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

Our music video and marketing campaign follows many forms and conventions of real pop, street and rnb media products. To best connote our genre and image we closely followed the examples of real music videos that strongly reflected the urban street genre.

MUSIC VIDEO
For our music video conventions we followed many theories one of which was Simon Frith's.
Simon Frith believed that music videos came in three types:

Our music video fits into the performance category as it features a girl group who sing and dance. We take up most of the screen time. Most scenes are performance based shots such as our dance routine, singing to the audience, playing around and performing with male actors. We decided to do something interesting and not just conform to one category of music video but to make a hybrid music video. Our video displays aspects of the narrative genre as the lyrics and scenes with our partners convey small individual stories of how each of our relationships are like with our guys. This is similar to real media texts such as Fifth Harmony's Worth It and Little Mix's Move and even with Misery Business by Paramore (our prelim project). We included male actors to widen our audience appeal as they are for our viewers to gaze at and/or aspire to become like.

Goodwin also states that there is a "clear relationship between lyrics and visuals" which can be amplification, illustrative or contradictory. Our music video both amplifies and illustrates. Our song is called Red Planet and that line is sung quite a few times in the actual song. Therefore we wanted to use a red colour scheme as it signifies love and passion which fits perfectly with our song. Below you can see that in a few short seconds of our video, most scenes have a red colour scheme.

One convention of real media products we use and challenge is the the representation of females and the female body. Andrew Goodwin states that: "There is likely to be voyeurism, particularly in the treatment of women" in music videos. This has been a feature of  a lot of mainstream music videos driven by the idea that women's bodies sell. Music videos which sexualise women include Katy Perry's California Girls and Can't Remember to Forget You by Shakira ft. Rihanna. (right)

We've followed Goodwin's theory to target mass audiences but have also tried to challenge this by not over-sexualising ourselves as female stars and also by sexualising the boys more. This comes across in our lyrics which are quite sexual, but commanding and not submissive. For example lines such as "Give me all of your love tonight". We are also seen pushing away our guys and being playful with them but are never involved in sexual activity on screen.

Another theory we use and challenge is Mulvey's theory on the male gaze. She believes that audiences have to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. The camera lingers on the curves of a female body and relegates women to the status of objects. Thus female viewers must experience the narrative secondarily by identification with the male. The male gaze theory applies to many music videos. We've used it by adding conventional beauty shots of each member of the girl group.

Our music video conforms very much to pop and rnb music video conventions. The sound of our song and and the beat are very pop - it includes the guitar, electronic beats and vocals. Our band identity is very street- this is portrayed by our outfits and the way we act and perform in our music video. Monica has a rapper's swag, her movements are tomboyish and explosive. Her facial expressions are fierce. Gift has a Beyonce-like sass and is very outgoing and confident. She smiles brightly and laughs a lot. Thakshana is girly as she plays with her hair and gets up close and personal with her guy but also very hip and cool as she uses a lot of hand gestures inspired by many rappers. Her facial expressions are casual but confident. I come across as a casual girly type as I also like to play around with my hair and dance in a more feminine style. Me and Thakshana try to create a more sexualised image with the way we dance and look at our guys and also the camera.

We are seen dancing, singing and performing with guys in our video which is very conventional. Our relationships with our guys come across as cute because we're doing random things such as Monica putting a hat on Will. Other times we create a more deeper sexual aspect as Thakshana's face comes really close to Aaron's. This gives our audience a varied experience with fun visual hooks as well as more mature visual hooks. We tried to create visual hooks with editing effects and content such as beauty shots of the girls and narrative shots of a girl and guy getting really close. Each visual hook grabs the audiences attention and also appeals to specific audiences in our target audience group.

CAMERWORK & FRAMING
Our camerawork is rarely static as we like the extra movement our shots create especially when we are dancing, the camera movement keeps the visuals more interesting and dynamic.
We tried to create visual hooks with editing effects and content such as beauty shots of the girls and narrative shots of a girl and guy getting really close. Each visual hook grabs the audiences attention and also appeals to specific audiences in our target audience group.

Evaluation Post 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Like other artists' marketing campaigns, we made sure our main product and ancillary texts worked in synergy to promote our band and music.

One way in which our combination of texts markets D4MES effectively is through the consistent band identity conveyed.

Richard Dyer's star theory states:

• 'A star is an image, not a real person, that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc as well as films [music]).'
• 'Stars are commodities produced and consumed on the strength of their meanings.'
• 'Stars represent shared cultural values and attitudes, and promote a certain ideology.'

We created pop star images that are similar to our actual identities so that everything is synergistic and consistent including our poses, facial expressions, personality and how we speak as these things would all be noticed and closely watched by fans and viewers. However star theory means it is just a representation which meant we could be creative with how we wanted to present our complete image in order to target our audience.

Example of a real marketing campaign

Created with Padlet

Our marketing campaign
How the three texts are synergistic and link together, work together: branding (font), band image (street, London, girl power), genre (pop, RnB)
Our brand logo is clear and consistent. It is also shown on our website. All our fonts are white with some red letters to follow through with our red black and white colour scheme. However our album cover contrasts with our website in that it has a light grey background rather than a black one. We feel this contrast is a nice change rather than a stark contrast that seems out of place. Also our dressy black attire shows our prestige, classy side which ties in with connotations of both celebrities who attend classy events as well as the normal girl image who likes to go out and fun fun clubbing with friends.

Created with Padlet

Evaluation Post 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience consists mainly of young girls and women as we are a girl band promoting female empowerment. We also target fans of the rnb and pop music genres as our style of music is a combination of the two genres.


This includes young people of all ethnicities and genders.





We targeted our audiences using Blumer and Katz's Uses and Gratifications Theory which states the 4 simple needs of a media consumer:

• Diversion: entertainment and escape from everyday life problems
• Personal relationships: using media for emotional and other interation
• Personality identity: finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviours and values
• Surveillance: sourcing information from texts that is useful for life/living

DIVERSION
Because our video is performance based it is naturally a source of entertainment. Singing and dancing with cool lighting, effects and non linear editing will create a clubby, fun atmosphere that hooks the audience engaging them to watch the whole video.

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Our other media texts such as our Instagram and our website allows viewers and fans to know us as individuals better. It gives them an idea of what our friendship group is like and what we get up to everyday as normal people. Therefore we try to connect with our target audiences on a deeper emotional level and set an example of a close-knit, successful fun friendship group pursuing their dreams and careers as this is the USP of a lot of successful groups such as One Direction.

 Below is one of the images shown on our website.

PERSONAL IDENTITY
Everyone in the group get along very well but are at the end of the day individuals who have their unique traits. We've tried to connote this through our scenes with our partners which are all different and give off different vibes. For example mine is tense as me and Mario stare at each other's eyes and get very close while Gigi's is very cute as she is being playful with Eddie.

We also include a bit of info about each of us in the 'Meet The Girls' section of our website.

SURVEILLANCE

Our website is the main text that gratifies audience's needs for information. It informs them of our newest songs/albums merchandise and tours. It also links all our social media sites, has an abundance of photos and even short bio pages on each member of the group. Our Facebook page and Twitter account are the main social media platforms that gratify the audience also for sources of information. What's good about social media sites is that theyr'e constantly updated and are accessible to everyone with the proliferation of technology. They're also highly interactive as users can like and comment on things.

We received a lot of feedback from people of both genders and varied ages. One way in which we received this feedback was through an anonymous survey online. We could link this to anyone who was willing to take it.

This is the anonymous survey that we set up on SurveyMonkey

Results from SurveyMonkey

• Female respondents made up 82% of the people who took the survey suggesting that they were more interested in our music video which confirmed that our primary target audience were females
• The genre(s) of our music video were identified correctly by 90% of respondants displaying our success in portraying that genre
• Main criticisms of the video:

        - "sometimes there are too many flashes or fast cut aways it is too much for the eyes and loses                my focus on what's happening"

• Main compliments of the video:

        - ''the dance choreography was good, the hair flicks were nice''

        - ''the band looks put together and cool''

Another group of people I got feedback from were family members and personal friends. This gave me viewers of varied ages and opinions from people who did not worry about offending me. Below is an interview I did with my sister Catherine, age 16.

During our editing week, I also got feedback from media students in the years below which I thought would be very constructive seeing as they also took the subject. It was very helpful.
They really liked the video saying it looked sophisticated and professional. They liked the special effects we edited in. Their only criticism were that we had too many cuts and flashes which seemed to be a trending criticism so we took that into consideration and altered our editing accordingly. So it now looks much better.

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

Being able to use a wide variety of recent media technologies meant we could complete our project efficiently and creatively when researching, planning, producing and blogging. We made use of both modern software and hardware to create our project to the highest standard.

Research & Planning
Our research was all internet based. Due to the proliferation of the internet and its advancement, google was immensely useful. We could research anything we wanted on the music industry including current popular artists, target audiences and youth culture. Google images and sites such as pinterest were particularly useful in researching fashion and art to inform our clothing choices and hair styles as well as make-up looks for the music video

YouTube
YouTube was really useful for us as we watched countless music videos to inspire ideas for our own on visuals, fashion choices, video effects and even dance routines we could learn. Having access to the Latymermedia account meant we could upload videos onto the shared channel such as tutorials and stealomatics. We could also view previous years' music videos. One particularly useful thing we did was upload a collection of videos that inspired each of us into one playlist so we could collectively view them and know what our other team members were interested in.

Whatsapp
For ease of communication, we created a whatsapp group chat, on which we discussed and shared project matters outside of school. Whatsapp is a hugely popular mobile app that is really simple and convenient to use.

Instagram
We had access to social media via the internet which was essential in communicating with each other to share our research using apps such as Whatsapp and Facebook. The fact that we can access the internet hence these apps on our mobiles meant we had ease of access to information and ease of communication anywhere at any time. It also meant we could see what current artists were up to and how they built their image and promoted their music via Twitter and Instagram. It allowed us to see what they did in their personal lives at home and also their professional lives out. Of course we were able to research artists' marketing campaigns online in order to create our own. We also sourced their fashion styles from google images and Instagram. YouTube is the main platform for viewing music videos worldwide. We watched countless videos to inspire our own ideas in preparation for production which included dance styles, fashion worn in music videos and how they were shot and edited.

Construction
For the contruction of our music video we used the Seward studio at school to our advantage as our shoot location. This meant we had access to the school's studio technology including the lighting system, cameras, tv and sound system. We then used the media department's editing suites for post production. Adobe Premiere Pro was our choice of editing software. Photoshop was our choice of software for creating our album cover and inside. We used Wix to create our website.

Although Wix was mainly easy to navigate and had lots of available functions and features, it was sometimes difficult to use especially as we did not have previous experience with it. One problem was the fact that a lot of the pictures we uploaded were distorted with either heads cut out the frame or legs missing from the bottom.This problem was easily solved by looking up instructions online.

I also used my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S4) to record evidence of our construction stages so I could upload them later onto my blog.

Evaluation
For the evaluation stage I used various web tools one being Blogger to collate my progress. I also used tools such as Slideshare, Padlet and Prezi to present my work. In order to present evidence in visually dynamic ways I used Imgflip to create gifs and publisher to create tables and diagrams. I also used YouTube to upload evidence the group needs such as certain shots and first shoots/edits.
 I used social media sites such as Facebook to interview people for their thoughts.