Evaluation - Karisha

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

Primarily, we chose the song Technologic by Daft Punk. We wanted to go with an electro theme to match the song by creating a surreal, colour saturated video in a non linear form but found it very hard to produce ideas as the song was very long and repetitive. After remixing and editing the song, we still found it difficult to construct effective ideas, and were quickly running out of time. Therefore, we started the planning process again by choosing a different song, namely ‘Day n Nite’ by Kid Cudi. It is an alternative hip-hop song which was produced in December 2007. Almost instantly we were able to come up with a range of ideas that used, developed and challenged forms of real media products.

Chris Cunningham is a well-known creative music video director and we were influenced by him as his videos were surreal, artistic and challenged generic conventions of music genre stereotypes. Watching the videos that he had directed, gave us ideas for our own. We were also influenced by other music videos from the likes of Kanye West and Jay-Z, who produce music of a similar genre to Kid Cudi. Jay-Z has produced many of his videos in black and white which we liked and wanted to use in our own video. They both use a variety of shots taken from a lot of different locations which we all thought made an effective music video. We found that watching the existing video for ‘Day n Nite’ which was released in February 2008 and directed by a French Director, So Me, helped us brainstorm what we would and wouldn’t like to include in our video as we all felt his music video did not match the song well at all.

We knew we wanted a dark and surreal feel to the video, unlike the original, as this is what we collated from listening to the song repeatedly and analysing the lyrics. We created mind maps to illustrate and annotate what we wanted our music video to be like.

Typically, music videos of a hip hop genre will include contain consist of themes of possession, voyeurism, wealth, glamour and iconography. They are commonly very performance based, so we wanted to challenge that convention by making our video narrative based by intercutting shots of dream and reality. We also had no footage of any generic themes and no constant close ups of the icon unlike a typical hip hop video. We introduced a new Artist the scene called Alter Ego.

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

The combination of our main product and our ancillary texts were effective as we included screenshots from our video to connote a dark and sinister theme, just like we had included in our main product. Continuing the same theme with our magazine advert and digipak meant that we provided evidence that we wanted them to be closely linked so that people knew they were part of the same set.

Our aim was not to make the main product and ancillary texts to look exactly the same but to have them of the same theme. We spent a lot of time editing the screen shots we took and wanted to include on the ancillary texts by using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to turn them into effective images that looked attractive and bold, as we wanted them to attract attention.

We wanted to present our Artist, Alter Ego as a new upcoming artist with an edgy, urban look. We used typically iconic photographs to promote this. Our aim was to predominately attract hip hop listeners, and so tailored our designs to their taste. We used a lot of dark colours, but ensured our text and fonts were bright and stood out well.
In the end, the products felt like they were produced individually, but still closely linked with one another so buyers knew they were part of the same set but not the same product.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We gave our music video to a lot of different types of people to watch whilst we were still editing. People that wouldn’t characteristically listen to this type of music liked our video and said they liked the fact we tried to not make our video most of the same conventions of a typical hip hop video. Initially, most viewers stated that it was difficult for them to comprehend the dream and reality aspects of the video. We acted upon this by brainstorming ideas as to how we would make this clearer. We hoped that keeping the ‘reality’ bits of the video in colour, and ‘dream’ bits in black and white would make it more understandable.

Some liked it more than others. They all commented on the fact that it suited the lyrics and theme of the song well and liked our adaptation to the video over the original. Others, like me, felt we had sped up too much of the video, resulting in most of the video using the same effect which became tedious to watch.

During editing, we were unsure about how to end our video. This is because half our group wanted the video to end in the view of our artist waking up from a dream, whereas the other half wanted the video to end in dream form as it was more climatic, and felt that ending it in reality form would be an anti-climax. We used our audience feedback to help us decide how to end the video.

Most of our feedback assured that they were kept engaged throughout the whole video which was good to hear.

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

Whilst planning, we took pictures of images we found influential as this helped with our brainstorming and mind maps. We used a digital Canon still camera. We produced image boards of our influences and target audience on the computer.

When constructing our main product, most of our shots were taken outside so we had to make sure we took them where there was sufficient lighting, and lots of open areas to avoid unnecessary shadowing and darkened filmography. Due to the name of the song ‘day n nite’, we inevitably needed to take shots in the dark to represent the night. We filmed this effectively by filming in areas in the evening where there was a lot of light available. For example, on well lit streets and near street lamps, however this became difficult because it was never bright enough. To overcome this problem, we filmed inside using darkened rooms and spotlights to create a sinister and dark atmosphere.

We used a Panasonic video camera for all our filming and took extra care when carrying it as it had to be transported to many different locations for filming. The majority of our shots needed a tripod to be used, to avoid a shaky and unprofessional looking video. The tripod enabled us to have smooth, professional looking tracking shots.

When editing, we used Final Cut Pro for making our music video look professional. We included a variety of different transitions and effects to help keep the audience fully engaged throughout the whole music video. We needed to record a log of all our footage, so they were quickly accessible when we inserted them into the programme to be edited.
When creating our ancillary texts which consisted of a magazine poster and digipak, we used Adobe Illustrator to design the fonts we wanted to appear on them. We used Adobe Photoshop to edit all our pictures using appropriate tools and features that the programme offered in contributing to make our images look professional and attractive. We downloaded extra brushes to create the exact effect we wanted.