Evaluation question 1

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

For our media coursework project, collectively we made a final decision to construct a music video for the song ‘Swimming Pools’ by Kendrick Lamar, we later did a digipak and poster for the album that the song would be featured on. After researching into the forms and conventions of music videos and specifically into the genre of music videos were focusing on (RnB/Rap) we were able to gain an understanding of what we should be striving to achieve when we created our own music video. I began by looking at the music videos produced by similar artists to Kendrick Lamar. Videos such as J-Cole ‘power trip’ and Wale ‘Bad found on the vevo channel on Youtube helped me gain a better knowledge of the forms and conventions of this genre specific music videos along with what a makes a music video effective as a piece of promotional material along with their digipaks and posters.

Andrew Goodwin was the director of music and organist at Bangor cathedral for thirty seven years whom established a theory regarding the key features, characteristics and conventions by looking at six main aspects which he argues we look out for as an audience. One of the first aspects Goodwin discusses is how in all music videos there is a relationship which illustrates, amplifys or contradicts the lyrics. Whilst researching existing music videos of from the RnB/Rap genre the re-occurring aspect were narrative based videos. I noticed how a lot of the music videos’ visuals I looked at had a complete similarity to the lyrics of the song although the words were being spoken quite fast, when read on a piece of paper there was a lot of meaning behind them and this was transpired in the music videos as there was always large emphasis on the story lines.  

I have included the above two videos as evidence of how the RnB/Rap genre use narrative based music videos. In the first video the audience follow J-Cole’s story about how his daughter was shot and died by a policeman raiding his house, essentially this is why he has a crooked smile,  J-Cole has used this video to promote this true life story of what happened to a little girl from New York in America, at the end of the video the titles are dedicated to her reading ‘FOR AYIYANA STANLEY-JONES’. In the second video, Lil Wayne tells the story of young ladies who are unaware of how to love, The young girl didn't have a father figure in her life and was abused by men growing, so she takes the wrong path and ends up becoming a stripper so she doesn't know how to love. To end the music video he tells the reverse story of what would have happened if she had a father figure. 

We decided to follow on with this convention, This is to start with why we printed out the lyrics of the song and annotated each verse with our understanding of what the lyrics meant, and how we felt it should be depicted, As well as that every time we filmed, we made sure we had knowledge of what verse we were filming so that we could take shots that were in close relation to what the words were saying. From what we gained from our audience feedback they felt that the narrative of our video was closely matched to the lyrics of the song. He also identified that the visuals within a music video may be edited in time with the change in pace of the song He also stated that these visuals are commonly repeated within a chorus to place emphasis the repetition in the lyrics. This links to closely with our music video because we have used a mix between slow pace visuals and fast paced visuals because to match the beat of our song, and also to match the mood of our song and depict how the male character in our music video is repeating his daily routine in his depressive state of alcohol dependency day in day out. 

  I have compared my music video with Eminem’s video who is a rap artist like Kendrick Lamar. In this voicethread you can see how the lyrics visually relate to what is going on in the music video, for examples when he says ‘their throwing roses at my feet’ you see the crowd throwing roses at his feet. This is similar to my video, the lyrics say ‘okay now open your mind up and listen to me kendrick’ indicating that he is going insane and trying to reach out to his inner conscience and just as you can see in the footage you can literally see him going insane thinking about this girl. 

http://voicethread.com/share/5696867/

(if you cannot see the video please type the link into the search bar where you will be redirected to the website in which you can view and comment on the link)

  Goodwin’s theory recognised that genre related style and iconography is conventionally present in music videos, arguing that artists have a trend of repeating certain actions within their music videos in order to establish this as their ‘trademark’ action, and therefore making their songs recognisable due to it re-occurring so often. In our music video the constant use of iconography was essential, to get across the message of alcoholism there was frequent and constant use of alcohol bottles along with the constant actions of the male model putting his head down, or running his fingers through his head to show that is distressed, this is then transferred to the front cover of the album so the audience immediately recognises that the album cover links back to the music video.

Goodwin also discusses the re-occurrence of multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist to show the importance and create the star and promote a recognisable brand image he argues that this a tool which record labels use in order to promote sales figures. He states that this convention is used throughout videos but is most common with female artists as provocative angles are often used to sexualise the artist, he argues that voyeuristic angles of women are used in order to entice male audiences. This is backed up by Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory which argues that this use of close up imagery causes a fetishation from the audience towards the artists. Although this is true for a lot of RnB/Rap music videos, this is an example of a convention that we challenge, instead of filming lots of close-ups with our male model, we filmed lots of close-ups of our female model, however the audience doesn’t see her in a sexualised way because she is dressed in all white connoting purity and with minimal make-up on. Instead she is used a tool to add mystery and a dramatic element to our music video. The audience see her and wonder who she is and why she keeps haunting this male character, however we have developed this convention in some aspects because she becomes a recognisable brand image later on on the front cover as her arms are over the male characters neck holding a bottle of alcohol, the audience recognises its her without even seeing her face.  

you can see how we have challeneged the convention found in typical RnB/Rap music videos, in the whats my name music video rihianna is highly sexualised, the red hair and heavy make-up, along with the fact that her mouth is slightly open is very sexy and leads to the male gaze. Whereas in our video the female character looks natural with mousy blonde hair and no make-up on, she look innocent, but at the same time she looks quite haunting .

Lastly Goodwin speaks of how intertextual references to other media texts may be present in music videos, he recognised that it was not uncommon to recognise either the visuals or lyrics of a song to be a direct reference to another media text, he argues that this is used to engage the audiences and provide them with gratification if they recognise the link. This is true for the more humerous RnB/Rap videos but our music video was a more more serious, with deep, dark meanings so we decided to leave this convention out of our music video. To conclude it would be correct to argue that our music video uses a lot of already existing media and Rnb/Rap genre conventions throughout the entirety of our music video, whilst only challenging a few conventions, I believe this is a good thing because conventions are a set of stipulated, or generally agreed standard, norms/social norms ways of doing this. We wanted our video to be accepted by this genre of people so it only makes sense to use the conventions whilst adapting some elements where we see fit 


Ancillary tasks 

front cover

I would argue that my CD front cover is conventional. Firstly it features a large image which predominantly shows the male main character, my research states that this enables the audience to immediately recognise the artist and relate the artists’ face back to the music video. Our male artist looks exactly the same in the music video as he does on the cover of our CD, we did this because the general mood of our music video and digipak is quite dark and gloomy, therefore there is no need for glamorisation, The glamorisation element is incorporated in the use of the Gold colour text which is included in a lot of RnB/Rap style artists’ albums. We have incorporated iconography on our front cover by having the female character hold the bottle around his neck, to show that our artist is confined in the walls of this alcohol dependent depressed state of mind. We made sure that the singer’s name is large and bold so that it would immediately grab the audience’s attention, but also show the masculinity of the artist. We used an image as the background of our front cover; this is an example of how we challenged a convention because this isn’t common in the research we found, however we felt that the image was necessary because it meant that there was continuity between the CD/CD case and also from the video where the male character begins to b.urn images of the female character, hence the reason for the smoke

back cover 

 I believe the CD back cover is conventional because it holds all the information which would typically be found on all CD back covers, in terms of copyright information, record label trademark signs and the serial number which we have included on our spine. Also on our spine you see the singers name and album title. The image in the middle of the page of the rose and the candle which looks as if it is illuminating the whole page, This is a strong design element which we discovered when doing our research, you can see that only his face is illuminated on the back cover. We felt that this was a strong design element and wanted to incorporate it into our back cover. However we adapted it by using a rose and a candle.

pamphlet

our inside cover, when researching into RnB/Rap artists we found that it was conventional for this genre of artists not to have an image of themselves on the front cover, but instead to have a meaningful image which related back to the general tone of their album. We also found that they kept a simplistic layout hardly any writing at all. We took this into consideration when picturing and editing our front cover. As you can see we have three candles, candles are often used in prayer when something fatal has happened, or to represent peace. On our pamphlet, we decided on candles because we wanted it to be as if the male character has lit candles in her memory and with hope that one day he will able to forget about her and finally find peace.

You can see by the simplistic design of our media product compared to the simplistic design of the products we have researched just how conventional our CD front cover is. 

CD cover

I personally believe that the simplicity of the CD cover is what adds to the professional look of our CD cover. The fact that the name of the artist and the album title is the only thing written in large text is an eye-catching feature which immediately grabs the audience’s attention. Our copyright information is included on the edge of our CD following the circular CD shape, we decided to include this on our CD cover we noticed it was used in a lot of the genre specific CD covers that we researched. Our CD cover had a black and white smoke design as the cover, the black and white colour scheme is typical of this genre. However we have challenged convention by incorporating an image, I felt that it was a strong design which would add to the design element of our CD cover but also it enabled synergy because it was also the same image as the CD holder and on the front cover meaning that the three images linked together in a visually powerful way. 

Poster

The continuity of the colour scheme from the digipak on to the poster is conventional In this poster I’ve only included the colours, white, black, god and red, real magazines such as the drake one use this to make the promotional poster identifiable to their target market. It would have been wrong to challenge this convention because the whole point of a promotional poster is to promote the album, each colour on the album links back to an aspect of the music video or of the general mood of the album, To use different colours would destroy that sense of continuity and association. Another way in which we followed convention is the fact that we followed the landscape design which all but one of the posters we researched used. We felt that the landscape design gave our media product a more professional look, as it’s a popular choice with real promotional posters.

 the small picture of the album with the iTunes logo above it  is a form of synergy because it links both products together, the audience become aware of what image they should be looking for when they go looking for the album on iTunes. Although it is conventional for artists to include an image of the front cover on their promotional posters, it’s not convention in the RnB/Rap genre for artists to include the iTunes logo. However we felt tht this was necessary as Kendrick Lamar is a mainstream artists who appeals to young audiences. Statistics show that around 70% of young people aged 15-25 are using iTunes to purchase their music, therefore for us it was essential to ensure that those potentially 70% of people are aware that they can access this music on iTunes

We included the parental advisory sign which challenges convention, none of the posters we researched includes the parental advisory sign, however I felt that the sign was necessary because the song swimming pools contains explicit content, some younger audiences may not be able to cope with this, therefore it was important to warn customers before they buy.

 I included the debut release date (on the red strip) along with the fact that he has won 8 Grammys and that he is 37 weeks number 1 on the chart list. The audience is provided with solid reasons why they should spend their money to buy this album; this information proves to them that he is a talented, respectable music artist. This convention is useful on promotional posters because that is the whole reason for a poster to tell the audience why it is essential that they have/buy this album hence why decided to incorporate it onto our poster.

Lastly I used the same image which I used on our front cover on our poster this is conventionally done by real posters because it acts as a form of synergy, linking the poster back to the digipak, by using the same picture over and over again, the audience eventually have it engrained in their memory which helps to promote the album.