In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real life products.

I wanted to try and keep to the basis forms and conventions for my advert cover. The reasoning behind this is so it appealed to more people who are into hip-hop music, if other adverts do similar things and sell well then it means something is working well which is the primary reason I wanted to keep this as close to the general stereotype of hip-hop magazine as possible. The way I conformed to this stereotype is having just the model on a back ground with a small obstruction, in this case the artists name over the eyes. This is very common for adverts and front covers in XXL magazine (the magazine my advert would have been in). I decided to challenge the codes and conventions when it came to my CD cover, my reasoning for this is I wanted it to stand out and be different to give my artist their own personality rather than just conforming to a basic image of his face on the front which is exceptionally common in hip-hop CD covers. Making the CD cover obscure makes it stand out more and is more recognisable that others which may look very mundane.  For my main product I wanted to conform as much as possible in order to make the video more appealing. In my video I wanted a lot of quick shots in order to give a fast moving and upbeat atmosphere which is very typical in hip-hop and rap music.

Howdid you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning & evaluation stages

Social media

•During the research stages I decided to use a diverse selection of media platforms such as Facebook, Blogger, Twitter and Youtube as these all often offer music videos both produced by official companies as well as people doing a similar course to myself. This helped with both getting inspiration for a music video as well as helping me to understand the codes and conventions of the different music genres in videos. The main platform that I used for research was Youtube as it showed a lot of different types of music videos helping me to understand what fans of different music genres like to see in a music video, this varied from slam metal to pop to hip hop. Eventually I decided to do hip hop as I found it to be more convenient to film a music video of this genre. After doing research I found the music videos are often a lot of quick shots in varying locations, normally in front of somewhere rundown or in front of a car which I incorporated into my music video several times in order to fit the genre well and focused a lot on the codes and conventions. Another place I found to be helpful was music channels, although they are not as popular were a great source of information as they show only music videos once again allowing me to get a better understanding of the type of videos different genres of music get.

Another great platform that helped with constructing my videos idea was Instagram. Almost all celebrities use this and this helped find outfits for my model to allow him to fit the genre more effectively, commonly hip hop artists wear clothing like snapbacks and Gucci which I tried to implement into my music video.

Photoshop

 

To create the ancillary texts I primarily used Photoshop as I had a lot of experience with this program as I use it on a day to day basis. I decided to change up my design as I felt my new design was more practical and all round fit the atmosphere of my song more effectively than my previous design. I opted to use Photoshop over other software's as I have significantly more experience with Photoshop allowing me to use my skills to the best of my ability. I created the entirety of my front cover on Photoshop, I started off with just a regular stock image of a person and then used the magnetic lasso tool to highlight his outline and coloured him in black making a blank black image. Once I had done this I coloured the background in a pink colour, I got inspiration for this from using various vaporwave backgrounds which I felt was not as successful. Once I had done this I wanted to start playing around with the black image and decided to colour in the inside of him and keep an outline which I felt worked very well and it fitted in well with the genre. As for the background I didn’t want to keep the same pink on the front so I used a crystalize texture on it in order to change it up and make it more diverse to the colour on the front. I decided to put the font in white for the back to once again keep on the theme of vaporwave. One issue I had when first making the back cover was making sure the font was an equal distance away from one another, in order to make sure it was accurate I used guidelines in Photoshop at 10% each time in order to keep them an equal distance. I feel this worked very well and makes it look very neat which is what I was aiming for.  For the extras such as parental advisory and the barcode etc. I used google images to obtain the “Parental Advisory” logo for the front cover, this is a very common thing to be on CD covers for music of this genre. As for the XL recordings logo I used a black and white box and used the straight lasso tool to etch out the “X & L” and coloured them in the same as the background and then applied the crystalize filter to it similar to the rest of the background. The barcode I used a barcode generator and for the remainder I used the text tool in Photoshop.

 

Serif MoviePlus X6 & Paint

 

Similar to the reason I used Photoshop, I decided to use Serif for my editing as I have used it in almost every project previous to this one meaning I knew how to use it although be it limited as Serif is not very advanced. Initially I wanted to use Sony Vegas cs6 as I use that extremely often at home but we were given specific instructions to use school computers to avoid any technical issues with laptops etc.

For the majority of my editing I used a frame by frame animation technique involving paint. For each frame I wanted to animate I needed to snipping tool the frame, paste it into paint, draw the outline with my graphic tablet (Huion h420) and then save the image, paste it back into serif and & overlay it over the frame I wanted to change. This created a lot of lag problems in server because it was trying to render 60 different images for every one second which for school computers is a lot. In order to fix this I deleted the clip of the frames unanimated and then dragged the jpeg’s down into the slot where the clip would have been, although a long process it was worth it eventually.

In planning stages Serif came in very useful when I was planning my video as I was able to make an accurate animatic on it by scanning in images of my storyboards via the page to computer scanner and then crop each frame and place them in and extend the length of the still image to that of the shot length to see if everything would fit. At first it was slightly too long but a few small changes and reductions of some shots allowed it all to fit and flow well.

 

 

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I will be answering this in two ways, the first will be in a text format here and the second will be a short video I composed to go over some finer details.
The main piece of feedback I was given is that the animations worked very well and I agree with this, although a lengthy process I feel like the work was worth it in the end as it fits well with the codes and conventions of a hip-hop video, these being quick paced and sometimes quite "out there" in terms of editing. From this I would say if I got the opportunity to I would have more animations in more parts as well as making a few a bit longer.

How effective is the combination of your main product and anciallary text

In this evaluation I have created a short video with the main actor in my music video and we are going over how both he & I feel about my main video and the bonus ancillary texts.

Finished product.

A few days ago my final piece came to a finish. It's be a long time coming and I'm glad to finally say that both the music video and the ancillary text's have been fully completed. There were a few complications which meant I was unable to post before this date. I will link bellow both the ancillary and the music video.
One issue I had whilst filming was lighting and general lip syncing. Often the model would sing the line quicker or slower than the original artist and would need to be reshot as you could clearly see the actor was not singing. Something that went well in this aspect was the fact the actor fit the voice very well which I feel makes the video more believable.
Editing was something that took up significant chunk of both time and effort as for a lot of it I needed to redraw the various animations for e v e r y frame which filmed in 30fps was a very gruelling task but I endured through it and got it done and I feel it was worth it in the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQH6qbd0vLI

Music Video

The final product is coming to a close very soon, I have a few more small edits to do as well as my model being ill delaying the process for my final shots a bit, I will be hoping to finish it within the next few days.
The primary issue here was the outlines and frame by frame editing which has taken more time than I have expected and I had a lot more to do than I had anticipated. I have finished the vast majority of this now but of course I have a few shots to finish shooting once I have filmed them I need to edit them.

CD cover

The CD cover has been completed. I went through a multitude of different designs to experiment with which I felt was best and most appropriate for my target audience. I eventually settled with the image bellow as I felt it was more appealing to my target audience rather than my other designs. It's simple design makes it stand out from other CD covers which is important as it will catch a viewer's eye and possibly make them have a second look. The parental advisory also allows viewers to know its for a more mature audience. I opted to have the album name on the side and just the artists name across the front which will capture fans' eyes. I placed the artists name across where the eyes would be on the outline as often when people look at an image they will look at the eyes first meaning the initial viewing will be of the artists name.