Q1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video is called Rum and Redbull. The genre of the music comes from Dancehall and also Caribbean music.

Nonetheless, our narrative set-up and constitution follow the traditional forms and conventions of perception motivated music videos by ignoring the narrative component. The only change to this is that we have included a DJ to set up and link all the scenes and shots together as to not bore the audience and keep them focused on the video. As a further variation to the concept driven music videos we have included a shot of a performer lip-syncing the lyrics, which is very stereotypical of music videos. We also took quite a voyeuristic approach a propos one of our actresses, who shows her legs and dances to attract the male gaze. (Mulvey 1975)

Our music video did not use a crowd of sexy female dancers as we didn’t want to make a stereotypical dancehall music video. Instead, we focused on everyday people getting drunk on Rum & Redbull and generally having a good time as we felt that most of the audience can relate and connect with the characters in the music video.

All the way through, the main focus in our video is not just on the men but the girls as well and how smashed they are becoming. This is a popular convention for our sub-genre because many dancehall music videos give more attention to the women rather than the men, Beenie Man ft. Camar Jamaican Party / DanceHall Nuh Dead Yet is an example of this. Typically, in our video we use many extreme close ups, not only of the characters, but also the products Rum and Redbull.

Our camerawork follows the predictable technical codes by using variety of shots and unique angles to depict a sense of personal connection between the audience and characters. We used long shots to establish scenes and close up/mid shots to mark the characters and show their enjoyment of the party. We achieved this by using many short and quick takes to keep our video fast paced and perplexing, connoting that everyone is getting more intoxicated with every mouthful of Rum and Redbull they take. Our plan was to place the audience in a position where they could identify with the characters, as well as keeping up with the pace and intercutting of the scenes which allowed us to create an entertaining atmosphere for everyone. We also used point of view shots to place the

audience in the characters position which made it even more amusing because it was as if they were there taking place in everything that’s happening.

The editing we used follows the conventional style of music video editing, with it having transitions being straight cuts between the beats of the music as we felt that this could allow the visuals to work with the music. The whole of the track has a fast pace to it and is so energetic therefore we didn’t add much slow transitions as this wouldn’t work with the music. We wanted to institute the mood of the music as soon as possible by having a party as the opening to the music video as this would allow the audience to establish the main motive for the rest of our music video.

Q2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I felt that the arrangement of our music video and its ancillary texts worked together as we learnt the key elements of branding such as; brand personality and brand position. We put these elements to use in order to make our product look as professional as possible. In the video we tried to separate ourselves from what was existed already in the current movement of music videos, by not featuring any lip synching or lots of female dancers. In that case we decided to do the exact same with our ancillary texts. So, after a lot of drafts and deliberation, we decided that we wanted simple yet powerful designs for our digipak and poster.

We also decided to have the Jamaican flag colours (red, yellow, green) throughout all our ancillary texts as this made a clear link between the artist (Beenie Man) and our products (Rum and Redbull). The use of this also helped keep a clear relative between all the products and so there is a persistence of the mood from the music video to the digipak and magazine advert; the bright colours match the fast paced and lively music video. Throughout all our products we have used a key logo which is the bat as this represents rum. This is also the logo of Bacardi rum, and by using this we have instantly made this our identity and put it on all of our products so everyone knows that they are all linked.

Our digipak follows several traditional forms and conventions of other digipak’s for example it has the name of the artist, song, a theme, price and lyrics on the inner sleeve which you can find inside the digipak. Many artists choose not to have their picture on their digipak or album so we didn’t feel as if this would be an important factor, as we wanted to concentrate more on selling the song and music video rather than the artist. We decided to use the ‘splat’ on every side of our digipak as we all agreed that it looked like someone had just opened a can of Redbull and it splattered everywhere, linking into scenes of cans being opened in the music video. At first I thought it looked as if somebody had spilt paint but then I realised that with it being related to the Redbull can it fit in more with our whole theme of our digipak’s.

Promotion was an extremely important part of our ideas regarding the magazine advert. We had decided that by using a snap shot of a character from the music video, people would be able to make the connection between the image on the magazine and our music video; as a result of this would attract a lot more attention to the audience and they would be more liable to watch our music video. As a group we thought that having our Michael Jackson look-alike as the front cover would bring a lot of attention from our target audience as he was famous and easy to recognise. Accordingly this would catch the viewer’s eye and they would be more intrigued to watch the video. Our magazine advertisement follows customary forms and conventions by showing the name of the artist, song and also a release date. These are all important towards promotion as they let the audience know all the details. We felt it was important to keep a sense of continuity so when the audience see magazine advert and the digipak, they will be able to recognise that the two ancillary texts come from the same music video.

Q3- What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our initial research stages we learned that our target audience would mostly be males and females aged from around 13 – 25yrs. This was mostly because Dancehall hasn’t been around as long as other genres of music and has only been receiving mainstream success since the 1980’s. Our research also indicated that particular ethnicities would be irrelevant as the sound appealed to

everyone we surveyed, however I was not amazed to get a lot of good feedback from Caribbean/African people as Beenie man comes from Jamaica and Dancehall does originate from there. Our target audience research showed us exactly what kind of music our target audience generally enjoyed more and what they liked and disliked about music videos. For example we found out that their favourite genre of music is RnB and they preferred fast paced songs to slow melodies.

After doing some intricate research we then tried to create a music video that would appeal to our target age range and to help us achieve this, we used a mixture of actors that were in the same age range and also of different ethnicities so it would appeal to everybody. This endorsed us to form a link between the target audience and characters which also gave our music video a whimsical side as we aimed to try and get the audience to laugh at the fact that similar crazy things happen to them when they are drunk. In our script development, we incorporated the use of lots of particular camera techniques for example; close up shots and point of view shots were used to place the audience within the situation. This was extremely helpful as it authorized us to incorporate actions of the characters with particular camera techniques to accentuate a particular mood that we all wanted to focus on.

There was a lot of positive feedback with a lot of people saying that our video was much better than expected and was definitely unique as they had never seen a music video without a defined performer lip-synching the words. The audience also said that they would watch more music videos with a concept like ours because of the fact that it was so different and stood out amongst lots of other commercial music videos. With regards to our main product a few people have said that our non linear/multi strand narrative was a tad confusing and that they also didn’t understand what was going on until we explained the narrative to them. This was disappointing as we one of our key plans was to get the narrative across effectively yet we were unable to fulfil it.

Everyone was equally as stunned with our ancillary products as they liked how we had made a clear link between our products and would definitely be interested in purchasing the video after seeing how professional our magazine advert and digipak designs looked. We all felt that our end products successfully met the OCR brief as we were able to methodically follow as well as challenge forms and conventions, whilst maintaining creativity.

Example of a Digipak.

Q4- How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

The majority of research was achieved by gathering information via the internet and search directories such as Google and Youtube. Using Google was much easier to use rather than any other search engine because it provided us with relevant images and useful information. It was also much easier to use because when searching for a particular product or artist, it would list thousands of websites and images within a matter of seconds. Another exceptionally good new media technology that we used was Youtube (www.youtube.com ) which especially helped me with my similar textual analysis because all I had to do was type in the artists name or song and it came up with lots of videos regarding what I typed in the search bar. I then selected a music video that I wanted to analyse on Youtube.

For the filming of our music video, we used the Canon XM-2 Camcorder. To get the best out of this digital tape camera, we needed to the basics of how to use this camcorder such as know how to set up several controls like how to insert and play back a tape, how to adjust the white balance so our recordings would be clear in each location and also how to zoom in and out which was quite useful in our close up shots. We learned how to use used manual focus, which allowed us to capture clear shots from different distances with the option of pulling focus when required. We also used the Canon’s manual exposure adjustment for when our DJ is dancing in his studio.

During the editing stage, the editor used Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Most of the techniques that were required had already been learnt during our AS thriller film opening sequence project that we had done the year before so the editor was pretty familiar with it all. We were able to effectively use the log and capture feature whilst playing back our tape though the external video tape player. Another technology we used in the construction stage was Adobe Photoshop for our print production. This software wasn’t new to me as I study photography therefore I am quite familiar with all the tools and the software itself which made the digipak production easier for me as I was able to use lots of different tools (the crop and blur tool) successfully to manipulate the inner sleeve to exactly how we wanted it.

Generally, we had to upload all our work on to Blogger. However, I used Slideshare most of the time as this was a lot easier and quicker to upload documents and pictures all at one go and would also keep the layout of the document intact.