Olivia's evaluation

To create our music video we firstly looked at goodwins theory that states that every video has a element of voyeurism, looking, lyrics and actions match and so on. We chose a song that came under the genre we like most which was r'n'b.

Then we went on youtube and watched a lot of r'n'b videos for inspiration by artists such as chris brown, rihanna, bruno mars and trey songz. We noticed that all of the songs where about love and relationships, this is a common convention of r'n'b.

I also researched on the origin of r'n'b and realised how it was inspired by jazz as gospel music, also how it has a strong repetitive beat and is normally sing by African Americans. I found out that whitney houston, michael jackson, mariah carey and mary j blige are all iconic figures in r'n'b.

From watching all the videos and digesting all the research we found out that the generic conventions of r'n'b are:
black artist
lots of voyeurism especially by women
lavish lifestyle is illustrated
fancy cars
pretty ladies
sophisticated but street clothes
video is cut to the beat
artist features heavily in the video
tattoos
white vests and ear piercings for the men
dance routine
street

and we conformed to most generic conventions to some extent.

We were greatly inspired by chris brown's with you video, we decided to incorporate the idea of other couples showing love in our video for cut aways.

Moreover Bruno  mars' just the way u are also gave us a bit of inspiration as he doesn't really have a narrative in his video it isn't definite so we decided to add a argument scene in our video so the video can hold multiple meanings to our audience.

We rejected the use of extreme voyeurism because we didn't want to dehumanise or degrade woman because of the uses and gratifications theory by blumler and katz. Because R'N'B videos are normally watched by young people and they watch our video to gain some kind of identity and we wouldnt want to encourage  teenagers to dress provocatively. Also it was difficult to find a young lady willing to show much flesh so we used mild voyeurism unlike a Trey songz video.

We also subverted the convention of using a black artist, we used a young iraqi guy. Because many big r'n'b artist now are not black for example: Justin timberlake, Justin bieber, Mike posner, Drake and Jay sean. We wanted to show how diverse r'n'b is now and to help young people gain a good identity form our video.
I chose to use Khalid to feature in our video because he has that street look with the slits in his eyebrows, ear piercings, dress sense and tattoos. He also looks a bit like a mixture of Drake and Jay Sean so he will be a easy and appealing artist to sell due to the intertextuality.

We used a black girl and asked her to wear a short dress and high heels in our video to add a element of voyeurism also kind of conform to the convention of using black people in the video.

I filmed in five locations a nice flat, the riverside, tom thumbs arch, canary wharf and under a train arch. We wanted a mixture of elegant and raw street locations because r'n'b artists always come from the bottom up to lavish lifestyles.I think our audience will use our video for surveillance into the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Our ancillary task sells the artist, his picture dominates the front cover because we found that all of the other r'n'b cd covers we looked at done the same thing like on the front of Trey songz invented sex cover.

However we had to make multiple cd covers and magazine covers because our audience said that the two didn't link together clearly. Because he doesn't wear the same clothes in the video and in our video the location features heavily but it isn't shown at all on the digipak, so i decided to make a new digipak including landscape and khalid in brighter clothes due to the film in Tom thumbs Arch standing out so much.

We decided to dress khalid in the second digipak in a nice casual jacket and a cap to add that urban touch. In our first digipak we dressed him in a smart ralph lauren polo to represent the artist being wealthy. We wanted to sell him as a smooth streetwise gentle man.

Our digipak offers the consumer a free poster and the song lyrics printed on the inside cover if a hard copy is purchased. Because of all the illegal downloading going on I thought this would be a good incentive for the buyer to spend the money and fund the artists future singles.

I expect our audience to come across our video on facebook or youtube. I would like them to repost and tweet our video so it reaches a wider audience than viva or 4music viewers.

Youtube was a big help for our research I watched so many music videos to get ideas from. I also used blogger to watch other media students videos and read through their posts to be inspired.

Wikipedia also helped during planning and research I learnt that r'n'b videos are full of short rhythmic cuts to the beat.

We all downloaded 'like an iceberg' to our phones and played it out aloud at each shoot to help or actor sing to I also printed out the lyrics so we all had a copy to refer to. Finally I bluetoothed the song to our actor for him to listen to and learn at home.

We kept intouch by phone calls, texts and facebook I tagged the other group members in status' and announced shooting dates as I was the production manager.

I used a canon video camera to film our video I filmed each scene three times so we could pick the best clips for our final piece. Furthermore i used a flip camera to record clips for our evaluation which will go alongside clips of us and photos of real r'n'b artists.

The video camera was also used to film for our animatic the the footage was edited in imovie.

I purchased rose petals to sprinkle on the girls bed to add romance to the video. we also used a big industrial light whilst filming the voyeurism scenes to make them more defined because the lighting in the common room was very poor.

We edited our footage on imovie which was very fiddly because if u delete a few seconds of film to make lip syncing more accurate all the rest of the film became unsynced. I added transitions and added effects to certain clips to improve lighting. I also copied and cut clips to the beat using apple c and apple t. Finally I made some clips faster and one clip of our artist looking into the light slower to make our the clips more effective.

Finally I created our digipak using my own digital camera and photoshop cs2 to crop our photos to standard cd size, adjust contrast and brightness, add filters, add text and finally bar codes and logos.

We got audience feedback at numerous points of production, firstly after we decided we wanted to create a video for Claude Kelly's like an iceberg. we played the song to two media classes and asked them what ideas the song gave them on narrative and star construction.

The audience suggested our artist looked like Jay Sean and our video should feature lots of cheesy romantic gestures like strolls on the beach. However this wasn't possible for us because when we started filming it was snowing heavily so being on the beach would of looked absurd.

Audience feedback was also attained when we came up with our ideas for the video, we asked them if they thought our ideas would be effective and if not why and how we can change them to make the video more appealing to the audience.

From then on we got audience feedback when we created our first two rough cuts when we didn't have the lip syncing correct and we never had the a female or argument scene in the video.

The audience advised us to introduce a element of voyeurism to our video as it is a generic convention so we did that with jessica on our next shoot.

They also said that some of our actors lip syncing wasn't strong enough as at times it looked like he was muttering and he didn't hold notes as long as he should have so we re filmed the first verse. Even filming it in a apartment instead of our college stair well so this really helped elevate our video.

Finally after we had done all the lip syncing and added voyeurism we felt like something was missing so we asked our class mates what they think we needed, they suggested we add a slight narrative so we decided to add a argument scene to give allow our video to be interpreted in different ways and so more people feel they can relate to our video.

The most helpful bit of audience feed back was about our ancillary task. We thought it connected well with the main task but our audience said otherwise. If we didn't change our digipak our artist wouldn't be as popular as the audience wouldn't realise it was our single in the shop because of the plain backgrounds and different costumes.

Throughout filming I realised hoe difficult lip syncing was. Our song is originally sung by a African American but we used a Iraqi from east London. Words were pronounced in very different was so our lip syncing didn't look as accurate as I would of liked. I also realised how important singing the lyrics are just saying them isn't enough as it looks weak. I really appreciate music videos now I have seen how much effort and dedication is needed especially working in a group.