Evaluation - Mustafa Duzel

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

We used the Internet for our research. We I looked into artists of the same genre, and we tried to find what type of clothes they wear, their editing style, and their choice of actors. I specifically looked at artists like ‘Calvin Harris’ and ‘Late of the Pier’. I looked for typical conventions of the Electro-pop/Indie genre, I found the 'band in a room' convention being used a lot, and I wanted to bring this to the next level with the use of clever editing. I planned the ‘Band in a Room’ to be a band with only one member playing all the instruments of a Indie band: Guitar, Drums, Bass etc. Another editing style that I wanted to use was ‘Stop-Motion’ when I fought of this idea I instantly remembered the music video ‘Strawberry Swing’ by Coldplay, the fast frame rate really made the stop motion look fluid, unfortunately with iMovie when found we could only increase the frame rate to 30fps so we didn’t use it for the whole video like Coldplay.

We also researched into the costumes that a Indie pop artist would wear, we found that they all wanted to hold a unique look, by doing this they all had ‘Iconographic’ costumes, Calvin Harris used Sunglasses, Late of the Pier used checked shirts and we wanted to capture this look.  I brought in a ‘Russian Hat’ that I would wear all throughout the video, and even in the Digipak and Magazine advert. By doing this we didn’t really subvert from the genre in anyway, we wanted to make our video instantly recognisable. However when we got some audience feedback they agreed in everything we planned to do, but they expected ‘Dancing Girls’ in the video. This we instantly disagreed with, we saw dancing girls as more of a R&B convention.

I was chosen as the actor as we believed that I met some of the generic conventions of this genre. I wore checked shirts, skinny jeans and a Russian Hat. We needed an actor with a serious look, we also asked our audience for some feedback on what type of style our artist needed, they said ‘funky, serious, skinny jeans, boots and dirty’ the dirty idea was discarded as we found it strays away to far from the generic conventions of our genre, but everything else was taken into account.

We also asked our audience what type of locations they would expect from this type of video, they said that they expected a giant white room, much like The White Stripes 'Little Room' music video and maybe even a street corner. We decided to use the white room idea and we developed the street corner idea into an urban skate park scene as it fit better with the generic conventions of the genre.

With the ancillary task we decided to use washed out colours, which added a serious tone to the picture. We also used black and white effectively because we wanted the cover to be instantly recognisable to people who are interested in the Indie-pop genre, it also isolated our actor because we tried to make the audience focus solely on the artist.

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

As I said before we tried to add this serious mystic around our artist in order to make him more appealing and interesting to the mainstream media. One of the techniques we used was iconography, the use if the big Russian hat was used throughout on purpose so that piece of clothing became part of the artist, so it became obvious that like Calvin Harris we had to use our iconographic clothing on our cover and magazine advert.

In regards to the digipak, it offers a lot more than the digital version of the song. Even though the digital version does have the ability to be downloaded right away, through research we found that people still love to buy the Digipaks because it can be collected and resold.  The Digipak also offers more exclusive content like posters. CDs can also hold more memory so the quality of the song is a lot better when compared to the digital version of the song.

The way in which we would expect people to come across our music video is though the QR codes that are on our magazine adverts. Most mobile phones today have the ability to process the QR code and take them to a specific website, ours being the music video itself. 

What have you leaned from your audience feedback?

The first time we got audience feedback was when we had just decided what song to use and we let them listen to it with no video, we asked them what genre they thought it was, what type of artist they expected, and what type of locations they would expect in the video. We used nearly all the information they gave to us, but some suggestions were just impossible, one of the audience members recommended a roof top scene with the band, since we didn’t have access to a green screen or an actual rooftop that was ruled out dude to technical reasons.

We also got feedback from the audience when we completed the first edit and final edit. After we showed them the first edit they recommended we slow down some of the jump cuts because it doesn’t give the viewer enough time to focus on what’s going on, even if there is no narrative in the music video.

To do with the artist I was going to wear my Nike trainers to the shoot, however the audience recommended converses as it fit into the generic conventions of the genre better.

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

For the most part we used the Internet, simply because of the videos, images and forums we could access. When we were researching into costumes we found out all the generic conventions of our particular genre, this enabled use to pick and chose which type of artist we wanted.

We also used music forums to ask if people still preferred Digipaks over digital downloads, this helped immensely during our production process. We also put polls on our blog next to our first edit asking whether or not ‘the pace of the song fit the editing’ we also asked if they ‘feel shots used were repetitive’ and even if the ‘costumes and locations are appropriate to the genre?’ this really helped us in are second edit to reshoot anything we were not happy with and re-edit certain parts that had some problems.

We also found our song on Jamendo, which was a copyright free music website. I downloaded the song onto my phone, iPod and computer in order to learn the song for the shoot. On the shoot itself, the cameraman would play the song though his phone so I could hear it and lip sync and because the phone was close to the camera we were able to sync up my lips to the mp.4 file easily.