Evaluation - Wahiba

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

Our music video used, developed and challenged the forms and conventions of real media products.
When we were brain storming ideas and themes we wanted to create a memorable music video. Although we were inspired and influenced by other music videos we didn’t want our music video to resemble anything else of the similar genre. Also we did not want our music video to be portrayed as a typical type of music video for a female artist which is generally very feminine. We wanted to go for a darker, edgier look. The song we chose is Rihanna ‘G4L’. Rihanna has over the years been branded an RnB artist up until her last album where she has gone for a more rock approach to her songs. ‘G4L’ is a very dark and edgy song so we felt it was the perfect choice.

Our concept was ‘Good versus Evil’. We all loved this idea as a group because we felt that there was so much we could do with it. I took on the role of the main artist, Mariam was acting the character of the angel and Justine was the devil. In one of our scenes we needed two guards. Justine and Mariam played the female guards. We didn’t want to use typical male guards because that’s what people would expect. You rarely ever see female guards in music videos being portrayed as strong characters so we wanted to challenge this.

As well as challenging forms and conventions of music videos we also stood by typical ones. For example the angel and devil scene; we have Mariam as the angel dressed in all white and Justine as the devil dressed in all red. We did this because this is a typical stereotype that everyone is familiar with and just by looking at them you can immediately identify their roles. Another typical thing we did was our constant costume change. Being the artist I changed outfits three times. Each scene I wore a different outfit, generally to fit my mood. When Mariam and Justine play the role of the guards they are playing masculine roles yet they are still wearing revealing outfits. This just goes with the point that female’s sexuality always being explored in music videos even when they play serious and strong roles. All of my scenes are like this. Although I come across as a strong character and my clothes are dark and edgy, I’m still being portrayed as your typical female character with the figure hugging outfits and make-up. Justine who plays the devil constantly appears very sexual and seductive throughout from when she tries to seduce me to her trying to scare Mariam who plays the angel in away in a sexual way.

There were two particular music videos that inspired us when creating ours. The first being Rihanna ‘Disturbia’, we loved everything about it; it was the dark look we wanted to go for and also our vision of the type of elements we wanted our music to consist of, that being the heavy make-up, the dark clothes. The second music video that inspired us was Beyonce’s ‘Ring the alarm’. As the main character I felt that I learnt a lot from this music video. I took a lot of time analysing Beyonce’s facial expressions and her whole body language throughout in each scene off her video. She plays her character so well! And so I took notes and tried to get into character like she did.

Our music video has a narrative; that our artist is a deluded, confused girl who is being tormented by her own thoughts and mind. I think we’ve constructed this very well with a unique approach with our Good v Evil theme.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

The combination of our music video and digi-pack worked very well as we knew from the start of the planning stage what we wanted to represent. We wanted an edgy, dark and mysterious feel. Our artists name is my real name, ‘Wahiba’. Like most artists the album is self titled. One of the main things you see in our digi-pack is the ‘W’ logo which is a way of the audience identifying with our product. The ‘W’ is our artist logo, so each time they see this they know immediately that it’s linked to ‘Wahiba’ like on the magazine advert and digi-pack. I think this is an important establishing between products. Images of my face have been used throughout the whole digi-pack as I was the most recognisable to the viewers and most importantly I was the artist. The images are all black and white. This is another decision we made as a group, we liked the timeless look black and white photos have and also it links with our main product which is very dark.

In our video my character has two sides. Good and bad. She’s fighting herself and being tormented by her own mind and conscious. We have shown this throughout all of our products. The digi-pack enabled us to illustrate this even further as we put tender, innocent images of the artist to portray Wahiba’s good side in half of the pack and the other half being dark, gloomy images showing her bad side. The two different sides were shown through mainly make-up, lighting and editing. I really enjoyed taking the photos and experimenting with different poses and facial expressions. Also Photoshop enabled me to change the images to highlight certain facial features. This was really good because it put a lot of emphasis on the ‘Good v Bad’ theme.

From the start we wanted our digi-pack to be very similar to the magazine advert but not too similar as to be the same as we didn’t want the buyer to have seen the advert in a magazine and then bought our digi-pack to find that they looked exactly the same, we felt it would be quite monotonous and may have looked lazy. Instead we wanted to have a different but similar product so that the buyer knows they relate to each other. Overall the combination of our main product and ancillary texts worked really well. We managed to portray the fact that they were all supposed to be connected, but we also managed to show that they were very individual to each other aiming to make our buyers feel that they have new product each time

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Before we begun the creation of our video a lot of people whom we asked had said they like seeing the artist appear in their music video and also they would like to see performance shots but they didn’t find the variety of locations that important. Knowing what our audience wanted we felt we had a better vision of what we should aim for when creating our video. We made sure we included lots of performance from the artist which meant that I as the artist appeared throughout.

We first got audience feedback for our video from the rough, incomplete cuts. We continued to ask the same people for feedback throughout the completion of our product. On the feedback there was generally a lot of good feedback but also a lot of constructive criticism so we developed it and made it better. When we finished we asked the same people which were astounded with our final product. Other people who hadn’t seen the progress of our video also liked it a lot and said they thought our creativity showed through our video and that they were impressed with our use of costume, lighting and editing.
Taken as a whole all of the feedback we received was extremely helpful in the completion of our final product.

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

We used many new and existing media technologies in the construction, research and evaluation stages of our final product. The technology that became most useful was the cameras and media editing software, ‘Final cut pro’. Firstly the cameras provided us with the technology which enabled us to film exactly what we wanted with as much footage as we wanted. Tripods were very helpful to hold the camera is motionless positions. Without the use of the tripod all of our shots would have turned out very shaky and would have ruined the quality of our video. The tripods were very useful especially as we had loads of close-up shots, for example when I’m singing into the mirror in one of the performance shots, the tripod kept the camera still which allowed me to perform.

Programmes like Photoshop and Illustrator played a huge part in the completion of the magazine advert and digi-pack. Photoshop was very important because we used that to edit all of the photographs. And Illustrator is important because that’s where we created out artist’s logo; the ‘W’ that’s shown on the digi-pack and magazine advert.

The editing software that we used was ‘Final cut pro’. I was the editor of my group and have used editing programmes like ‘Premier’ previously so having basic knowledge of the editing software’s like how to cut and navigate on the timelines, I found this previous experience very obliging. We used lots of effects throughout our video like dips in and out of scenes, super imposing and colour hue to create that image we had created for our artist. Also lighting was very important in our music video as we constantly needed it to look darker in some scenes and lighter in others. We found that red filters helped to create a ‘danger’ sort of look.

The blog was another good way of us developing our work and showing our research. The blog helped to show our influences in the form of images and videos. The blog also gave our audience an insight of us three girls. We were able to show our personality through small videos which we edited and added a bit of humour by mocking ourselves. We used our own initiative to do this as we wanted to do something different from normal essay written introductions.

Lastly the internet was vital and essential because it’s not only where we gathered majority of our research but with websites such as ‘YouTube’ we were able to research music videos like the two previously mentioned; Beyonce and Rihanna.