emotional nature of soul music, as soul artists write songs based on their own experiences. This builds a relationship with the audience as they can relate to heartbreak through their own individual experiences as heartbreak is a very common thing to go through within life.

The cinematography within my music video is also conventional to the soul genre as I used many high angles and closeups. High angles were used when my artist is smoking out of the window, in the bath and laying on her bed looking through pictures. These scenes were captured using a high angle as it portrays my artist as weak and vulnerable due to her heartbreak, it shows her to be inferior as she is being looked down on by the audience. Closeups were used when she is crying and when she is singing into the camera during the performance scenes, this camera angle was chosen to capture my artist while she looking sad and emotional as it allows her to connect with the audience because they are aware of how she is feeling. Both angles are conventional to the soul genre as they focus on building a relationship between the visuals and lyrics.

I believe my music video does not challenge or subvert from the soul genre as it follows the stereotypical conventions used within a production from the soul genre. I decided to follow conventions as I believe songs from the soul genre can mainly only be appropriately represented in this way due to the low variety of tempo within most songs and the strong independence of the genre. I called my artist Sophie Mae as the first name of the artist normally remains and I added the 'Mae' to feminise her image and make her seem more relatable because of the common use of this double barrel/middle name. However this could be considered to subvert from the conventions as many existing soul artists only have one name selected to represent their image i.e; Adele, Duffy.

Final group digipak

Final group magazine album advert

Final group music video

West Hatch High School -  16807

Devon Thomas - 3167

I also worked along side;

• Lucy Nottage - 3127 
• Shaun Mcfarlane - 3111 
• Sophie Elliott - 3226

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvSzNG67I4

Group digipak - Miss Miller

As a group we all agreed on creating a new group digipak that used elements from each of our individual digipaks, we did this because we believed each different side on our digipaks had useful and conventional elements of the genre that allowed us to create the most effective ancillary text. It was easier for us as a group to evaluate and reconstruct a better quality digipak with a contribution of all our ideas combined. Each of us have different and creative ideas as to how it should look however having actually carried out producing the digipak we can see which elements from look the most effective and are best to use, we also identified improvements that we needed to make.

Shaun's digipak was very simplistic and portrayed the theme of love and passion through the colour red and the iconography of roses. However because of the lack of personal insight into the artist, we decided not to use the images he had chose within his digipak for example the roses or kiss mark, we believed an image of the artist would be more suitable for this ancillary text, to allow the audience to become further connected to the artist. We felt that Shaun's song list was too subverted from the soul genre as well, because the dark colours and simple font were not conventional to our target audience, the use of a forest as a setting portrayed the genre rock rather than soul. Although we did believe that the CD layout was very conventional and appropriate for out artist's image, therefore we did use it but in order to stick to a theme we changed the colour to light pink to match the writing and image on the front of the digipak.

Sophie's digipak used a theme of toned down colours to represent the soul genre as deep and meaningful, black and white images were used on both the front and on the CD with a red font to allow it to stand out. From this digipak we used the image from her front cover, however we left it in colour and added an effect to follow the theme, we chose this image because it shows a close up of emotion from our artist. Within the image the artist is wearing very conventional clothing to the genre as she is wearing a black floppy hat and a pink fluffy jacket, these represent her as unusual and trendy which is how we chose her to be. 

From my digipak we decided to keep the image used on the message to fans as well as the font, however we added an effect so that it would match the effect used within the front image, we also bolded the font by adding a black outer glow so that the writing would be easier to read for the audience. We kept the image of our artist leaning against a brick wall as it is conventional the our genre as it portrays our artist as quirky and individualistic, we also decided to reflect the image in order to convey the album title 'A True Reflection'. From my individual digipak we also decided to use the same image in the background of the the song list, this is because it is an image that has not been used before for the audience to see, therefore offers them an extra insight into the artist, it also follows the conventions of the soul genre as she is standing in front of a graffiti wall, which is a very vintage and trendy setting. Finally from my individual digipak we used the image of the perfume and lipstick on the side, we decided to use this image to portray the feminine side of our artist, to show how cosmetics are used to cover up the pain experienced due to heartbreak. 

I believe the images within our final digipak are conventional to the soul genre as it represents our artist as sad and hurt which is the message throughout all of her songs and stereotypically all soul material, she is represented as this through her body language, clothing and the settings. The colours used within our final digipak are also conventional to the genre as they each represent an emotion or personality trait of the artist that is typically associated with soul, for example the pink represents love. I believe our digipak appeals to our target audience as we have created a trademarked font which will allow the artist to be recognised and she looks very approachable and relatable which will allow the audience to connect with her. Having created our own individual digipak I feel much more confident that my group have produced a digipak that will be most effective and successful as through combining ideas each element within the digipak is creative and conventional.

Rough cut - Miss Georgiou

Audience feedback is crucial within any production, therefore a rough copy is carried out. This allows us to find out the opinions of our target audience, which will inform us how we can make changes to improve our work so that it is more conventional and appealing to who we are aiming our music video towards. Audience feedback also allows us to discover new ways in which we can reach other audiences and for example different genres, this will then result in a wider audience base which in turn would improve the success of a music video. Having different individuals perspectives on the music video will show up any errors or poor quality editing, lighting etc that we as a group have possibly overlooked. Therefore a rough copy is essential to use when creating any production for it to be most effective. We received audience feedback by screening our production in front of a class of media students and then collected sheets that they filled out regarding strengths and weaknesses in their opinion of our music video. This will benefit our production as within the individuals we asked there was students who have been researching both soul and other music genres, therefore their feedback would be both applicable and useful to improving our music video. This process will also benefit the music industry as it makes it easier to merge genres and allows artists to connect with the majority of individuals from most genres as it has elements and appealing factors from each one.

From the feedback we received both positive and negative comments, which included;

•  Good use of location
•  Good narrative
•  Conventional to the soul genre
•  More angles need to be used
•  Lip singing parts need to be improved
•  Repetitive camera shots

From the three positive comments we were given we realised that we used mise-en-scene correctly to portray the soul genre and appeal to the audience, for example the settings. We used settings such as a graffiti wall, bathroom and bedroom, these settings were chosen because of their personal meaning which is relatable to the soul genre as they are normally represented by real experience. We also used costume and iconography which is conventional to the soul genre as we gave our artist a very vintage and quirky image. We also portrayed the narrative successfully through using many different clips of the characters happy and then unhappy to show their breakup to the audience, the feedback confirmed that what we felt went positively we did successfully carry out.

From the three negative comments we received we found that our weaknesses revolved around the filming of the music video, we failed to use a variety of camera angles such as high/low angle and stuck to the mid and establishing shots. We also did not film enough footage to make the music video engaging enough, we used the same/similar shots continuously which may be perceived as annoying and the audience may lose interest. From this feedback we can now work on improving our music video by using our strengths to fix our weaknesses, we can use our successful narrative to assist us in creating more shots to extend our narrative. Through re-filming the lip singing scenes we will also be able to use more angles and create new shots that we can add into the music video to make the changes that need to be made from the comments that we received.