*..Media..*: 2010

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

Our media product uses many forms and conventions of real media products such as the continual use of lip-syncing throughout the video. The lip-synching is used combined with the dancing to convey a real music video, as videos such as ‘Alexandra Burke - Bad Boys’ does when she has elements of dancing and lip-syncing combined. We also used an expensive car (a Porsche) to create the image of a ‘pop star’ as Rihanna does in ‘Take a Bow’; the expensive sports car suggests a lavish life therefore conveying the life of a famous star. We created the pop star name ‘Nadelle’ as it was a combination of our actresses name ‘Nadia-El’, we think the name works because it is eye-catching and unusual such as pop star names like ‘Beyonce’ and ‘Shakira’. Looking at the technical aspects of our video we used fast cuts, cut zooms and cutting exactly on the beat to create a fast flowing video which fits into the conventions of fast pop videos with strong beats. You can see this from (0.12s-0.16s) at the beginning of the video as we used a cut zoom faded in then out and the dancing exactly to the beat so it is choppy and fast paced like a real media product.

We also used many ‘meat shots’ which show the main artist or focus of the video, e.g. at 0.49s of our video we use a close up of ‘Nadelle’s’ face. Research shows that audiences like to see many ‘meat shots’ of the main character or the lead artist in a band, or in this case, the soloist. Amongst the meat shots and fast cuts you can see from our video we took performance into consideration. Just like a real media product everything was planned precisely including the dance choreography. The choreography was important as it is dramatically timed to the beat and uses the song as a focus, as the song is about posing the video conveys this with lots of shots of the artist posing. This performance is a conventional one as it is mainly in the style of street dancing like many pop videos use.

Other conventions we used were costumes for ‘Nadelle’, these including some previous costumes used for dancing competitions, we also put her in very glamorous clothing which can be seen in videos such as Cheryl Cole ‘Fight For This Love.’ These lavish clothes would be typical of this genre of music video. Other things included in her look were over the top make up and extreme hairstyles to get across the point that Nadelle was supposed to be a celebrity. The excessive make up draws attention to Nadelle’s beauty and the image of glamour.

We chose to make our video black and white as Beyonce’s video for ‘Single Ladies’ inspired us. This video has won many awards including ‘’Video of the year 2009’’, as a result of this there has been many more black and white videos brought out recently such Pixie Lott ‘Cry me out’. Currently in the music video industry many artists from different genres are all using the black and white theme for their videos, our research into the popularity of these videos lead us to produce our own black and white product. Our video relied both on natural and artificial lighting, which was used for different parts of the video. We used natural lighting outside for the Porsche scenes to convey a more realistic setting with real backdrops such as houses and other cars. This was also used for variation as it would have been less interesting to film every scene in the same place, therefore scenes were inter cut for continual variation in the video itself. We also had to think about continuity in our media product as we used many different costumes and styles. Each style had to be assigned to certain scenes to make sure we would have continuity when editing through the scenes to create our finished product.

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

Our digi-pack is effective in conveying the image and music genre of our artist. The black and white theme of the cover supports the black and white theme of the video and creates a link between the two so people recognize the product. The cover focuses on the beauty of the artist, which is a main selling point for pop artists in the 21^st century. Our magazine advertisement for the single shows the artist in various poses in a filmstrip, we used this because it is eye catching and relates to the song, which is about posing. We used a watercolour background, as we wanted to use colour for a brighter poster that would attract the reader’s attention. We used a picture of the front and back cover on the poster to show the readers what they would be looking for if they went out to buy the CD. We also informed them of the different media products available such as the ‘deluxe edition’, this may persuade the audience to buy it as a present or as a collectable as the deluxe edition is more prestigious and rare. The CD cover of a single can be just as important as the single itself or its promotional video. We had to make sure our cover highlighted ‘Nadelle’s’ pop star image so that the target population of our audience would recognize this.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback showed us that our product was successful in conveying the image of a pop star. Our audience particularly enjoyed the end of our video, as it was original and showed the artist laughing which was more realistic and showed a different side to the artist. We used the idea of a big screen where you could see Nadelle’s shadow dancing behind it, she bursts through the screens on the beat and the lighting changes so you can see her face. Some feedback included people saying that it would not look out of place on a music video channel such as MTV. We also had some feedback from Internet viewers on Youtube saying ‘this is fab, well done girls’. The video has had over 150 views in a short space of time, which encourages us to believe that our product was well received by our audience. A weaker element of our video is that it had a lack of narrative to amerce the audience into the video. We felt that a more performance based video would be more well suited for this song as it is not a song that has a huge meaning behind it but it has a focus of ‘posing’ which we did amplify. Other weaker elements are our lack of variation in terms of our shot location. We only used two settings to convey a realistic setting and an artificial one. We mainly used the studio as the song is about photographing someone, which may be done in a studio setting with a white backdrop. We also used a camera in some of the shots to strengthen the idea that that was the main focus of the song. A weakness may be conveyed by the way the contrast of light and dark shots are used, some shots are very sharp and dark and others are lighter. This however, was done purposefully for variation in the shots lighting. A strength however is that we used many effects such as the mirror effect which showed Nadelle on both sides of the screen. We also used fade in and fade out to create a smooth transition between certain shots. In our video we used dramatic lighting with the car scene, we angled the camera correctly so that the sun would reflect off the car, this gave the effect that the car was brand new and was very clean. This was to give off the effect that ‘Nadelle’ was a celebrity and had lots of money.

Many members of the audience liked the black and white effect and others said we could have used colours to give more of a variety, however we decided on the black and white theme as it is becoming more and more popular with many modern pop videos being made, we wanted to get across the idea that our video was modern and professional which is why we decided on the black and white theme.

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

To construct our music video we used I movie and Final Cut, we decided to make our video on I movie as we felt comfortable using the software that we were used to however the technical aspects of I movie aren’t not as advanced as final cut so we chose to use final cut to edit certain clips. For example our ‘silhouette’ scenes were originally filmed with a white background, we felt this didn’t look as professional as it could and used final cut to crop our footage. We also used final cut to brighten up some clips, as the Porsche scenes were originally filmed in colour and in a natural lighting, once they were turned to black and white some scenes were very dark due to the clouds that day therefore we took the clips to final cut and used the colour adjuster to lighten the clips. We used Imovie to add other effects such as numerous flashes used during the chorus when taking a picture is mentioned. We used simple fade in and fade out’s to make transitions from each clip smoother and a fade out at the end of the video this is a typical convention of a music video today.

To construct our digi-pack and magazine advertisement we used Photoshop. For the front cover of our CD case we decided to keep to the black and white theme but we wanted to show that we could use colour so we gave Nadelle a mask to hold during the photo shoot. When we decided on the photo we were going to use we thought it would look best if we kept the mask in colour. To do this we used layers in Photoshop, we cut out the mask from the original colour photo and put it a separate layer, and we turned the original photo black and white and then put the coloured mask back into the photograph and blended both layers together. For our magazine article we used a ‘watercolour’ photo of Nadelle for the background this was to make sure the advertisement was eye-catching. We also used a filmstrip of photos of Nadelle with the same mask from her CD cover this is so that people would relate the two together; we were inspired to use a filmstrip in our advertisement as we had recently this used in another magazine.

For our research we used website such as ‘YouTube’ to look at many different music videos. We started by looking at different music genres such as pop, rock, hip-hop and R&B. Once we had decided on our song, which was in the pop genre, we looked at many modern pop videos for solo artists such as Miley Cyrus ‘Party in the USA’ and Beyonce ‘Single Ladies’ We took into account all of the conventions used in similar videos, we noticed that many of these videos included dancing, lip synching etc but the main point we noticed was that more often than not it was a performance based video. Very few of the videos we looked at had a narrative to the story this is why we decided to use lots of dancing and make it performance based. We used the website freecovers.net to look at many different artists CD covers, this website was very useful to us as we were able to look at pop artists similar to Nadelle and evaluate their CD covers this came in very helpful for when we had to make our cover.