Individual Evaluation - Frederick Mokoso

This is my independent evaluation, the questions I will be examining and answering are;
 1. In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
 2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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

 This year’s media product involved me creating a music video. The song our group decided to do was 'R.Kelly duet with Usher - Same Girl'. Having watched many music videos beforehand we understood what we had to include into our own video to make sure it was successful. Our aim was to include a variety of media conventions which would relate to both our music video and our music artists in order to show a modern day music video which would appeal to our target audience. We included fragmentation of the body, examples of this is the girl's lips and legs. Fragmentation of the body was used as it’s a way of showing sexual objectification and this would appeal to teenage boys who are part of our target audience.

 As in today’s world a high percentage of music videos show girls as a sexual object. You could argue that the music video shows intersexuality(art recognizing art) which is shown when Usher and R.Kelly are singing the chorus and at certain times look straight into the camera as if they were expressing themselves to the audience. We also integrated many high class logos such as Ralph Lauren, Mercedes Benz as well as filming parts of the video in high class bars and restaurants. This down to both the real Usher and R.Kelly comporting themselves in a high class manner, so we had to make sure that Fred (R.Kelly) and Daniel (Usher) portrayed this to our target audience as many of them see these two artist as role models and like to copy there sense of style and living as much as possible, so we knew that this would keep them interested. In our video we have shown controversy as in the original video both artists are black, but we decided to star a white male as one of the roles. The reason for doing this is due to they not being many duets featuring one black male and one white male. It was also done so that the music video was different and kept our target audience interested.

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

With the main product being our music video, we combined many aspects of ancillary texts to develop the promotion of Usher and R.Kelly. We have created a website which shows our audience many different things on both artists, e.g. pictures of them, biographies and many other things, but as you can see the font and colour that has been used on the website, is the same that has been used on the CD covers. This was due to consistency being very important to us as it appears professional and has some sort of high class, but more importantly it links everything together which is what we have been going for.

 

3. What have you learned from the audience feedback? 

 After interviewing three girls and three boys, I have learnt that overall our target audience are very much pleased with our music video but had a small number of criticisms for us. For example one was when the audience’s attention was distracted for a matter of seconds when one artist took out a phone that was quite old and looked tacky which does fit in with the style of the artists being high class. This has made me understand that the smallest of things are scrutinised, and because of them could make the audience dislike your work. Although on the good side our audience were impressed with the way both artists presented themselves as Usher and R.Kelly in terms of their acting i.e. expressing their emotion via their body language, their attire and many other things. Overall our audience said that we interpreted ‘same girl’ very well.

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

In the construction and research phase we used many media technologies for e.g., facebook, prezi, survey monkey,music metric, and many more. This helped find out who would watch our video, who are the artists fanbase e.g. are they more likely to be girls or guys, what age, where from, all these minute details were researched upon so we could get the best possible idea of what we were going to do to cater to our audience. In the planning and evaluation programmes such as Iweb, Prezi, Adobe Premier, were used were used a lot. Adobe premiere was one of the main softwares we used as with this software we edited our music video. Facebook was used to promote our video as i found out that facbook is the leading social network, and i knew that most of our target audience are always on this website.