Day & Night Media Evaluation

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


Our music video, takes inspiration from existing forms of media aswell as challenging the conventions of these media products.



The track is ‘Day & Night’ By Kid Cudi, which conveys the artist of being alone in the world after a girl no longer wants to be with him. One source of inspiration we used throughout the video is the use of ellipses, which we have seen being used in many films and videos. One example of this is the use of ellipses in the film Kidulthood, which was also used to convey isolation and loneliness.

Another way we have used existing conventions is the style of the artist "Lil Bee". His style is similar to artists such as T.i, Lil Wayne and 50 Cent.




Here we show our artist with similar styles to those we reseached. Things such as his flat peaked hat, shades and baggy jeans all contribute to the style.




Real media texts can often be seen as a "straightjacket" to creativity, however we felt that the framework of existing videos helped us greatly in coming up with a video of that genre.



(9 Key frames of our video)



Shot 1) This is probably the most important frame in the whole video, as it sets up the plot. Without this, the audience may not have understood what exactly is going on. It also uses the typical music video phone, the iphone, which has been seen in many music videos.



Shot 2) This is the 1st shot of his dream, where he is obviously still thinking about being with his girl. This dream scene is portrayed by changing the image to black and white, and making it different to reality.


Shot 3) Development on shot 2, as he has a realisation that they are over as she has even gone from his dreams.


Shot 4) Again, he is seeing the girl that he wants, but in reality she has moved on. The next scene shows her walking off with another lad, matching up with the lyrics "he thinks hes first but really finished last". This shows that he hasnt got there in time to get back with his girl.


Shot 5) This shot shows that although shes got on with her life, shes still the one thing on his mind and that he is still interested on what she is up to.


Shot 6) This shot was more of a lyric specific shot, and the glare on the sunglasses reffered to "He's on the move can't seem to shake the shade". Obviously the artist is wearing shades and thats why we have emphasised these, but the lyric has a deeper meaning also. The shade is conveying the darkness surrounding his emotions.


Shot 7) Again, lyric specific for "he fades away, he slips into his white nikes". However, to emphasise this further, and develop the fact these trainers are a frequent feature in rapper's style, we added a ghosting affect, which made them linger on screen longer for the full effect.


Shot 8) This significant shot is the very last shot of the video. It represents how he's finally seeing the light, and the future looks bright after trying his best to get over his girl. This develops the plot, and gives it a true ending.


Shot 9) This frame just incorporates the grafitti mise-en-scen that is often involved in rap videos. This is representing "The Hood" as a run down, grimy place, which is exactly how we wanted to convey the artist. (as a man from the areas rap often descends from)

(9 key frames from other videos )

These are the other music videos that exhibit some of the same ideas. We found these after we had produced our video, and it showed us that our video involves the conventions of proffessional R'n'B videos. If our video involved none of these, we would have felt that it did not use and develop existing products.

Shot 1) The frequently used iphone appearing in the video "spotlight" by Jennifer Hudson.

Shot 2) This is similar to our video as this key frame is at the beginning of the video to signify a relationship

Shot 3) The video "my boo", an R'n'B love song by Alicia keys and Usher, were the lyrics also represent lonliness. The long shot of her in the emptyy bed signifies what we attempted but the opposite way round. (The man was the lonely one)

Shot 4) Our image showed how he was too late, and his girl had moved on. This frame from "take a bow" by Rhianna shows the same thing. She has ended it, he chases her and she drives away un-interested.

Shot 5) "Birthday sex" by Jerimiah has a similar image to ours, however we used Adobe premier to edit the shot.

Shot 6) "sunglasses at Night" by Skepta also shows the lense flare we achieved for our artist. The "coolness" rap artists try to achieve is helped greatly by the sunglasses, and the lense flare just emphasises the coolness.

Shot 7) Smart trainers in the video "in my head" by Jason Derulo are a key feature of any R'n'B video. And often these particular trainers are known as "high-tops". We took this style and incorporated it into our video, to make sure our artist kept with the trend of the usual rap artists.

Shot 8) This frame from the same video is uses a white background with a blacked out image of him dancing. We had our artist dfancing on a white background throughout, however this image matches well with our final shot, as he walks off into the light.

Shot 9) The graffiti, an image involved in alot of Rap videos confirms how we've kept the mise-en-scen similar to that of an existing rap video.


Inspiration for our Ancillary texts

We found this image that represented what we intended to do for our magazine advertisment.



This was also of the Rap genre, so we felt that we had used and developed this image for our own work.



Our image, also with an unrealistic effect added, also shows 2 sides of the artist.

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



We believe that the ancillary texts, in this case a Digipack and a magazine advertisment combine very well.

The clear aim of the ancillary texts were to promote the artist to his target audience. We feel that the creativity shown in creating the images would catch the eye of potential and existing fans, and persuade them to buy the album.

The Digipack -

We feel as if the CD cover not only focus' on the artist, but especially on the style of a rap artist. The shades and hat being key features of the rap genre clearly involves him in that specific music scene. This would appeal to a wide range of target audience, something we achieved to do with these products. They sell the artist to the teenage audience, both male and female, but for different reasons. The male audience can relate to the rapper through his music, and maybe even to aspire to be a young rapper. The female audience however may be attracted to the artist, using him as a teenage icon. Eg. Chris Brown, etc.

We also show how he is just a normal person like everybody else. this is achieved by portraying him taking part in normal things such as snooker, and using a computer. However, it could be viewed by the audience as showing off what he can afford. A snooker room, an iphone and a state of the art computer can all be associated with the privelaged.

The magazine advertisment-

This avertisment is not only eyecatching, but represents the song title. "Day & Night" is conveyed by the light and dark side of the artists face. We felt that the blues were more eyecatching than the obvious black and white.

We have also provided details of where the CD will be sold, targeting the most popular music stores, and places where our target audience are most likely to shop. Also, producing a website for the artist would hopefully build a larger fan base, which in turn would create more sales.

What have you learned from audience feedback?


Feedback is a crucial aspect of the post production stage as it enables you to accurately assess the audience interpretation of the text to ensure your piece is getting the intended message across.

From the feedback we have learned that without people's feedback we simply wouldnt have been able to produce the narrative up to the high standard that it's at now. It was apparent that at the start of the production of the video, the storyline wasn't clear enough to the audience and so we had to change the narrative and use different locations in order to make the video easier to understand. Once this was addressed we could then concentrate on perfecting the shots for continuity. The feedback also made our group realise that our own interpretation of the music video is very different from others and so we had to make the video appeal to as many as possible.


Upon completion of our media production, it is clear from the feedback that we have created a music video to a very high standard as we have evidence to back this up; this meaning that we have fulfilled our overall goal which was to produce a music video as good as professional existing music videos with no funding or proffessional help. It was said that we had a good use of camera shots/editing particularly the shot were the artist is being filmed walking down the street 'tracking'.

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

In making our final product we encountered numerous pieces of both hardware and software. They were all integral to putting our piece together and making it to the high standard we achieved.

To shoot the video footage for our music video we used a Canon video camera. We also used this camera to capture our work.



To take the pictures we used for our ancillary texts we used a Nikon digital camera.
This was the best camera at our disposal.

To edit our video work we used Adobe Premier Pro. We used it to cut down the film we had collected and add effects that wouldnt be available withoput this programme. These include things such as filters, dissolves and changing the speed of a certain piece of video for continuity or lip syncing purposes.

This was done in one of the singing scenes, when our artist sang a little bit too fast. This meant that his mouth movements did not match up with the music. We were able to correct this by slowing the video down so it looked like he was singing in time.

The dissolve was also useful when changing from reality to the dream sequence. The flash, along with the colour becoming black and white, made it obvious that the sequence wasnt reality.

Black and white signals the dream scene

The flash signifies going back to reality,





The girl has gone, and he is facing realisation that he cant have her.

Another effect that was done on adobe premier;

This image represents the lyric "he seems alive although hes feeling blue".
This was done by putting a blue light filter on the image.

This was all done on the timeline on adobe premier.

This is an example of adobe premiers layout and what can be done on the programme.

Development of Digipack & Magazine Advertisment

Photoshop was a very important in creating our ancillary texts. This provided us with the ability to single out parts of photgraphs that we wanted, combine photos with text, and most importantly add effects and filters to the images.

Our original front cover photgraph:




we used the crop tool to cut the photo down to CD cover size:





We added a film grain to the picture to make the image more 'chalk-like". This was as the image is in a grimey area, with graffiti already on the wall, we thought it would look good to have the image look like it was imposed onto the wall.
We also added the name of the artist, and the song title. We were able to change the angle of the text, the gradient and the shadow behind it :





Further Development - We changed the font and lightened the image. The reason for this was the printouts look alot more professional and puts a glossy feel onto the image.




Inside Images - The inside of the digipack involves pictures of the artist. Here the image represents him as lonely, like the song suggests.




Here is the developed image - Again, we used a film grain to make the image less realistic, but this time we added an effect called "sumi-ee" which made the image very cartoon like. This is a frequent technique used by the rap industry when making artist's CD's. We used this on all of the images inside the Digipack.

Magazine Advertisment-



This was the original image we collected to create the magazine advert. Again, using the conventions of shades and a cap, it would provide the artist with a generic identity. We held up a black background to make the editing much easier on photoshop.




Here was our original development of the image. We split his face in two, representing the day and the night. We then added a cartoon effect onto the image, which defines his face much more.





We decided to stick with the light and dark sides of his face, however added a blue filter onto this. This made the image very eyecatching.

This was our final magazine advertisment, with the added shops and brands. The text also matches the image in terms of colour scheme.



There are many products of the media we used aswell as the programmes to actually collect and edit our work.

These included :

Youtube

The popular site has helped us a great deal in our research and planning stages of our project. We found exisiting music videos, films etc. which all helped inspire us to create our own work. E.g. watching music videos on youtube in college time was the quickest and easiest way to reasearch.

Google

This was also a key site for us to use when researching things such as existing digipacks and artists. It gave us ideas to produce a generic piece of work, and this helped us make sure that it appealed to our target audience.

Wikipedia

This was incredibly useful when researching the actual artist of the song and the record label he was signed to. Although its not a completely reliable source, it gave us enough valid information to send us on our way with or project and allowed us to identify target audience.

Blogger

This was were we uploaded all our research and then eventually this evaluation. This provided a large area of space to be able to see all our work in one place. Images and videos allowed us to be creative when evaluating our work as well as allowing people to see how we developed our woprk throughout.

MTV Base

This logo represents the music channel, another form of media, which our video would appear on.