Music Video Digipak Website

For evaluation task one, I have created a video montage for the music video product. For the digipak and website I have created a slideshare. These platforms include how I have used, developed and challenged forms and conventions compared to real media products. 

Summary of Conventions: (Used/Developed/Challenged)

• Dance Like we’re making love: Used technical conventions of close ups and long shots
• I Bet: Used technical conventions of extreme close ups and image manipulating editing (mirror effect)
• Just Fine: Developed conventions of Jump-cut editing, changed entire positions of artist and used editing style on dancers too. 
• Say My Name: Challenged the conventions of immediately showing the singer by instead building anticipation 
• Umbrella: Challenged conventions of showing the artist immediately, however developed the star image of mystery and sexiness through silhouettes
• Work: Used conventions of illuminated lighting to create a fun and engaging video
• Beautiful Liar: Used conventions of set design such as the poles surrounding the artist to depict them as confident and powerful in such a large design. Developed this to fit into our main theme of illuminated lighting by combining set and lighting together. 
• Bootylicious: Used symbolic conventions of a simple but colourful set design, but developed this with darker colours to create a more mysterious video than Destiny’s Child’s. Seen in more modern videos such as The Weeknd’s Starboy. We challenged the conventions of colourful and light sets commonly seen in 2001, and updated them to a more modern convention. Additionally, challenged conventions of makeup and costume by instead using black and white costumes rather than bright costumes.

My music video as reference: 

DIGIPAK and Website:

In conclusion, we created a music campaign which allows our artist to connect to her fans. This supports Dyer's star theory paradox as she is absent and present at the same time, as well as being ordinary and extraordinary. Through our connected products of music video, digipak and website. We constructed our star to appear sexy and fun to appeal to her target audience. 

I created a prezi to clearly demonstrate the journey of my process, before and after receiving audience feedback. 



What have I learned from my audience feedback? We used quantitative and qualitative research as a method in receiving audience feedback. We created open and closed question surveys including questions such as "Would you say we have photoshopped it too much?" where our focus group would either put yes or no, this is a closed question.  Using open questions are useful as they are quick and easy for our focus group to understand. This gathers much more data and allows us to ask more questions in a small amount of time. Closed questions were also very useful in gathering richer data. I felt that this was more useful in finding out what to improve on for our products as the data was more constructive and rich in detail. We placed this data in pie charts and graphs to easily see the majority view in answers. This helped us to really establish what our focus group thought and notice any patterns in data. The demographic and psychographic profile of our audience was males and females of age 16-19. They are all college students of similar backgrounds and interests. This meant that feedback were very similar as it was only coming from one aspect of our target audience. We therefore do not know whether our improvements based off our limited audience feedback is preferred by our target audience of all different kinds of backgrounds. 


We felt that some responses and feedback might not be honest and therefore not accurate. As we conducted open focus groups we realised that some people might experience conformity as they are amongst their peers and not giving their own personal opinion. This is a limitation as we effectively only receive one piece of feedback, rather than multiple. On the other hand, one advantage of using these focus groups is that we received the feedback with lots of detail. Our audience were able to develop their explanations so that we completely understood what they meant, so that we could go and improve our campaign with a straightforward vision of what we should improve upon and achieve.   From our feedback, we discovered that our music video is clear in that it fits into the genre of R&B. The conventions of R&B that we encoded, such as the colourful backgrounds and revealing costumes are coming through to the audience clearly. We also had audience comment on how engaging our video was, claiming that 'the music video held my attention the whole way through'. From this we realised that the quick cut editing between shots was keeping our target audience engaged thus seeing our artist to have a fun and preppy star image. However, we felt that we needed to add more shots of the rapper and dancers as we received feedback claiming that it is 'too repetitive'. Therefore we improved by adding snippets of shots other than Nand.C, but using the same style of quick cut editing. Audience feedback lead us to look at the encoding/decoding model, proposed by Stuart Hall. This theory is a way of understanding multiple readings of media texts. To encode a text is to attempt to deliver an intended meaning to the audience. However, depending on social and cultural contexts, audience will decode the meanings differently. For example, we wanted to encode a meaning of Nand.C feeling a connection to her audience by making her sing directly into the camera. We found from feedback that our audience decoded this correctly in feeling like she is talking directly to them.     We turned to the uses and gratifications theory proposed by Lazarfeld, Blumler and Katz. This theory suggests that audiences actively look for and select texts that they wish to consume to fulfil specific needs and desires within their lives. In terms of our focus group, they found our video very entertaining and wanted to see more of the dancers and rapper to get a bigger overall sense of our video.  For some of our target audience, our music video acts as a route to escape mundane reality. For others, particularly the female aspect of our music video, our music video acts as a personal identity, in which females identify and admire our artist's feminism and female empowerment.  Based off our audience feedback of conducting focus groups and questionnaires, we found that our audience go for preferred meaning. Our target audience we focused on was 18-24 westernised males and females; who accepted our intended meanings of creating our artist's star image to be sexy and mysterious but also fun and confident. However, as we only focused on a select few from the same social context, we did not consider other cultures into account. Individuals from a different cultural contexts may lean more towards the negotiate or oppositional reading, as they decode our encoding differently depending on their specific cultural context. We found that some women opposed our intended meanings of creating a sex appeal, as they may see her as being objectified.  In conclusion, we received feedback from our target audience of females and males 18-21 via focus groups. One limitation we had was that our focus groups were devised of our target audience from the same background, limiting a diverse range of feedback we received. From this feedback we learnt what we were doing well, such as our quick cut editing style, and what we should improve on e.g. adding in more shots of the dancers. Through the use of theoriests such as Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding model and Lazarfeld, Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theories, we identified what our target audience looks for in our video. This helped us to improve our campaign to suit those audience needs.

For my music video product, I created a prezi identifying the technologies I used in pre-production through to post-production and specifically focused on a select few technologies and how I used them. In summary, I used multiple technologies during my pre-production, production to post-production. Through the use of these technologies, we were able to operate these production stages smoothly and effectively whilst avoiding problems via communication, hardware and the online age.



For my website product, I created a screen capture video guiding you through the website and explaining the technologies I used from pre-production through to post-production. In summary, we used different software programmes to research and look into other artist's websites, and then creating our own using editing platforms such as Adobe Photoshop and WIX. The combination of these softwares allowed us to create a dynamic and engaging website which encodes our singer's star image and connection with her fans.



For my digipak I created an infographic to present my information of how I used technologies from pre-production through to post-prodution. In summary, we used a range of hardware and softwares to communicate in planning the photoshoot. This was a key element to our success as we organised a photoshoot via external people outside our group who were willing to help. 

From our focus group, we learnt that our social media buttons were not clear to access. We thought about how to make it more user-friendly for the audience, and experimented with placing the icons around the homepage. We found that placing them in the bottom right corner maintains the aesthetic we wanted for all different internet browsers. One particular problem we found was that internet explorer did not support our fonts and layout. We attempted to compromise our layout to fit all, however we had no luck and therefore must warn our users that internet explorer is not supported.


We also added a lightbox to immediately hit the audience to check out her latest album Hallucinations as soon as they go onto the website. This is used in multiple real media products such as Ariana Grande's website, where the website redirects the audience to a lightbox selling merchandise and tour dates, before continuing to the main homepage. This enhances the synthetic image of our artist as she wants the audience to buy her album and create sales.

We conducted a focus group for our website. We created open and closed questions and asked members within our target audience. We created a graph to simply and accurately display our data. This helped us to improve our website and its effectiveness. 

We began to add on side pages to our website such as Music, Tour, and About page.

We used WIX, a free online platform which allows us to use templates and add gadgets to create our website. We began by creating the homepage. We were inspired by Kelly Rowland and Mary J Blige's homepages as we thought that these were simple and effective.

We wanted to create a small slideshow presenting the singer's star image. However, as WIX doesn't support this feature for the background, I instead created a photoshop gif where the 5 images blend together.

I duplicated the image 10 times and changed the opacity of each one from 90-10%. Underneath each duplicated layer, I put a duplicate of the second image underneath. I then placed this into an animation and set the delay to zero, except the original image which I set the delay to 3.5 seconds. This creates an animation of the images blending together, revealing the second image. I continued this process with all the images. For the final image, I rounded it back to the first image to make a continuous gif.

The technical conventions show a numerous amount of information all laid out geometrically for audiences to use with ease. To not overwhelm the audience with information and add symbolic conventions of edginess, the greyscale involves a hover feature in which the information turns into colour. Rihanna's website however, is a bit more complex with the amount of information it has and the age suitability of its material. The photographs used to visually show her career are more risky and suitable for an older audience.
Unlike Grande's website, viewers can still see the evolution  of Rihanna's career by displaying all her albums and news since the beginning. The website still covers news about Rihanna's old albums, such as Unapologetic gaining 2x platinums, conveying the ideology that she takes pride in her music.
Overall, Rihanna's website almost reflects her life and successful career. It bombards the audience with what it seems organic information as it doesn't introduce them obviously to buying her products. However, subliminally, as Rihanna applies to Dyer's star theory, the audience is exposed to buying all kinds of different projects, such as fashion products and fragrances.

What's similar and different between the two artists:

• Both artists use an introduction page, where they offer different digital music platforms and merchandise. 
• The artists have different target audiences, shown through different styles. Grande's is easier to use than Rihanna's, as it is for a younger target audience. 
• Rihanna still updates on her previous discography, unlike Grande who focuses on her latest album.

On her official website home page, the first thing you see are Grande's music and concert videos from her latest album. The layout is clean, slick, and modern. And we see conventions of purity that are associated with Grande, from the black and white backgrounds.

The purpose of this website is to get the audience to listen to her music and buy merchandise. The website is very simple and clean, not overwhelming the user with information. This allows more sales as more users can access them easily from the website.



The website also has links to social media websites and an option to sign in/register. Users can sign up to the mailing list to find out the latest news and discuss Grande and her music in forums and social media. The register also allows fans to be entered into special competitions and more info, connecting Grande to her fans more personally.

Although Grande is a popular well-known idol among a younger audience, there is very little biography about her personal life or music career. The homepage simply introduces the audience to her image, music and merchandise. Grande is sold on her image and not her personality.

This website is targeted mainly for a younger audience of 12-25 years. Grande has already attracted a young audience from her Nickelodeon show Sam and Cat, so continues to sell towards that young audience as they are guaranteed sales. Her website is easy to use, simple, minimalistic, and modern. it is suitable for all abilities and ages, but mainly targeted towards females. It is evident from the style of merchandise shown on the homepage that the apparel is more feminine and not something a man would wear. The navigation bar of social media icons appeal to a more technological audience who will share Grande's work through the internet.