How did you use media technologies in the planning, research and evaluation stages of your project?

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

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

A London based independent record label- XL recordings may distrubute our real media product, as it recently has been signing many british rap artists and distributing their music and videos such as artists like Giggs and Benny Banks. As an independent label, they are more willing to distribute products which are less commericial to a mainstream audience, perfect for british hip-hop which has relatively small target audience of young and working class. 

Editing Process

To edit our film, we used a program on the Apple Macs called "Final Cut Express", much more of an advanced program to use rather than Imovie, even though in difficulty to use, with the help of tutorials online we were able to utilise the capabilities of much more advanced soft ware to give a better final product in our music video.

As shown in the picture above, grey scaling was used in one of the shots, to give the video an "urban" mise-en-scene to be in a quite working class, gloomy area signifying the hardships the artist has grown up with. There is also editing techniques used such as flashing transition cuts in sync with the beat of the song, giving a smoother feeling to the transition of cuts in the video. This also matched editing with song lyrics, being that the artist Mike Bauer raps about a "Transition", hopefully the audience would be able to appreciate this intended effect. We created the back of our digipack on adobe photoshop, placing the artist's face from a photoshoot we had previously done for the magazine advert inside a watch, representing a new age for music and it is now the artist's "Time to shine" in the industry. We had to change the opacity of the image in order to give it the effect of the artist's face inside the watch, it was difficult at first but achieved for a good final product, as well as using the same graffiti based font for text, that we have used in other parts of the digipack, giving more continuity in our media product.

For the album Cover we used Adobe Photoshop again, taking a photo of the artist Mike Bauer in front of a green screen, to edit later on the software. We then created a background we desired and added fonts to the image, easily being able to edit out the green screen behind the artist.

We then also edited the opacity of the image and duplicated it three times on the album cover, in order to give a visual match to the single title, showing how the artist is making a "Transition" in image and in growth.

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

Similarities and Differences Between Real Media Products

Our media product represents the working class social group and particularly men, striving to improve their living standards and making much like the song title, a “transition” to a better life style. Both artists are dressed typical of the british hip-hop genre, wearing hoodies remaining to conventions, however it can be possibly argued that both are Caucasian males subverting the conventions of a predominantly afro-Caribbean race genre. As main artists they are also both heavily featured in the music video with many close ups and mid shots of the artist walking to signify the importance and give strong recognition to the audience.

Audience Feedback

In order to gauge the positive and negative aspects of our music video, we asked students of our sixth-form, for their opinion of what they liked and disliked about the video.

What did I learn from audience feedback? My partner and I learned that possibly we should of gotten access to a dolly cam, to keep a steady still shot, whilst our main artist in the music video is walking towards the camera. As well as perhaps more characters involved, to give more narrative in the music video, but it seemed like our audience enjoyed close ups of the artist to give him recognition, as well as the effects we used in editing.