Evaluation

Joseph Carlton

Evaluation In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Within our music video we reflected conventions of the UK Hip-Hop genre by having lots of shots of the actual artists themselves rapping. We also played to conventions by having fairly quick cutting between shots. The clothing worn by the actors within the music video are also in line with the usual conventions of what artists within the Hip-Hop genre wear.

This shot is an example of how the shots used in our music video reflect conventions of the UK Hip-Hop genre. In recent years, artists within the Hip-Hop genre have started using comedic value within their music videos. We reflected this convention by using a shot of a rubber duck smoking to open the music video up.

There are multiple shots within the video of the artists performing around cars. This is a regular occurrence in Hip-Hop music videos. Smoking is another convention that is more often than not included in the genre’s music videos. This is another convention we included in our video.

In a lot of music videos there is a relationship between the visuals and the audio. Whilst there isn’t a direct relationship between the two, the editing could be seen as the relationship between the two. This is because the cutting has been done in line with the audio. This is one of the theory’s put forward by Andrew Goodwin.

Another theory put forward by Andrew Goodwin is that the close ups within the music videos are put in at the request of the record label. There are lots of close ups within our music video however this is to create a link on a more personal level with the audience.

Q.1 Continued

The cover of our digipack plays to conventions of the Hip-Hop genre by showing the image of a broken road to fit in with the urban nature of Hip-Hop. The back includes the names of the artists, producer and the website used by the group. This is not an exclusive trait of the genre as a lot of artists tend to include this. Another inclusion in the digipack is the lyrics on the inside. Again this is not exclusive however this is regularly seen within Hip-Hop digipacks. The fonts used are predominantly graffiti style as this is a convention of Hip-Hop.

Q.1 ContinuedJust like in the digipack, the fonts used are mainly that of a graffiti style. This is to keep a recurring pattern going throughout that consistently sticks to conventions of the genre.The image of the artists at the bottom of the advertisement is recognised as a convention throughout all genres not just Hip-Hop.

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

The colour scheme of red and black has been carried across from our digipack to our advert. This has been done to create more of a relation between the two media products. Due to the fact the artists are wearing the same clothes in two of the media products, this reinforces the artist’s images as urban. The smoking and the cars also reinforce the image.

We used a still from our video in the magazine advert to create more of a link between the two. This will also make the artists more recognisable when potential buyers see the advert.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

“This is good, I like the bits outside and the bits in between the verses, and the start of the first verse is good, the bits where you’re sat inside are a bit dull though, like on Matty’s verse it’s just his face but then it goes to a really good scene with him rapping to the camera and you two bopping behind him which looks cool, but I reckon there should have been more of it.”

From this feedback we learned that we should possibly have used more shots like the outside shots. This is because the feedback reads, “I like the bits outside.” Another thing we learned is that we should have had less shots of just the rappers individually rapping. This is because the feedback says, “Like on Matty’s verse it’s just his face”.

“I really enjoyed the fact you had a lot of the same shots you’d expect to see in a Hip-Hop music video. Saying that I think it would have been good to have a wider variety of shots.”

From this feedback we have learned that although the shots we have used are relevant to the genre, we should have maybe thought about using a wider variety of shots to keep the video interesting throughout.

“Although the video did fit the genre quite well, it lacked variety a little bit. The clothes worn by the rappers were good because they were the type of clothes you expect to see in Hip-Hop. I also liked the use of the cars in the shots.”

This feedback re-enforced the last point of not having the widest variety of shots, however they have said they liked our inclusion of the cars the clothes worn. This shows that although we could have made some changes, at least some of the things we used were correct.

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

We used different media technologies throughout the project. Each different type of technology has it’s own way in which it helped us.

During the research segment of our project, the main media technology used was Google. We used Google to do research on different digipacks from the Hip-Hop genre, this helped us construct our own digipack as we knew what we needed to include within it. Blogger is another media technology that was used throughout the research stage. We used blogger to upload all the research we did. This not only helped us as it archives all of our work, it is also the way in which our work gets marked. We also used Survey Monkey during the research stage as we needed to do audience research and find out what our audience expect to see within music videos from the Hip-Hop genre. This helped us decide what we were going to put in our video.

We used the vast majority of our media technologies during the construction stage of the project. The Canon 600D camera was the main piece of technology used as we needed this to shoot the video, take images for our magazine advert and also for the digipack. We had a tri-pod to go along with the camera to ensure we had steady shots and didn’t have to spend ages doing re-shoots. This camera, unlike all DSLR cameras, are able to shoot videos as well as take images.