Blog Reflection - Week 8

What have you been doing this week?

This week I have been doing

-Analysis of Digipaks

-Analysis of Magazine adverts

-Finishing flat plans

We had finished our flat plans for both of our ancillary products and use existing products to help us produce and create own ones. We drew our flat plans in pencil as a rough outline and then we coloured them in colour to make it clear and understandable of what we wanted to go for. We use various techniques for both products such as the use of placement and composition and typography and even mise-en-scene, as we want it to be clear to when we make our final one.



I firstly started analysing existing adverts and digipaks so I can understand the basic conventions of both products, and see how they are put together such as the use of the bar codes and the main image of the artist on the front. After denoting all of the typical conventions we then went into detail about what they could mean and what appeal it has on the audience, with this I took this into consideration when creating our own ancillary products and with this we decided to base our products on this mainstream ones that already exist but have own spin on it.

What key concepts have you been focusing on?

We have been focusing a lot on audience and theory as we want our products to appeal as well as the main product and understanding all of the theory increases the likelihood

of the product becoming successful. With this we also focused on representation and how our artist will represent himself and if it would appeal to the audience that we are looking to appeal to, this is shown throughout all of our products.

What were the main decisions and revisions you have made?

The key decisions that we had for this week was how much screen time our artist would have and how long the duration of the clips will be and this would be further explored in our shooting script, even for the digipaks we decided how many panels we wanted and what other songs that he has made and to choose if they all relate to song were making or to have them completely different, such as Rihanna's albums sometimes has song that are completely different from each other.

Analysis of Magazine adverts

Magazine advert - Flatplan

Digipak - Flat Plan

Blog Reflection - Week 7

What have you been working on?

This week we had been writing up our final treatment preparing our shooting script and flat plans for our ancillary products.

For final treatment we had expressed what we wanted and how we would do it, we mainly focused on having a narrative driven surreal story that has our artist have many struggles in his way of life and this was a great way for us to express the themes that we want to create, within the treatment we talked about the artist and what he believes and his culture, this helps us create an better product as we understand the way he would make on if he did it. The treatment also talks about our vision so any other things we wanted to add make it different while targeting and maintain that core aspect.

What key concepts did you work on?


In terms of concepts we mainly focused on our treatment as I've mentioned before, such as a slide within our brief called key concepts which expressed how our project will be received and all the theory behind it. Such as active audiences and passive, and even the hypodermic needle to a degree and even Stuart Halls preferred readings. This allows us to understand the mind of the public and makes us refine our product to make it appeal much more, after that we finally talked about technology and planning, in the technology we mentioned the equipment and software we would use to make our music video and we go in depth of how it would benefit it us and how we would use it, as for planning we mentioned the locations we want to film at and how we planning it such as organisation and gaining permission.

Other than that we started making deciding ideas for our flat flans for our ancillary products, we spent some time deciding why we wanted it and for what reasons as we want our product to be received as well as our main product.

What were the main decisions and revisions you have made?

The main decision's that we decided to have was that we wanted to make our ancillary products reflect directly what our main product is and have our treatment explain things we want to do and how we would  do it.

Anaylsis of Digipaks

Analysis of Music Videos

Blog Reflection - Week 6

What have I been doing this week?

Preparing final treatment and finishing audience research analysis and conduction

Audience Analysis

This week I had conducted the audience research that we needed to help give us an understanding of what our audience wants, and what we did was give out the questionaries' first and the answers were mainly quantative and this gave us direct answers that we wanted and most of the answers that we wanted were mainly there were very helpful and most followed to the direction that we wanted four our music video. After that we then conducted a focus group which had lots of useful information that we had conducted such as the useful qualitative data and everyone giving their opinions which were valid, the analysis of the results gave us an understanding that our music video idea had a good reception and that we can continue to the path that we want with some adjustments but mainly solid. After all the analysis we started to prepare for our final treatment which composes our final ideas and choice for our music video that we want to create.

What key concepts have you been working on?

Mainly we were focusing on having our audience research done and getting the feedback that we wanted to help improve our idea. We wanted our artist to be extremely relatable and make him appeal as much as possible to our audience which is focus/questionaries' were consisted of. our idea did prove to be successful and the choice of music being played was also received well and liked by our audiences.

What were the main decisions and revisions you have made.

The main thing had chose is to have our artist as real as possible but also visually surreal to watch and we made sure that this was carried through our idea and this is seen in our upcoming final treatment for our music video.

Meet My Audience

Audience research Analysis

Focus group analysis

What did I aim to find out?


When conducting the Questionnaire/focus group of our music pitch idea i wanted to find out if there was any improvements or suggestions to our music video idea, such as specific areas such as Mise-en-scene and the representation of our music artist, we wanted our focus group to understand our full idea to see if the did agree with our vision or if there were some changes, we wanted the most honest answers as possible, we also gave many other suggestions to our focus group such as camera setting and locations and how it compared to typical Rap based music videos.

What kind of method was undertaken?

The type of method we decided to use for our feedback was a opinion based interview with many suggestions from people, first we played them the music that we want to use in our music video, and after the song had played we asked many questions such as, ''Do you think we should stick to the stereotypes and ideologies of typical rap Music videos or should we challenge them' The focus group as major help in collecting data and feedback as questionnaires are very useful as they contain direct data that can be analysed but its very broad and specific in contrast, a Focus group where it has many ideas and suggestions that can be interpreted into many other ways with a much more in depth opinions. The feedback that we got was useful and we will incorporate the data we got into our final idea.

What doe's this result suggest?


What the result suggests that are overall main pitch idea is fairly successful and has some changes but is majority the same original idea as before. One of the main questions that was asked was about, Do you think the forest is a good location for a Rap music video or do you believe we should go against the typical convention of an urban style environment?Many of their responses to our idea of changing the typical location was a good challenge as mainly every rap music video is set in a Urban environment and challenging it helps push the genre forward.  They also suggested that having the main character to have similar conventions to a stereotypical 'Black Rapper' such as maybe a few clothes but retaining a much more casual look to the character, as people disagreed to have the character be a nerdy based background as it would break the genre completely because of the use of two contrasting stereotypical backgrounds. They also liked the song as it would fit the type of style that we were going for, they also did like the narrative of an upcoming aspiring rapper trying to get somewhere in the music industry and the non linear based style of the music video as it as creativity.We also did ask them about our theme of having visuals being the primary focus of our music video such as special effects and any other manipulations and they liked the idea of having a much more engaging and crazy visual experience as it would appeal to their target audience much more. They did have suggestions such as maybe having the artist an Asian ethnicity and not follow the stereotypical Black rapper.


Where any of the results surprising?


Majority of the answers and feedback that we got from our focus group wasn't too surprising in terms of how many of the opinions that were proposed were mainly agreeing with our idea and supporting its development, I was surprised by how many people did like our main idea and it gives more experimental ideas as they did mention things that they liked and why which gives us ways to help build upon that. The new suggestions and feedback that we did gain such as the Ethnic background, were a good topic to mention upon as is was debating to ether challenge the stereotype or continue to support it, as I wondered if it would conflict with the audience as it may not appeal to them because of the radical change of cultural background and from audience theory a lot audiences expect the traditional formula with slight changes but not a radical change which make them less interested in the text being presented.

Is the results slightly biased and inaccurate?


I believe that the results that were conducted were accurate because of the suggestions and improvements that were listed to help increase the rate of viewership. Many people suggested many different ideas about what they wanted to see and why and this caused and created a little debate. Some people talked more than overs because maybe they had more knowledge within this area and field and watch music videos more than others, the types in variations in locations had many different views and opinions and because of the different suggestion suggested a much less biased result.


How will this affect your music video?


Overall this does affect our final music video such as the use of mise-en-scene, instead of having a typical stereotypical Black rapper we will challenge this view and use a Asian or White ethnicity as the main artist in our music video, in terms of locations we will continue to the forest scenes but also having some urban based areas to contrast against, we are also making sure that our music video does challenge the stereotypes being conveyed but also not going to a completely different style and creating an broken mise-en-scene which could work for a surreal abstract idea for a music video but we don't want to go down that route, as it could also create much more oppositional readings to the preferred readings that we would want. The clothing will also be much more casual than the stereotypical tank tops and chains that normal rappers wear. For the animation will continue to use the vision we had planned but also adding some new shots and scenes to incorporate the choices and inputs from the focus group such as less gangster related visuals such as flashing chains and appeal to a much more casual animation for example a distorted sky, which would appeal to a wider audience because of the surreal abstract feel.

Questionnaire analysis

Overall for the questionnaire the results that we gained back were mainly what we wanted or expected from our target audience for example some of the questions on there were about how our artist is represented and some of the questions were about what type of artists do you like and from this we can get an understanding of what our audience likes. It also gives us inspiration and a guide of what we can target for when making and planning our music video. Most of the questions answered were mainly quantitate and not mainly qualitative which is what we used the focus group for. The focus group was the main feedback that we got back as it was much more in-depth and the questionnaire's were more direct and functions more like  as a backup if there's any confusions or development problems of our music video.

Blog Reflection - Week 5

Audience Research

Denoted above is the focus group that I conducted about me and my partners idea for our music video idea, we had a group of 7 People within our target audience and they were between the ages of 16-20 which we decided to have as our target audience. We decided this from our questionnaires that we conducted, there is an image below for the data we collected.







 

Audience research Planning

Rationale

Blog Reflection - Week 4

What Have I been doing this week?

This week me and my partner were coming with ideas for our final amalgamation and how we wanted our overall final idea to become, such as the narrative style and the visual representation.We also disccused which song would suit the style we wanted and why and we finally decided to o with my partners song as it just better suited the song that we wanted to go for such as the rap feel to the music. However we did change some things such as we did combine both of our ideas together to create a combined hybrid, such as my abstract feel such as the use of animation and post production with his realistic narrative and the growing aspiring themes.

What else did we do?

We also started planning audience feedback for our combined idea and from this we can collect data and analyse it and get a sense of what is useful for us when making our music video, we will also conduct a focus group to get an understanding of the qualitative data as well, so we can get more detailed opinions.

What key concept have you been focusing on?

Our core and main concepts are the abstract and Narrative themes that we had created, as we believe that these also appeal to the audience directly, and making decisions that the audience would enjoy will make a better product so we went with these ideas, this also allows to create a much more creative digipak and magazine advert, in terms of colours and design. However we had to make sure that these ideas and choices that we choose all fit with the artist that we are trying to portray and I believe it fits very well because of the nature of Nav our artist but also the song is called 'Diamonds' and diamonds are associated with wealth and luxury and from this we explored this deeper and made 'Diamonds' a surreal experience to reach so when becoming rich and big which is part of our narrative, its a surreal experience which is correlation between the narrative and the abstract visuals.

Research Plan

Job Allocations/Responsabilites

Pre Production


Call Sheets - Ronnie & Faheem
Production Schedule - Ronnie & Faheem
Location Reccie - Ronnie & Faheem


Post Production

Project Logs - Ronnie & Faheem
Focus Group - Ronnie & Faheem
Treatment     - Ronnie & Faheem
Shot List       - Ronnie & Faheem
Audience Research - Ronnie & Faheem
Pinterest style blog - Ronnie & Faheem
Digipak/Magazine Advert - Ronnie & Faheem

Production

Director - Faheem
Cameraman - Ronnie 
Editing - Ronnie & Faheem

Final Treatment

Blog Reflection - Week 3 Pitching my song

This week we started to  look for songs and come up ideas for a music video that we wanted to create, for this I did continuous searches for the a song that would fit the style and genre that I wanted to create.
For the idea I wanted, I wanted a surreal song so I could make a hybrid song that had elements of abstract in it.Once i found the song i started to create a power point for the idea that I would pitch to the class of how, why I wanted to make a music video for the particular song in choice.

I then pitched my idea to the class and it contained all the material that I needed with extra information on the slides if any was missed out, after the presentation I got feedback from my audience such as how things make work or how things may turn out and this was very important for me to acknowledge this questions so I can make improvements to the music video, I also got some inspiration from other pitches to include elements that I found very interesting and original and implemented them with some changes into my ideas.

Having feedback is very crucial as it helps to understand get an insight of how and what the public perceive of the ideas that you want to create, and they can give criticism and valid information that will ultimately effect your final product for the better as they will be the voice of the audience that you are targeting for.

Overall the pitch went well and having valid points to help improve my final product and getting new suggestions and ideas of certain things and this is very helpful and I will get more valid data to help improve the music video that I aim to have.