Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

All three of our media products, the music video, album cover and website, use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of existing media products to create visually interesting and unique products that meet our TA's needs and expectations of the industry.

Our Music Video

A music video is an important product in promoting the single, album and artist as well as making a statement on the artist's image and the creative vision associated with them.

Form

Simon Frith's music video theory states that there are three main forms of music video and they are: Narrative, Performance and Conceptual.

Below is a mind map giving details on these forms and examples of each. Please click the present button in the top right hand corner to make full screen, and click and drag to navigate.

From this theory we applied the hybrid form of having a Performance/Narrative music video, in keeping with genre conventions and to the lyrics lending themselves to a simple, universal story on relationship.

Narrative

Our video contains a narrative that shows AJ looking back on his relationship with his girlfriend that ended after she cheated on him, with him expressing how he feels about the relationship as a whole and the break-up itself.

It was important that our dual narrative had a basic structure and was easy to follow as we wanted it to be a universal story that our audience could understand and relate to. To ensure this we followed Todorv's Narrative Theory which has been detailed in relation to our plot in the table below.

Narrative structure theory applied to our music video

A real music video that really inspired our narrative was Ne-Yo's 'Miss Independent'. We followed the structure seen in this video, common fro the R&B genre, of the story being fragmented and fit in around performance and dance shots.

The full video can be seen below along with screenshots from the video giving the basic outline of the story interspersed throughout the performance shots.

Another convention we developed within our narrative in the music video was Carol Vernallis' theory on the audio-visual aesthetic, in particular the fragmented and disjointed nature of a music video through discontinuous editing. This is seen in the montage of the girlfriend and the man she is cheating with and the argument between her and AJ. 

Andrew Goodwin's theory states that there must be a link between the lyrics and visuals in a music video to help create meaning throughout. We followed this in our video by having specific narrative shots on certain lines to match what was being sung. This can be seen below on the line 'Why did you leave me all alone', where the first time the girlfriend walks out on AJ and the second time AJ looks around registering that she's left him again.

Performance

Our music video is predominantly performance with narrative interspersed throughout. We have a range of different set ups for lip-syncs both in the studio and on location with several dance sequence set ups as well.

Lip-sync

Goodwin's theory on the link between lyrics and visuals was also important in our lip-sync on lines such as 'I found out from him' where AJ points at the other guys shadow, and 'Now its your turn to cry' where AJ points down the camera.

For the lip-sync it was very important that it was authentic and portrayed a lot of emotion in fitting with the lyrics and narrative of the song. This part of our performance was heavily inspired by Jason Derulo's lip-syncs in his videos.

Jason Derulo examples of authentic lip-sync

Our examples of emotion portrayed through lip-sync

Genre

In order to meet audience expectations and needs it is important that our video convey a strong sense of genre, conforming to specific R&B conventions. Our video uses and develops these conventions throughout in order to be easily recognisable as an R&B music video and challenges some conventions to reflect the artist's personal beliefs and make the video stand out. Below is an Emaze going into more detail on this.

Website

Below is a Prezi detailing the key aspects of our website and how we followed conventions of real ones.

Digipak

Below is a Slide show analysing a reference album cover and our panels in accordance with digipak conventions.

To conclude, I feel that we have successfully used and developed forms and conventions of real media products across the music video, website and digipak, creating authentic products which meet the audience's needs. Where we have challenged conventions, I believe that this has helped our products stand out and be unique in the market.

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

All three of our products, the music video, the website and the album cover, were created with the specific intention in mind to work together in synergy to produce a successful marketing campaign to launch a new artist and their debut album into the industry. The website acts as the hub for all of the information on the artist, promoting them as a brand and all of their related products, the music video then works to promote the single and album and in turn the album promotes the single, the website and the artist as a whole.

Marketing Campaign

The aim of any marketing campaign is to have as wide a reach as possible with low wastage and high appeal to get an audience to buy a product and become invested in the brand behind it. For a music artist the brand needing to be bought into is themselves - their Star Persona - and the product is the album or more common now-a-days, single tracks as well as concert tickets and merchandise. 

When deciding how we would structure our cross media marketing campaign and integrate the release of our products we researched different artists' campaigns to get an idea of timing and related content. 

Below is a diagram giving examples from Raleigh Ritchie's marketing campaign with specific relation to his social media and how this created his Star Identity, increased his reach and promoted not just his music and acting but also current important issues such as mental health and equality.

Examples from Raleigh Ritchis's marketing campaign

We took a lot from this case study and applied it to our own campaign to ensure it is as realistic as possible 

Theory

The Marketing Mix, with reference to the 4Ps, was also influential in our decisions in creating the 3 products, ensuring that they were effectively combined to appeal to our TA. The breakdown can be seen below.

• Product: We created 3 product that are available for audience enjoyment and escapism, that use, develop and sometimes challenge conventions of real media products
• Place: To ensure as wide a reach as possible, all of our products are available online, which given the increased use of Web 2.0 across all demographics, is the best place for them, allowing for interactivity and sharing that could start a viral campaign and increase AJ's fan base.
• Price: Our album, merchandise and tour tickets, which are the biggest source of revenue, are all sold at affordable prices, lower than many other artists' and should attract a bigger following for AJ.
• Promotion: We have reached our audience through online platforms such as social media, YouTube, the website and live events such as a Meet and Greet at Westfield Shepard's Bush as well as a competition sponsored by JD.

Social media promoted on website

Video on YouTube

Synergy 

In order to create a successful marketing campaign, it was important that there was consistency across all of the different platforms and repeated images to increase brand memorability, essentially creating a synergistic, cross media marketing campaign using both above and below the line marketing techniques. The key ways that we did have been detailed below in the Prezi on our marketing campaign as a whole.

Star Identity

Marketing theory states that 'when the audience is not interested in the person, product or service being promoted, they will not seek out any information about them'. It was important that we did not fall into this trap and created an artist with a strong, marketable personality that inspired fans. To help us achieve this we used Richard Dyer's 'Star Theory' which describes how a true star has lasting significance, as they convey beliefs, ideas and thoughts outside of their music, giving them more relevance in aspects of life outside of making music, and in turn allows them to build an iconic brand that crosses industries.

Below is a mind map going into detail on AJ's star identity and how we created it, with the help of Richard Dyer's 'Star Theory'.

Ultimately, I believe that our three products work very well together in synergy to create an effective and realistic marketing campaign that appeals to the TA,

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Throughout this whole process getting and reflecting on audience feedback was very important to our decision making to ensure that we created 3 products that appeal to our TA. We received feedback throughout construction as well as at then end on the final products and I have analysed this below after explaining who are TA actually is.

Our TA

Primary Audience:

• Fans of R&B - both old school and contemporary. These are the people who would actively seek out and engage with this music
• Both genders

Secondary Audience:

• People aged 12-25 as this is the biggest age demographic of music consumers and as AJ falls into this age group he can be inspirational and relatable for them

Tertiary Audience:

• Fans of similar or mixed genres such as pop or hip hop and R&B or soul as they are likely to like the style of music that AJ makes

Appealing to our TA

Whilst creating our products to appeal to our TA we kept the uses and gratifications theory in mind at all times as goals that we had to meet. Below is an Emaze demonstrating how we used the theory throughout our project.

Audience Feedback

Music Video

For the music video, we received feedback regularly throughout the process - on the stealo, the rough cut and the construction of the final video. This was very helpful for us and the table below gives details on the feedback we received on the rough cut and how we responded to it in the final video.

As well as implementing these specific changes from the rough cut in the final video, we got feedback from our teachers, family and friends at the halfway stage. The responses we got at this stage were helpful for fine tuning our edit and gave us suggestions such as adding more discontinuous editing in the narrative and special effects on the dance break.

Creating the ghosting effect over the dance sequence improved our final cut massively as before we added it, the dance sequence looked slightly awkward. We showed members of our audience the dance break both with and without the effect and they all agreed that it looked better with the ghosting, with one person saying that 'the effect made the dancing look so good and really slick'.

eg of dance break with and without effect

Our views as of 17/1/18

Once our final edit was finished, we uploaded the music video to YouTube which was very useful as it allowed us to break down our viewers by country of residence, age and gender, giving us useful data for the analysis of the feedback.



The photo below shows the global breakdown of who has been watching our video on YouTube.

Breakdown

This showed that the majority of our viewers are from the UK, which is expected with AJ being a British artist. In addition to this, we also received views from people in the United Arab Emirates, USA, Australia and Germany, highlighting the importance of social media sites in ensuring a wide, global reach.


The gender breakdown was also very useful to us as it highlighted that both genders are engaging with our video, which is what we wanted from our TA. It does, however, show a higher percentage of males watching the video than females, split roughly 2/3 to a 1/3, which, whilst I would have preferred a more even split, does not surprise me as males are more likely to watch a video with a strong male lead that they can relate to.

Gender breakdown

As well as collating viewer data for our analysis, YouTube enabled comments to be left on our video and we actually received very positive feedback from this. The comment left praised our styling, editing, filming and overall creativity, which can be seen below in full.

YouTube comment

Survey

In addition to the feedback received on YouTube itself, we created an online survey on Survey Monkey and put the link on YouTube with the video as well as sending it out to our family and friends. This allowed us to collect a range of different responses to our video, some of which I have analysed below.

Above is a few example questions from the survey

The age breakdown below shows that the most common age demographic watching and responding to our music video is 16-24 which is really good as this falls within our TA age range. In addition, we got responses from people younger and older, including those in our secondary and tertiary audience, giving us a wide base for receiving feedback.

Age breakdown from Survey Monkey

The majority of people who took the survey correctly identified the genre as R&B but there was still a fairly large proportion who said that they thought it was a Pop video. This was slightly disappointing as it suggests that we didn't make the genre clear enough in the video and needed to include more R&B conventions but as the song is mainstream and very well-known, this could also play a part in the confusion.

Some responses to the genre question

Examples of people's favourite shots

The survey also allowed us to collect data on our audience's favourite shots/parts of the video. We got a huge range of responses from this question with people picking out the dancing, the silhouettes and shadows, which overlapped with some of my favourite parts, as well as sections such as the phone ringing and the argument. 

I was really pleased by the varied responses we got as nearly every set up was covered as someone's favourite and the hard work we put into creating visually interesting lighting and grading paid off.

The last question in our survey asked the audience to rate the video out of 10 and I was very happy to see that the majority of people thought it deserved 10/10, saying that there was nothing that needed changing. This, coupled with the 86% yes or maybe answer to 'From watching the video, would you like to know more about the artist?' really pleased our group showing that the audience was engaging not just with the video as a standalone, but the artist brand behind it.

Rating out of 10

We did receive some constructive criticism through the survey as well which is helpful in highlighting to us where we could have done better. Some feedback we got was that there should have been more dancing throughout the video and that we shouldn't have shown the new boyfriend's face to create more suspense. In addition to this, when asked what the message of the music video was, whilst most picked up that cheating is bad and relationships need work and good communication, the idea of forgiveness, being the bigger persona and moving on with your life away from the hurt was not picked up on. This was a shame as we wanted this aspect of AJ's personality to come across and in hindsight we could have made this clearer by making a bigger deal of the forgiveness section of the narrative before AJ walked away for good.

Focus Groups

As well as collecting quantitative feedback on the music video, we did small focus groups of people from our TA to get more in depth, quality responses. The video for this can be seen below. We have included the responses throughout when they are watching the video and the more in depth questions at the end starting at 3:46.

I was very pleased with the responses that we got from the focus groups as they picked up on the little details we added in the narrative such as the picture of AJ and his girlfriend on the phone. As well as this, some of the favourite shots that were picked out were the same as those that we found in the survey and messages from members of our TA, an example of which can be seen below.

Feedback example

Website Feedback

Whilst creating our website we made sure to get feedback throughout the creation process as well as at the very end.

An example of this is when during construction we got feedback from a friend to include the social media icons at the top of every page to make them clearly visible and accessible as some people may not want to scroll all the way to the bottom to get to them.

Our header with the social media icons

We also had a focus group to get in depth feedback on our website which can be seen below.

The feedback we received from this focus group as well as from members of the TA that we sent the link to, was very positive with us receiving feedback such as 'I really liked the logo', 'the whole design is very sleek and professional' and 'the personal touches showing more of AJ' personality were really good'. I was very pleased with this as it showed that our careful planing of content had paid off and our website looked authentic.

Digipak  Feedback

Feedback example

We followed the same process for getting digipak feedback as with the music video and website, receiving opinions on our work throughout construction ass well as at the end.

The main change that we made during construction was to scrap our original idea of having the layered photo on the back. When we edited it in, as a group we really didn't like it and after asking member of the TA what they thought, we changed the idea when they agreed with us. Our final image on the back panel is a simple LS of AJ leaning back against a wall, which worked a lot better that the planned image.





After making this change we received very positive feedback on our album cover as a whole and some of the responses can be seen below.

Feedback example

Feedback example

I was very pleased with these responses as I am proud with how our cover turned out and people really liked it. The inside left panel was a favourite across the feedback which again I am happy to hear as it is my favourite too.

We also carried out a focus group to get feedback from two member of our TA which can be seen below.

Conclusion

On the whole, I have learnt a lot from the audience feedback process during this project. It was very useful to get the TA's thoughts and opinions throughout construction to ensure that any tweaking that needed to be done to create effective products that appeal to them could be carried out. Feedback on the final products was very pleasing as it was positive on the whole and made me very proud of our work.

Evaluation Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation pages?

Throughout all stages in this process, Research and Planning, Construction and Evaluation, we used a range of different technologies, both old and new, to help us create 3 effective media products and I have learnt a lot from this.

Below is a mind map summarising all of the technologies we used in each stage. Please click the button with the screen on it at the top right to make the mind map full screen and click and drag to move around the branches.

Research and Planning

Below is the Prezi I have created to discuss the pros and cons of each technology we used during this stage and their importance in conjunction with 'old' tech research and planning.

Whilst planning it is important to note that we did still use 'old technologies', for example we created a huge paper timeline and post it note storyboard which the whole group could sit around and work on together. Newer, advanced technology is so beneficial but the value of 'old school techniques' shouldn't be overlooked; the two can be used together for the best outcomes.

Construction - Production and Post-production

I have created an Emaze, which can be seen below, breaking down each of the technologies we used during this stage and the benefits and any drawbacks associated with them. 

Evaluation

The technology I used for the evaluation has been explained below with details on their ease of use and overall effectiveness.

Conclusion

Throughout the project I learnt how to use a lot of new technology as well as developing my knowledge of ones that I had used before. I was pleased to be able to improve my editing skills on Premiere Pro and actually have become much quicker now as a result of this project. In addition to this, I have learnt how to use Wix, the sound desk and the lighting desk which I really enjoyed. Having our media technician, Sam, on hand to help was very useful as if I had any questions or worries about using the equipment he was always there to help.

Overall, I have learnt a lot through the making of the music video, digipak cover and website and the vast amount of time and effort that is required to make effective, professional products. Technology played a huge part in this, both old and new, as detailed in the web tools above as it allowed us to communicate quickly and clearly as a group, making decisions and completing our work to a standard that we can be proud of.