A2 Media Blog

The session was very helpful as we asked a range of questions which aided our initial ideas of how we were going create a music video for the genre of R&B. I firstly created a power point of visual aids which included pictures of R&B artists and extracts of music videos from these artists. This formed the base of our questions and helped narrow down our talk which would give focused and detailed answers.

Firstly, we informed the group about the background of R&B with some information about general conventions and how it had changed over time. We asked what the audience already knew about R&B and who their favourite artists were in general to see if anyone's favourite artist was in fact, an R&B artist. By asking these sorts of questions we were able to question why they liked certain artists and what about them made the stand out from other artists.

There were some older R&B videos mixed with some newer ones and so we could show this comparison to our audience. When asked which type of R&B was better, the audience response was generally that an older type video was preferred as they gave more of a sense of reality. They didn't like the newer videos as they focused more of wealth and success which came across arrogant as well as the desirable, sexual representation of women which was not approved by many. With this information, I found that it helped us understand exactly what path we were taking for our song choice and gave us ideas of would do in our planning and production stage.

A question that was put forward questioned whether narrative videos were more popular or performance based videos. We showed them extracts of Drake's 'Started from the bottom' which is very much followed with narrative and compared it with Usher's 'Yeah' which is predominantly a performance by Usher himself.

we found that some of our audience enjoyed the story telling element of the music video as it was something to follow however, the more popular choice was the performance based video of Usher as it focuses more on the song itself rather than a story which allows the artist to dance to his own music and let the music do the work. We decided from this choice that we would include both within our music video so that it appealed to a wide variety of our audience and found during the post production stage that both suited the look better and worked to a more professional level. We found that the way the performance was played on the chorus areas added to the continuity of the music video.

Another piece of audience feedback was from our second focus group that was done after post production, this time we asked a different group of people that were the right age and asked them to critique the positives and negatives as well as give us opinions on what we could do to make it better.

From the negative side of things, the audience realised that the rose wasn't actually seen as a motif and they found it rather random at the end of the music video, i found this a piece of research that i understood and i felt that we could have included the rose more in the music video and i feel that if i could re-do my final piece i could have included the rose in more important parts of the music video.

Another negative note that they pointed out is that they felt they didn't understand the story line completely and wanted another male character to portray the cheating or for the timing on the texts to be displayed longer to allow the audience understand the cheating story line.

On a positive note from the focus group, the audience said that they found the lip syncing to be effective and they all found this to be a technique that they understood was difficult but was pulled off well.Another part that they found worked well was the story as a whole, they found that we were able to portray the positives and negatives of the relation well and found the settings and body language ideas to connotate to what we wanted to achieve.