EVALUATION

1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Media codes and conventions are like the building blocks of all the media around us. Media codes generally have an agreed meaning, or connotation, to their audience. There are three types of media codes, symbolic codes, technical codes and written codes. Conventions are expected ways in which codes are organized in a product. Codes and conventions are tools or elements that help to create meaning in a music video. With the correct equilibrium of codes and conventions allocated throughout the music video, one can easily distinguish between which is going to be triumphant and which is not. I must say that our music video is quite stereotypical to the pop/hip hop/ rap music genre. Pop music is thought to be songs that give off the issues the writer or artist is going through. For example most of Taylor Swift's videos are about her heartbreaks.

Rap music is stereotyped by weed, money and alcohol. Our music video has some elements and conventions that lead it to be stereotypical, for example alcohol and the relation incorporation of the imagery with the lyrics. We did this, firstly because the target audience that we are aiming at are between the age of 15-30 and can actually relate to the lyrics by comparing their lives with it. Since by using different codes and convention we can portray the lyrics as images, which makes it easier for the viewers to relate with. Secondly, as a director, I wanted to stay as true to the original music video of the song as possible, while crafting the message of sacrifice and communication.

Our video had both symbolic representation as well as verisimilitude, for example the "dropping of the rose" and the "girl shooting herself." The rose symbolizes love and growing romance however when the artist dropped the rose it represented that the love between the two characters was diminishing. When the girl takes her own life with a gun it represents the issue that has been going on, not just in Pakistan but also around the world. Teenagers and young adults are committing suicide at such a young age just because of the lack of patience in them. By choosing the location and shooting in an auditorium on a stage we wanted to reflect and depict what people go through when they go into depression and when they start to lean towards taking their own life. The darkness represents fear that they have of getting hurt even more. The artists are shot individually rather than together in order to depict the loneliness and the isolation that a person is feeling before committing suicide. If we had chosen a party ambiance location, the sense of hope would have had been delivered to the audience , which we did not want since it was not the message that our music video was portraying.

Our music video "Love the way you lie" is a performance as well as a conceptual based music video, which shows and represents one of the main reasons behind young age suicidal tendencies, i.e the lack of patience and the fear of losing your loved one. A new story becomes the part of media that clearly shows that there must be an alarming increase in the suicide rates in Pakistan. Strong feelings of stress, confusion, fear, and uncertainty, as well as pressure to succeed, and the ability to think about things in new ways, teenage love, influence a teenager's problem-solving and decision making abilities. The inspiration came from a misfortune that happened a year ago in Bahawalpur’s University where two students a girl and a boy shot themselves in a hotel room after both of their families refused to fulfill their desire of getting married. Thus the shooting in the bedroom shown in our music video is inclined towards what happened in that hotel room on that fateful day. The falling of the rose represents a life taken by one's self because of love. Alcohol was also used as a symbolic vehicle for identifying, describing, constructing and manipulating cultural systems, values, interpersonal relationships, behavioral norms and expectations. It represents those people in Pakistan who start start to go astray from the norms and cultural and religious aspects of a society. Pakistan is a conservative society thus, drinking of alcohol is prohibited by the Islamic laws. However, because of devastating heart aches, people tend to break such laws.

Our music video also illustrates the aspects relating to gender. In our music video, the girl is committing suicide by using a fire arm (a pistol) to shoot herself. It is usually considered that men are the ones who are most likely to use firearms and the majority of women (73%) are less likely to use firearms as a way to commit suicide since they are considered a a weak gender. Breaking this stereotype, instead of making the girl poison herself or making her die by exsanguination we decided on a firearm.

Our music video followed a lot of the conventions of pop music videos, that were influenced by Andrew Goodwin's four conventions.

2. How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

The interconnection of all the three media products. that is, the website the CD and the music video help one another to cross promote each other. Different elements such as similar themes, color palettes, house style, the mood and tone, the fonts, images have been used to create a sense of branding. The target market and/ or the

Cross media convergence is produced due to the intervention of the three media products (on the left) among st themselves. Branding evolves around creating a unique name and image for a product (the artists) in the consumers' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

viewer of the product would be able to ally with it in a way that would be unique to this album only.

For the color palette of our products, we stuck mainly to the colors of brown, red and black and some colors belonging to each colors family like orange and pale yellow. In heraldry, black is the symbol of grief, we stuck to black since the music video that we produced shows the grief that comes with love. This love is

signified by the color red which counter balances the grief and love parts. The color brown is used in order to reflect the desperation of adding order in one's life.It shows a a strong need for security. The combination of such a color palette makes a story by itself. Since one of the codes and conventions of our genre included tints and filters to boost color, I used adobe Premiere in order to achieve the desired look and to enhance the colors further in order to convey the meaning better.

A house style helps the artists of the album by using standard grammatical, graphical, and typographical manners in order to communicate through written words or other symbols. It helps create recognition of the brand or the artists. We used logos for both, the artists (Maddox) and the album (Remorse) so that the target audience would be able to identify and relate to the product through the unique aspect of their logo. We used red and white from our color palette in order to illustrate the need for security in love.

The mood that we set up for our music video was mostly dull and quite gloomy in order to portray the devastating incident that happened in our music video. We used low key lighting and dark tones in order to high light both the mood and the tone. It can be seen that the artists were performing under a spotlight however the spotlight's strength of giving light was altered in order to create a dreary mood. For the imaging, after doing some research it can be concluded that most pop songs and rap songs have the face of their artists on their websites, albums and so on. Since our video is both conceptual and performance based we, decided on focusing more on the artists on the digipack rather than other elements. This is because the use of artists in our music video is less than the conceptual part of it. So, in order to balance it out we decided to keep the artists in focus when creating the digipack. By doing so, the artists would be promoted more and people would start to recognize their faces. We also created a website which would allow our viewers to get in touch with us and the band. The website would further help us to create a strong customer base by selling merchandise of the band and the album online, such as, t shirts, mugs, caps, jewellery, and so on. By using above and below the line promotions we can sell concert tickets on our website and give online information and updates about the band to our audience. By merging with other platforms, such as, YouTube, Spotify, Shazam, Google Play, Pandora, iTunes, Soundcloud, and so on we can help promote our product even further.

3. How do your products engage with the audience and how would they be distributed as real media products?

The target audience for our music album 'Remorse' ranges from 15 to 30 demographically, whereas the psychographic segmentation would be more specific. The Album would draw both male and female audiences, however female as a majority since the topic is about an issue in which females are more likely to attempt suicide than males.Youth is the asset for any nation and are the source of pride and success for any country. They have the power and ability to change the world. They have the greater influence on the society than the older ones.

My music video alludes to the uses and gratifications theory due to a few reasons. Firstly, as my performers include a young teenage girl and a young teenage boy, my target audience would also be of a similar age and would mostly be females too due to the reason mentioned above. This would allow the audience to relate to the main actors in my music video, by putting themselves in their shoes or by relating their current happenings in their life with that shown in the video. The purpose of a performance based music video is to entertain, and the purpose of a conceptual based music video is to convey a message.These two combined were the main aim of mine, therefore, my product was engaging and allowed the audience to relate and watch something that is intriguing yet serious. Music is a highly talked about subject across all ages, as it is a constantly changing subject that builds relationships between people. This would mean that music videos would spark conversations, hence, supporting the reception theory.

By using mise-en-scene and ensuring that the locations, being confined dark gloomy spaces such as bedrooms and the auditorium stage, combined with casual dark toned costumes and sad and emotional body

language and facial expressions will link with the song, and create a cold gloomy tone. The natural day light, instead of being dull and dim will however lift the mood, which is shown when the girl eats the ice cream from the supporting actor and will give the audience the chance to create a message that they think is being portrayed, listening to the lyrics to help. Using a large range of camera positions will engage the audience and allow them to see my artist's facial expressions and body language, also in order to make it more interesting by adding slight camera movements too such as panning and tracking.

Our album would be made available to a wider audience including Pakistan and many other countries by using a distribution company. The record label that we chose to help reach a mass audience is Universal Music which is based in the US. We would use distribution channels such as online distribution and retailing distribution to promote and distribute our album. The album and the main song along with the music video would be shared on social media sites, since its the quickest, easiest and the most cost-efficient and effective way of distribution. Sharing on Facebook, hash-tagging on twitter, snapping it on Snapchat and putting stories on Instagram, our album could be publicized. By uploading the music video on platforms such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Soundcloud, iTunes and so on, our whole album could get recognition and would be able to gain profit if it is successful since platforms like these allow artists to be discovered by music companies and agents and channels such as "Vevo" on You tube allow the artists to distribute to a wider audience and earn profit. Like telephone companies we can also buy emails and phone numbers and start to advertise by texts and emails. By airing it on the television on channels such as MTV,Channel UFX, 4Music, 40 TV, Channel V, VIVA, Scuzz and so on, a wider demographic audience would be able to view the music video.

We have also created a website for the artists and the album which would help in distributing the whole package in one go from merchandise to concert tickets, to actually selling the album.

4. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Starting from the pre production, we did some in depth research about our music genres and sub genres. This also included a survey about the genres that we conducted ourselves in our school. I watched a variety of pop and rap music videos from a technical point of view. As my music video's genre is pop, hip hop I had to get a lot of ideas and inspirations from different mediums. I learned different editing techniques,angles and shots through my research which helped me in carrying out my project. I also carried out a survey as mentioned above, which helped me obtain qualitative results due to which i was more aware of the thoughts and interests of my target audience.My research helped me to understand the codes, conventions and to decide on what type of genre I would want to work on. In order to grasp more concepts and techniques and to get used to the camera and the world of shooting, we had done a preliminary task. The script that we wrote was quite simple and had a strong visuals and lyrics relationship. Many transitions that were planned were not executed since we were not mature and were inexperienced in such a work.

I took quite a lot of aid from technology in order to enhance my creativity.Internet was a very efficient and cost effective resource. By using it I had gained a lot of information relating to sound,camera,lighting,editing,distribution,angles and shots, however, due to load shedding I had to face some delays in my project. Our school took us to a news channel office called "City 42" where we learned to use Adobe premiere pro by a professional and we visited many shooting rooms and the control room where we got to learn about how to operate the camera and instruct the actors. I considered the preliminary task also as research since the whole experience of planning producing and editing that we learnt ourselves was another experience. We went through several different songs after deciding "Love the way you lie." We already made a story board about another song named "Sad Song" by We the Kings however, one of my team members and I thought that the pace was too slow of it so we rejected the whole idea.

In the production process of the music video, though it was not easy in start I was making a lot of errors in directing the video but later with the help of my team I ended up producing a good music video. I learned about different shots like over the shoulder, closeups,point of view shot, closeup, long shot, rule of thirds and camera movements like pan movement while the production phase.I took many short videos and tried to make a few short videos before my project and even while editing my preliminary task video helped me out in carrying out my project more efficiently and having a better grip over the camera. As a cinematographer of the project I learned about the match on action. I also learned how to enhance the emotions of my audience along with the mise-en-scene and how control lighting in DSLR manual mode by adjusting the ISO and shutter speed. Since other than a tripod we did not have any professional equipment, our video had some flaws with stability and tracking however, we did manage to produce a good video by editing it well. We almost had to shoot every scene 2-3 times since either the actors started laughing or the camera angle or position was not satisfactory.We also did retakes in order to help us decide in the pre production phase as to which shot was good and would be used in the video.

While editing my video I learned about the following editing techniques dip to black,fade in fade out,dissolve and also learned white flashes. I also learned to use different software's like Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. As an editor I learned how to over come all the editing errors like jump cuts,continuity error and white balance and Hue and Saturation. I learnt how we can enhance and emphasize the emotions and give a better gloom to our video by using different techniques of color correcting. I had photographed the artists where they actually sung the song in different outfits for the digipak. By the end of the project I had gained better knowledge about the use of DSLR and editing the video. Due to low budget we lack resources but we managed to complete the project efficiently within the available resources which improved my planning skills.This project totally improved my productions skills and converted me into a media producer.