Fekky- Adverts & media links

For some artists, their activity isn't as active as others so their page has less stuff on as the others like this artist here Fekky for example.

As you can see on this artists page, there is no biography which i have no idea to why there isn't one, however the artists links for their other social media sites are still there, each artists views ratings increase when they do something. Some artists stay quiet for a time and then come back onto the scene.

As shown in all the artists pages, video's are available for what the artist has been involved in. The amount of views for each post show the artists popularity.
Also shows that their fan base is still very active and on alert for when something is to come out.

In this instance Fekky's page for his news is very little compared to others, this could mean that this artist has not been as active in news terms for his fans to read or watch up on what he has been doing.

Target audience feedback

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZj2Kg9oKJI

Simple question of how many of our target audience watched music videos, as you can see the vast majority of the group of people we asked said yes they have watched a music video. Those who say they haven't is because they prefer to listen to the song and don't take much interest in music video.

This was the part where the different genres were discovered. As you can see from the results there was a variety of genres that people listen to out of the people we asked.

 This question was based on the range of age groups we had out of those we gave the questionnaire. Clearly the 17-20 area dominated the results as they made up the majority of those who took part in the questionnaire this further helped us for our audience research as that age group knows or listens to a lot of our genre.

This was a key question in our questionnaire as it was focused on the genre we were doing. As a result of this question everybody who answered this question knew about our genre which helped us for the feedback process as everybody knew what to expect.

This question was key to our questionnaire as well, as it revealed artists from our genre, from the results majority of people knew skepta which gave us confidence as we knew that Skepta being a popular figure in the grime scene would help us in the process.









The other answers to our questionnaire benefited the group massively as more idea's were then created and knew which direction to go in as those who answered it mostly were along the same lines for what they knew and thought about our genre. There was a similarity in artists and who knew them and what they had produced.

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

The products that have been produced links in and fits the conventions of our chosen genre which is grime.The lyrical nature link in with our genre, it usually tends to involve or relate to something or someone, sometimes the lyrics can be aimed at a specific individual like in Stormzy's 'one take' freestyle aiming his lyrics towards a boxer, for our product we had to make sure the lyrics were similar to the ones we would hear of our genre. In some video's of our genre like 'Bookey' by Chipmunk (Chip), the similarity of a public place being the setting and it being during night fits in with the conventions of the genre. Often the artists are very expressive in emotion and attitude in videos of our genre, hand movement which helps express emotion and a mean attitude happens very consistently, it also shows the artists passion in them being the focus of the video. During our music video the use of hand actions were used a lot by our artist, he did it a lot but it is very common to see in our genre as they express emotion through doing it, it also adds aggression in the lyrics, some artists like JME in his music video 'man dont care', in this music video the hand expressions are there from the beginning showing the passion when rapping. The lyrics of our media product fit the conventions of our genre through intertexual references, it is very common for artists in our genre to always reference something like Stormzy in his track 'know me from' his makes many references to things, he mentions adidas clothing brand, apple iphone products, shoe brands, he also references another artists track, dizzie rascal's 'i luv u'. Stormzy also made reference to eastenders the nations most watched soap drama, so all this intertextual referencing is key of our genre. Another example of this is in Wiley's video 'on a level', showing off nike and referencing timberland the shoes and clothing brand and arsenal football club, so intertextual referencing is key in our genre. In our media product we tried to put intertextual references into our product which we did where references to Christian Bale and the dark night sequence and also hunger games two films referenced in our films, this really engages the audience cause they understand what the artist is saying. This gets the audience gets hyped up through this which really grasps the audience and the artist gets his fans interactive in a way, the lyrics are usually easy to pick up and catchy which makes the audience remember the lyrics and sing or rap along to the track as well. Another convention of the genre is the prevalence of the artist, they take up most if not all the shots in their music video. This common convention was translated over to our music video giving the artist the main focus and framing in the video an example of this is JME - Man dont care' this song gives JME the most screen time as he is rapping.

Editing of our genre depends on the artist, usually there are a number of effects in video's of our genre, like in section boyz - trappin aint dead, there is an effect which is like rewinding the video and we added that effect in, it is almost like you control time. Another important convention of our genre is the amount of close ups in the genre, there are a lot of these which show expressions and emotions or attitude, in our product we did it a couple times showing an attitude coming from the artist, through the editing our artist receiving most prevalence as it all revolved around him. For our cd cover and mag ad we fitted the convention of our genre as the artist is always on the front cover and there is a twist to what was on it, the idea that comes across when taking a look at it you notice the dark, aggressive vibe which could be read in different ways.

In terms of postmodernism we created conflict through the use of the police car and the contrast of whats going on, we created a binary opposition through this the idea that there is a conflict between the artist and the police is there. The male gaze idea has not been subverted in our product due to the fact its a solo male artist and in our genre male gaze being subverted doesn't happen, so we kept to the normality of what our genre does. Intertextuality was mentioned a fair amount of times during our product, this makes the track more engage-able and and adds a specific tone to it.  In relation to our genre of grime our media product fits the conventions of it fairly well, clothing,lyrical nature, mise-en-scene and camera work were all key to trying to fit the conventions and making it similar. In our product we have added more effects than there would usually be, just to be hyperbolic, this effect draws the attention onto the video with all the skills of the editing and the timing of the edits fit very nicely with the music.

In terms of our media product and interpellation, the idea being picked up is not very positive so in a sense the audience is being shown the fact of being against law enforcement so they are put in an position where they would need to adopt that ideological position. The audience can see the conflict between the two and is represented in the lyrics as well through footage in the music video. We've stuck to the road man stereotype in our video, hood up, almost unknown or unseen, however this stereotype of hood men tend to generate and have a very negative representation, and one thing we didn't add in the video was an entourage or an accomplice who usually act together and this is very common in our genre in music videos. So we subverted that usual convention of our genres videos, but we have still kept the stereotype.

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

Research and planning:

For the planning our of media product our initial idea was to cover a niche genre however growing, called trap music or sometimes known as hood music. Even though the name trap music has already been adapted in the US music industry, this version of trap music is UK based but also produced by and has links to gang culture in the UK. An example of the genre is a group called '67' a gang based in London and their rivals '150' who are based in the Brixton area, another example are a group called 'Section boyz' who are the most successful group so far coming out of this niche genre. Due to the genre being a niche one, its coverage isn't main stream yet and was harder to gain access to the material we needed if we were going to make this genre our main focus. Therefore after looking at the difficulties of the task, the decision came that the genre should be changed, and the genre that it was changed to was grime. This was a good decision as it was easier to find more artists and media materials needed to go ahead with the project, various idea's were put forward and that is when the research process began.However the group 'Section Boyz' have recently started to become well known in the grime scene so they currently fit into the grime genre. Google was a huge help giving us links to various artists we knew who were related to the genre and even more that we may not have associated with the genre,artists such as Skepta, JME, Stormzy and those who we had not heard from before like Novelist, DaVinChe and Scorcher to name a few. After searching up the artists of the genre we looked at their wikipedia page and found all the necessary information about the artists that we needed and thought was suitable to able to help summarize our plans, so in looking at these artists page, we found information about their career's, who they are associated with and awards they have been nominated for or won. After picking out a group of artists or bands we were going to focus on, we then went on and used YouTube. We used YouTube to analyse the artists music video's, looking at the mise-en-scene and cinematography in the music video's which would help us with adding onto more information to the knowledge we already had of the genre as a group. After gaining more information our planning process was now at the stage of what we need to expect of the genre for a music video and being able to incorporate that into our media product. This helped us to start off the idea's and type's of question's we would ask for our questionnaire. So after doing more research into our artists record labels and how they would advertise their albums or singles, this then gave more idea's on how we could present our ancillary texts for our media product. As a group there were a number of idea's that were out on the table, so the process was done to pick out the ones that meet the conventions of our genre. One of the conventions of our genre is that music video's are shot in various locations, but more often than not in well known public spaces. We did more research on local, fairly well known public spots for our project via Google, after narrowing down our search to spaces which were not far distance we set our locations between 2-4 spots. This idea looked good as often in music video's of our genre the setting is very familiar and fans engage with the location, the varied use of low-key and high-key lighting also was put into thought for our product. After deciding our location we turned our attention back to the artists web 2.0 links, finding ways they communicate or interact with fans and how they notify fans about a new release. Grime daily a website which focuses on our genre music was a massive help for the research and planning process for our media products, on this website we found pages for all our artists with links to their various social medias eg; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud and their YouTube page. These artists pages also held information regarding the artists latest news and tour dates, any gossip or drama that has been surrounding the artists is on there. This website helped massively towards our media product, the additional analysis of music video's from our artists helped more with the lyrical side for our media product for us to be able make it similar to our genre and also the product itself how the video would be shot. After gaining all the material we believed to be necessary for our product we set up dates for the filming to go ahead and everything to take place, time of day, costume etc. Due to weather and local restructuring of a few of our locations we decided to use just one location, the plan still worked successfully as a result of the unfortunate situation. Along our research process various sites such as Facebook, Grime daily, S.B Tv, Twitter, Soundcloud and YouTube all contributed towards our planning procedure, the use of the web helped with audience stuff and artists information and various things which was key to the whole sequence.

Construction- 

For the process of it all being fulfilled, we used a standard tripod and Nikon camera. We used scenery to our advantage as it was a big space and captured it using the camera, using different types of shots and different angles. After filming on the scheduled days with adjustments, using our equipment we got all the shots we wanted for the video and using the software Imovie and Adobe after effects to edit and add effects to our video. Using the two programs we were able to edit and the effects which we thought were similar to those which we would see of music videos of our genre, various effects have been added and variety of shots to fit the conventions of what you would typically see in our genre. Through using these programs, we were able to make the changes we wanted with shots, like changing the lighting effect of a shot in the video, or layering another shot on top of each other, creating various effects for our media product. For the creation and editing of the track, we used two programs, garage band and cubase. We recorded the track on both software's and edited  through both as just to see if either program had different effects to change the track, sometimes in our genre the artists voice has an added effect to it, whether that being a pitch change, an echo or complete change of voice, so we tried to make that possible with the option of editing the tracks on two programs. Then for the creation of our ancillary texts we had a photo shoot where we took shots for the poster and album cover, using photoshop we edited the album cover and posters adding effects and different text styles onto our ancillary texts. 

After it was all completed we uploaded our work to YouTube making it available for our target audience to watch, placing the link on Blogger the site we used to create our individual blogs or tumblr or wordpress which were also available to use to create a blog.

Using Blogger was useful as having used it before you know what to do, however keeping track of everything which took place and the way everything panned out it was very helpful in posting things. 

Evaluation

For the evaluation of our media product and where everything was placed, our video was posted on Youtube and was available to watch, we then allowed a portion of our target audience to watch the video and then give their feedback, the video which is also on Youtube really gave us understanding of how our product went. Using blogger for the lay out of and adding everything on was helping, keeping track and knowing what was going to be in place and adding things along as the process was happening was good and feeding back to each other in the group really helped with the content of the posts.

ancillary texts

Post Modernism part 1