Final Products

MUSIC VIDEO  Watch it Here!


WEBSITE See it Here

DIGIPACK (FRONT AND BACK COVERS)

 

DIGIPACK (INSIDE COVERS)

4. How did you use media technologies in the research and planning stage? (Pre-Production)

Pre-Production - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction stage? (Production)

Production - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

4. How did you use media technologies in the evaluation stage? (Post Production)

Post-Production - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback? Pt. 2

Audience feedback was gathered through us by a few methods, the most effective of which was by running a focus group and filming it to record the feedback. This video can be found on the last slide of my Evaluation Task 3 Prezi. Apart from that, we essentially gathered some feedback simply through work of mouth of our schoolmates. We also got together with an A1 entire class and asked them all questions we wrote down in order to get a collective response from all of them.

We aimed to pick a different demographic audience to ask the questions, despite the audience having the same age, (which is the age of our intended target audience for our products) they had different genders. However, psychographically, our audience that we questioned were the same. The result of all this was to get feedback from people of the same backgrounds/believes and ideologies, but with different demographics, like gender, in order to see how different the answers would be.

The advantage of using methods like word of mouth over the focus group questionnaire is that we were able to grab honest opinions since the audience isn't then being pressured by questions and they are able to freely share their own opinion. However, the advantage of using focus groups is that it gives a more sophisticated response and we can get answers from specifica questions that we disegned, as opposed to the normal, simple 'I like the red lights' comments. 

 The strengths that our feedback indicated is that one, the red lights worked really well. And second, that Joe Helmen really fitted the role we were looking for. He did a very good job in portraying himself as an artist who is not all about the looks and more about his music. This is one aspect that really attracts the younger age group of our target audience. The weakness, however, was the fact that joe had a lot of hand movements as he performed in the music video, perhaps a bit too much for our taste. Another weakness that was commonly pointed out in our digipack was the fact taht it was hard to read a lot of what it said due to the font. It was a bit confusing, especially in the back cover where we included most of the written part.

In our music video we did not intend to encode a lot. However, one thing we did encode was to highlight the fact that our artist is an organic one. Meaning that we wanted the people to see that he was all about his music and not about looks. The audience would then decode this and feel more attracted to our main actor since this is an aspect that believe believe is 'cool'.

My responses support the uses and gratification theory because we can see that we were not really forcing them to answer what we wanted in any way. We wanted the audience to be active and not passive, we wanted the media text to be shown to them, and for them to choose whether it worked or not and being honest with their answers. We can see in the video that a lot of the answers were quite personal. This is because they have applied the uses and gratifications theory which essentially states that the audience are not subliminally being passively controled by the media. As instead they are active and they receive media texts and formulate their own opinions on it.


 

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

This is a video my group and I made responding to questions that regard Evaluation Question 2

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (Comparing Digipacks)

This is my Digipack (Fredo Fanheit - Self Entitled)

This is Adrian Marcel's Digipack Cover (Adrian Marcel - Take Your Time)

This is Miguel's Digipack Cover(Miguel - Wildheart)

When comparing all these with my Digipack's front cover We can see clearly that the only one that is synthetic is Miguel's. Therefore we can say that my digipack, despite the front cover being quite heavily edited and manipulated we can still see that my artist, like Adrian Marcel, still maintains an organic feel. However what really enforces this is the fact that there is some 'hard-to-read' writing on both my front and back cover of the artwork of the album. While the other two have perfect writing that is either very easy to comprehend (Adrian Marcel) or no writing at all enforcing the fact that the centre of attention of that album artwork is the artist himself and nothing else (Miguel). Therefore, due to this, we can also say that my artist, regarding the front cover, according to Negus' organic and synthetic ideologies, my artist is more organic then synthetic, therefore, Fredo Farenheit goes against ths symbolic convention of R&B and alternative R&B artists' images.

When discussing location, Fredo Farenheit is the only Artist of the three of the same genre that is in a location where the mass audience can relate to. Fredo is in a garage car park, which is easily recognizable to an audience. While Adrian Marcel is in what looks like to be a field, he is still portraying a synthetic artist feel. This is becuase for one, not many people relate to a field like that, since the majority of the target audience is from urbanized areas. Therefore, Adrian Marcel is able to trick his target audience that by being in a field he is different, trying to portray himself as organic. However, the picture looks extremely staged and plays a lot with the shadows and lights, making him actually a synthetic artist. Miguel on the other hand is in a completely different end of the spectrum. He is in an unrecognizable location, he seems to be located in the clouds, alond with another girl who is undressed. This makes him extremely synthetic with one goal on his mind, to show off and impress. Which is usually a convention that many or at least most alternative R&B and R&B artists follow. Thus, Fredo Farenheit is actually subverting to this 'perfect looking' stereotype that artists of the genre have.

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (Comparing Websites)

In my previous post I explained what codes and conventions were and how they are broken down into symbolic and technological codes. In this post I will be making the same kind of comparison regarding websites as opposed to music videos. So does our website adhere or subvert to the codes and conventions of other alternative R&B artists?

First and foremost, does our homepage go with or against the 'stereotypes' of other R&B and alternative R&B artists? The layout of our website is quite simplistic. just like the homepage of Adrian Marcel. However, his' is still a bit more detailed. In addition, his homepage  includes the color white, but despite that, both our websites  maintained a similar and quite simplistic color scheme of two or three colours, in my case black and red. Black seems to be a colour that is very persistent when searching for websites of this genre. I found another alternative R&B artist's website that followed the same color scheme in order to support the fact that our website colors go with the conventions of the genre. We can see the similarities in color between Adrian Marcel's website, Miguel's website, and our own despite lacking the color white.

In regards to layout there are quite a few similarities between all the sites, however, also a few differences. First of all, while most websites work in a tab manner, where you have to click the tabs that direct you to a different page of the website,  my website works in a scrolling manner. We essentially put all of our content on one page and all of it can be found while simply scrolling down the page. Similarly like how Adrian Marcel did his, but without the sections on top that you can click to be directed to that part of the page. Personally, despite this technical convention going against of other R&B artists, personally I believe that it was more effective for the star image of Fredo Farenheit because we wanted his to be mainly an organic artist, therefore, by not making such a professional looking website it makes it seem as if he is not so much about his products and looks, and as instead, he is all about his music and his talent, and does not mind having a website that is not fully up to industry standarts. In addition I also personally believe that by having only a scrolling motion to our website it makes it more user friendly as there is only one motion in which the audience has to do in order to browse it. Resulting in a more user friendly website as well. In addition, the fact that my artist is organic and not synthetic goes against some R&B symbolic conventions. As can be seen above, in the homepage of each artist there is a picture of him. Quite a photoshopped 'perfect' looking picture. Whereas our aritst has a more natural look to him, this again re-enforces the fact that he is organic and does not mind about how his looks are shown to the audience.

 My next point which once again re-enforces the fact that my artist is organic is the fact that there is no video or photos section of him on my website, this once again states that he is a musician who is interested in sharing his music to the world as opposed to pictures. We can see that both Adrian Marcel and Miguel are quite synthetic, due to the fact that they are considered musicians yet still have other tabs in their websites like videos/photos/media or instagram press. While in my website there is not a page intirely for pictures, the pictures are shown naturally throughout the one page.

However, Fredo Farenheit is not fully organic as the website I made for him also shows him being synthetic due to the fact that we have a merchandise section. Not only that, but when the digipack front cover is featured there is clear evidence that my artist also has a touch of synthetisis on him. Overall this makes our atist go agains the symbolic conventions of synthetic R&B artists however, a slight part of Fredo still goes with those synthetic conventions. As a result, I personally believe that this creates a nice balance of how my artist is portrayed to the public as well as still making the audience believe he is all about his music, when in reality, a small part of him is still organic.

Clothing-wise, I firmly believe I made Fredo go against the conventions of other R&B artists. Since as I said before, we want the audience to think that he is not that special in his looks because he doesn't care about that. So we can see that is is simply using a plain white shirt underneath a standard coat on top. This makes the audience connect with our artist since they believe he is not any better then them. Due to the fact that he is wearing simple clothes that you would see in everyday life.

After speaking about clothes, this brings me to merchandise, another way in which my aritst goes with R&B artist. R&B artists are known for wanting fame, and wanting people to have this image of them in their heads in which they are the best and the most successful. Where selling clothes with images of the artist on them enforces this factor, I believe that by seeling Fredo's clothes with quite simplistic drawings on them was going against this convention. This is due to the fact that Fredo does not care about attention. Despite selling clothes, he does not sell them to spread his image, or to be full of himself. he sells them simply for extra profit.

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (Comparing Music Video)

Codes and conventions are key to obtain a full understanding of how the media industry works. Codes and conventions are essentially the ways in which a specific genre is portrayed most of the times. Basically meaning that it is what we as people associate specific themes or genres with. For example, associating a horror film with knifes and blood, or associating the rock genre with guitars, punk hair and leather jackets. My group's music video was from a song by an unrecognized artist who sings alternative R&B. It is debatable that being an alternative genre of music codes and conventions may not be greatly associated, since the genre itself is already differs from regular R&B music. However, many of the times the alternative R&B media products go with the regular conventions conventions of R&B music.



Codes and conventions may be separated into two different categories, being symbolic conventions and technical conventions. Symbolic meaning its things like objects we associate the genre with (i.e. knifes in horror films) whilst technical meaning its things like sound, shot types and other technological techniques.(i.e. the fast paced editing in action films) I have picked  two different music videos of the alternative R&B genre in order to compare and contrast my own to them. One is Adrian Marcel - 2AM , and one being PARTYNEXTDOOR - Break From Toronto.

 Regarding lighting, it is debatable whether our music video adheres or subverts to the general technical code of R&B music. Despite most videos of the genre having a use of a different colored lighting, it is usually only used for a couple of seconds. We have indeed used a different colored lighting, however we kept it going for the entire music video. Additionally, we have used the colored lighting technique in a very strong visual manner, completely flooding the room with red lighting. Whereas they were a bit more subtle when it came to that aspect. As it can be seen, Adrian Marcel's music video has used blue/purple-ish lighting in a subtle way. And the use of red and blue lighting in PARTYNEXTDOOR's video. And the strong use of red lighting in ours. Thus, it is debatable whether we have adhered or subverted to the use of colored light.

(My Video)

(Adrian Marcel)

(PARTYNEXTDOOR)

One way in which we were sort of forced into challenging the symbolic codes and conventions of the genre was through not having any nice/wealthy cars. The reason why I say we were 'forced' into cahllenging this convention is because we are doing a school educational coursework, not a professional product. This can be seen in the two examples below.

Despite challenging this symbolic convention, we have also went with one quite stereotypical symbolic code that can be seen, almost certainly, in any R&B and alternative R&B music videos. This being the use of attractive women, usually to show that the main artist is "cool" and is successful with the opposite gender which not only attracts men but also makes them jealous of the performer's life.

One technical code that is similar within all three products is the camera work. More specifically the use of specific shots that are similar when the actor is singing. As it can be seen in these next pictures all the rappers are centralized in a mid shot while all performing the same action, which is singing and doing hand motions.

 Overall, despite having some differences, we can still say that our video leans more towards adhering to the generic codes and conventions of the genre. However, due to the amount of differences, it can be argued otherwise, but personally, I believe it adheres more than it subverts.