Luke Stevens Evaluation

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

Upon intense research into our genre, R&B/Hip Hop, we noticed a few major trends, our target convention to follow and deviate from was the voyeuristic treatment of the female body, as well as the point of view camera angle that would scan up and down a females body, we found that in certain music videos, such as the original music video for our chosen song would treat the female body as an object. We challenge this as we made our video look like a typical genre specific video and convinced people into believing it was targeted at men who like watching such videos, this changed, however, when the focus switched from girls to boys, perhaps shocking the audience, this shock appeal gave a comic effect to the video, which the song is notorious for, it has been used in many films and television, such as ‘Norbit’ and ‘Family Guy’. 

Like many R&B videos, it is a conceptual driven video, it does not feature a performance or a storyline, it is just a bunch of random clips mashed together, the editing is, like most videos, tailored to the beat, this adds a professional touch and makes it seem like the real thing, we developed some forms and conventions of real media products by challenging them, instead of making a video that appeals to only one particular audience, it adds a comedy side which can appeal to anyone the video is deemed appropriate for, this means it can make more money and even be virally spread, which is a very desirable trait in the modern world as viral ‘hype’ can be pivotal for the success or failure of a media product. It is very rare to see comedy in an R&B or Hip Hop music video, because rappers and artists from that genre like to take themselves seriously or have a certain persona that they want to keep up as it may gain them more respect, Kelis’ original video was not comedic, but the interpretations in TV and Film have been mainly comedy driven, this may be because it is a gimmicky song that has been overplayed on the radio and has lost it’s appeal as a serious song.

We found many inspirational videos that have helped us develop our music videos, mainly in film, we saw a carwash scene from the film ‘Dodgeball’ which includes an all male carwash team being completely dominated by a female team, the trade was going to the women as they were more attractive to the male audience. We also saw a parody of our song appear in the film ‘Date Movie’ which includes a woman dancing around the streets (similar to ‘Singing in the Rain) in a fatsuit.

A theory that we decided to take advantage of was Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory, which outlines the fact that in music videos, the female body is treated voyeuristically from the male eyeline. We used this to our advantage and did the same for the boys and girls in our music video.

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

To build an effective combination of work we decided we must create a brand or some kind of theme that can be noticed throughout our project, I believe we created a brand image and this proved very effective as it not only could be seen but enhanced our project in many ways, it is enhanced as we presented our idea in the same way throughout, making our video and possibly our production company recognisable straight away.

In the video we used many branding elements, these included fast editing, the voyeuristic treatment of the male and female body as well as copycat shots that mimic typical hip-hop images, this development shows that we have the ability to mimic a genre in such a way that our audience will notice that we are parodying. This parody also shows that we can target an audience and bring them something which will be humorous and with the help of camera work and editing we can develop this into such a product that is successful. As the music video is the bulk of the project, it was the first thing we thought about, the magazine advert and the digipak were side projects completed with the music video in mind, this means they were designed to be effective in combination with the main product.

The digipak can be related instantly to a few moments in the music video, this is where our model’s eye colour changes as she blinks (the changing eye colour is the focal point of the album and the album cover) and another part of the digipak which is relative to the music video is the background, which looks just like pink food colouring or ink being dropped in water, one of the shots in our music video includes this. Our first idea for the digipak was simply a female face with a thick moustache, which, I think would work well in combination with the music video as it has the same comical switch of male and female, but we decided that this would not look professional, after all we wanted our product to look as much like the real thing as possible.

 I believe our use of the colour pink is a main theme of the whole project, our blog is even pink! This was because of the song, ‘Milkshake’ which we believe is very much a pink themed song. On the back of our digipak we used certain items that you would often see on a CD, the production companies and the label, a barcode (which will take you straight to our website if scanned by a QR scanner app) and I believe this enhances it.

The magazine advert for a single and a music video typically features the album cover as a main attraction, so we decided we would do this, we provided two different magazine adverts, one including our album cover in the middle, and the other held a deconstructed version of our album cover, revealing more of our background, this follows the established norms of a magazine advert as it is bold and it has the barcode and record label logos as well as the artist name and release date.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience profile was those aged between 16 and 25, we targeted both males and females as well as fans of all music, but specifically those who listen to garage and R&B,  we decided this because of some of the adult themes of our music video, as well as the fact that the song appeals to this audience, the song has been a massive success in the humour department as it has many intertextual references throughout television and film.  As our music video is designed with humour as a key aspect, the audience must be able to understand the fact that it is not a serious video designed  to appeal to men or women’s sexual desires. For this reason we have excluded the older population from our target audience.

We tailored our music video in several ways to appeal to this audience, we put in several voyeuristic images that would not just appeal aesthetically to the male/female viewer but would lead the female/male viewer to believe it’s “just another hip-hop video” but then be astounded by the switchover. I believe the audience will be hooked by our music video as it is very easy to watch but hard to pull yourself away from, I also believe that our ancillary texts are so well developed that they will make our target audience want to watch the music video and look into more of UV PRODUCTIONS work.

 After we finished our music video and ancillary texts we received lots of compliments, this was from many of our target audience, unfortunately, as we only have access to a few audience members at the top end of our spectrum, the majority of people who have seen it are in the bottom end, this makes our data a bit off key, however we have had extremely high demand from classmates and those from our school to see the video, this is partly due to word of mouth and partly because of the fact two boys were scantily clad and washing a car which proved a big hit with those of our age, laughing and shock horror was common among the viewers.

There were a total of three viewings to the class in order to get feedback and the music video was changed after every one, comments were written down and taken on board, when the digipak and magazine cover were being developed we received comments and compliments that helped us along the way.

From this audience feedback I feel very confident that if our product was put next to another that was produced by a very successful company that it would fare well in a contest. I believe we made a music video to the best of our ability and maximised the technology and resources we had at our fingertips. If the products were used to promote the single and artist I think that they would work very well and boost sales, this is because the video would thrive due to word of mouth.

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

In our whole product we used an arsenal of equipment ranging from the latest Photoshop programming to our blog and what you are reading this on, Wix.

Our first venture into the technology side of media was research, we used sites such as google and youtube to look at videos that inspire us and create a mood board, we created a wordstorm using a site called Wordle, this helps you create a great way to present a few ideas. We did present our idea using Powerpoint and recorded this, you can see this on our blog. We created a blog on blogger which we posted everything to do with our project onto, blogger allows you to tailor your page in many ways, we tried out many backgrounds throughout our project and found our present one to be the most effective, it opens up into many different views of our posts, a limitation of our previous themes was that we could not post big enough pictures that justify our work, this was the main reason for a theme change.

To produce the magazine advert and the digipak we used a stills camera, Nikon D40 and the basic shooting facilities such as a green screen which were available for us in the media centre. The green screen made it a lot easier to edit the photos we shot. To edit our digipak together I used photoshop, inside photoshop we installed brushes and templates to ensure our digipak was smooth and looked professional, obviously we didn’t have the facilities to print out the CD and digipak in order to distribute them for feedback, but we made it look as legitimate as we could.

The camera we used in order to film our scenes we used was a Nikon D40 with automatic or manual focus and exposure and wide screen capacity. We also used a tripod with pan and tilt controls. We experienced several problems with the filming including only having one camera and one chance to get a shot (milkshake smashing) and getting the right focus. Many shots had to be re-done after we keyframed them in our editing software as they were not clear when zoomed. We eventually got the hang of using the technology to it’s arête.  

For the editing of the music video we used Final Cut Pro Express, this took a while to get our head’s around but we ended up with a good edit, we used keyframing heavily, as well as special effects such as colour enhancing. We had problems with the speed of editing as it is a lengthy process but learning the shortcuts greatly enhanced our ability to save time.

This is the link to my Wix

Filming Day 5

For our last filming session all we needed to do was to film some close up shots of the car wash scene, the falling of the milkshake and throwing of the ice cream. We wanted to use the video on our blog of things smashing as inspiration for part of this filming day. We used four different glasses filled them with milkshake and smashed them on a white sheet so that it was possible to see the full effect of the glasses smashing. To get the intended angles we had to use two cameras, both being in different positions when filming as we only had 4 glasses so therefore we had to be  precise to get a variety shots. The next thing we had to capture was the throwing of ice cream at a wall, which we planned  in our post - it storyboard. To achieve this we again used both cameras at different positions and captured the same footage at different angles. we found that by spraying the wall with water before throwing the ice cream gave the best effect as it would allow the ice cream to melt down the wall and splatter once thrown. Finally the last things we had to film was the close ups for the car scene which was quick and easily done as we knew the car wash sequence already. This day of filming was very successful  as we managed to get every piece of footage that we needed to be capable of finishing our music video. 

M.I.A.- Bad Girls

M.I.A. and Romain Gavras have teamed up again, this video is very different, however to 'Born Free'. Instead of a narrative, it's a conceptual performance based video. Romain Gavras has included some of the basic conventions of his videos (such as a sense of peculiarity, the video consists of a lot of Egyptians racing cars up and down and doing stunts. This is something that is quite a popular thing to do in Egypt, as it has been seen in many viral videos, the idea of people looking comfortable with the cameras around like a documentary goes with the other videos high verisimilitude.

Changes to album cover

After looking at many CDs we decided ours was missing a few things such as; a blurb including the rights to the music (which we do not hold) more songs (as it has two CDs and we had five versions of the same song!) we also included details about the songs such as timings and featuring artists.

We also realised we had made the small mistake of not including the artist's name on the cover! Here is our improved version.

Our favourite part is that if you use an app on your smartphone that can scan QR barcodes to scan the barcode on the bottom right, you will be taken to our blog;

uvproductions.blogspot.com

-Click the image to enlarge and see it the way it should be seen-

Props

Here are the props we used within our music video:

This is an image of a cocktail umbrella which we used at the start of the film as it is eye catching and creates mystery of what is going to be included in the video.

We also used strawberries in the video as it was used within stereotypical shots which portray sexual elements.

As the title is 'Milkshake' we decided we must include milkshakes within the video. This prop was used throughout the video to keep relating to the title of the song and to remind the audience.

This is an image of food colouring in water, we used food colouring to create a certain effect which matches a certain part of the music. It goes well with the music as it is a slow movement which goes well with the slow paced section in the song.

When the music slows down we decided to film a crazy daisy squirting water.

Champagne is another prop used which is used for a champagne fight in the music video. It creates comedy within the video.

We needed to use props for the car wash scene to make it realistic so objects such as a sponge, bucket and hose was used.

In this picture you can see all the props used in the car wash scene, also you can see the car that we used. This again was needed to be realistic for the audience to watch.

Ice lolly was a prop we used as we wanted to create an intended effect with it which was to show the ice lolly melting but in fast motion, to see the whole melting process.

We decided to follow our post it note storyboard and shoot ice cream being thrown at a garage door. For this we needed the prop of the ice cream. 

We wanted to try and experiment and use the images that we have used for inspiration and video colored paint dripping down a white page. 

We also covered the camera in cling film so that we could spray silly string towards the camera. 

To end the music video we used the prop, being a part popper. This shown popping at the end of the song shows the ending of the video.

At the moment we are playing around with the magazine advert, here are a few of our ideas.

We are not sure whether to go with the split album cover or the normal one, we are happy with the background as it fits in with the conventions of our music video and our album cover. The benefits of the split album cover are that it looks different to the album cover and shows that is more of a themed product than the same thing simply put on a different sized background. It also shows that we can use photoshop properly more than just plonking an image on another. However, many people we have asked have told us that the first image looked more professional and more like we are promoting an album, this is because it follows the conventions of other album promoting magazine adverts. Our final choice is still in contention.

Filming Day 4

We have looked at the footage that we still need to film and have split them into two filming sessions. The first one being filming day 4, we decided to film the crazy daisy and the morphing section of our film. We took the crazy daisy outside into the garden and set up the camera under a waterproof sheet to protect it. Our aim was to film it in a swinging motion to slow down in time to the beat of our music. We filmed three different angle of the crazy daisy and experimented with how the water came out of it. The second part of the filming session was to film the morph. We set the camera up inside so that we had a plain white backdrop. We had to make sure the camera was the same distance away from the wall at all times so that each image looked equal to get the full effect of the morph once on the editing suite. We used a post-it note as a marker to show the actors where to stand for each shot. We raised the camera in stages so that we had photos of each part of the body showing a feminine figure and a hairy manly figure. Overall, the filming session went well as we got the footage we needed however we did suffer some costume faults but dealt with them in the correct way. The original camera we wanted to use ran out of battery however we had a back up camera available. We also decided to film a zoom of a hairy belly button as we needed this footage for a short part of our music video. This was successful.

Costumes

Dancers Costumes:

The first image shows the leotards that the dancers wore. We wanted to have them in theses costumes but the time we had until the filming day was minimal, so therefore we asked a gymnast in our class to bring in three leotards. The reason why we wanted them in leotards was to show off sexual feminine figures as this is a common trait within dance music videos. The second image shows the footwear the dancers wore being black high heels. This was again to enhance the sexual figure as this is more appealing for a male audience.

Males Costumes:

These are the costumes which the males wore for the car wash scene. We decided for them to wear shorts and a bikini top, both being female clothing. We did this because it is contradicting and therefore creates comedy within our film. It emphasises the irony we are trying to portray being that normally within a dance music video it would be females within this scene, not males.

This is our final digipak, we chose to carry our theme through all of the features of the pack, experimenting helped a lot, many of the things we used in the pack were developed over time from our primary ideas, the wispy background was inspired by the part of our video when we dropped ink into a bowl. The faceplay was pure experimentation, we also kept to a specific font, 'Helvetica' throughout the pack.

The cover and other pictures were singular images which were originally some of our ideas, this was then all put together into a template, we wanted it to look as professional as possible. Many ideas were put in after the template was involved, an example of this is the 'MILK SHAKE' on the CDs themselves. The CD parts could be CDs or the part that holds the CD.

UV Productions Audience Feedback 4/1/12

- Maybe use boys at the start as well as the end and put some of the girls towards the end.

- Really good, I like the tye dye effect used in the water and the dancers fit in well with the song.

-Big contrast between inside and outside shots, brightness changes too much.

- Needs more close ups of Luke and Jack in the car scene.

- Zoom into the colour in the bowl because you can see the hands.

- I really liked the choreography, loved the humor, melting ice lolly was good and can see the representation of genre.

- Could do a shot from inside of the car when there washing the windows? - really good though!

- Good choreography and I like the melting ice lolly.

- Reshoot the car shots and out of focus shots.

From this feedback we have gained knowledge on what to improve on in our music video. We will be reshooting certain shots to make them more clear and to improve the quality of certain shots. Also we are going to add some more shots which include close ups to achieve a variety of shots within the video.

Photoshop practice and album design drafts

At the start of the project, one of our ideas that did not get storyboarded was the 'eyedea' of changing eye colour, we trained ourselves to be pro at this, however it only worked well with a subtle colour change such as this radiant purple, the bright colours are not subtle enough so they look obviously photoshopped, these were used in the video as they are less noticeable, the slightly subtler colours were used in the album cover, and to make it look more real we put a slightly transparent brush over the top in pink, this gave the whole front cover a rosey tint, almost as if you were looking at it through 70's sunglasses. 

The process of changing eye colour on photoshop is very simple to do, however it can be done sloppily. The stages of changing the eye colour are:

1- get a photo which has a close up or good quality eye (preferably a lighter shade)

2- when in photoshop, use a cutting tool to cut around the bit with the colour, layer via copy. 

3- cut out the pupil, layer via cut

4- select the layer in which the coloured eye is.

5- go to image- adjustments- colour balance

6- fiddle with the bars until you get the colour you desire.

Music video - Rough Cut

We are very pleased with our progress so far, if this is watched alongside the storyboard sequence you may be able to notice a few things, we have made a few minor changes and we are missing a few small bits from the video, this is due to the fact that we haven't filmed some bits yet. We are not pleased with the image quality at the moment, this is mainly due to the uploading process, (blogger reduces image quality) so we will upload it to youtube or vimeo when it is finished and embed it- vimeo offers the best image quality and hd sound. We are refilming some things due to feedback we have received, including the food colouring in water, which will be filmed from a better angle in HD.

This video was made by an independent film maker, they used found footage and edited it on top of a song by 'Neon Neon' it was not a single by the band so there was no previous video made, when the band saw the video they commissioned it to be used as live show projection, this shows the success a video can have, this was probably made with very little time, money and effort but as it follows the conventions of the band (the use of a Delorean, 80's atmosphere and sharp editing). The video has a clear relation to the lyrics (Dream Cars etc). 

Experimentation with text

Here we have experimented with some text fonts and have tried to create a visually interesting background which could be applied to either our music album or magazine advert. This was created using photoshop which was an easy tool to use to make this effect. In order to create a successful magazine advert and album cover we as a group are aware that they must be eye catching and interesting to look at which will grab our target audience.

Developing album covers

This was one of our primary ideas to play on the boy/girl and voyeuristic theme, sadly it didn't look as good as we thought it would, changing the background behind a person is not only hard but can lead to problems later when you try to change it, it was way too time consuming, we decided to explore different paths.

This idea had it's flaws, too. We developed the idea of the dripping milkshake from a tutorial on using text with dripping blood, we decided to make this effect pink to go with our theme, this was neither the album cover or the magazine advert. We were using the liquify tool and got carried away or angry, that's open for interpretation, and due to a fluke, this effect came about.

This was our final dripping text idea, aspects of this image were used in our album cover, we are pleased with it.

Group Meeting Ten

Today we gathered as a group to discuss what needs to be done in order to complete our music video. We have almost finished filming however there is still one more filming session to complete. The editing is also coming along well as we are happy with how the video is starting to look and develope. As well as editing our sequence w are also designing a variety of album covers for the video. Things that now needs to be completed is the final filming session which we are going to pick a near date to do so and also to be efficent with the editing of all our footage.

Third Filming session

We had decided to use the drama studio to shoot the shots that involved the dancers. We got permission to shoot during a lesson and had artificial lighting that worked well with what we shot. We managed to get hold of three dancers and three leotards and high heels the girls put the adequate amount of make up on and we made sure that the lighting was correct on them so that we could see them through the camera. Sophie had brought along some milkshake and cream the we used as props to dance with. Sarah then taught the dancers a routine that they could perform to the music. The dancers practised the dance and we set up the camera in the correct position. We then experimented with different angles and the footage came out really good. We had shot more than we needed and were really pleased with how we had used the time. The lesson after the shooting was media so we uploaded the footage onto the computer and began to edit it into our sequence.