Commentary

1. For our product we we analysed and researched other products with a similar genre. We looked at other music videos under the same conventions and followed Goodwins theory. One of the videos we looked at was 'Lil-Wayne - Lollipop' which is also under the hip hop/ rap genre. Here we focused on settings and costume etc to get ideas for our video. We decided to some conventions by styling our main singer in a 90's fashion/basketball style theme, we plated around with the idea of pitting our characters in a conventional urban setting, keeping the basketball theme. We also looked at a lot of editing and cinematography techniques and kept our character in most of the shots rapping directly at the camera then cutting back to the other shots to break it up. The editing techniques with hip hop videos change a lot so we decided on one of the more effective techniques and did quick cuts and fades on some of the cut aways depending on the speed. conventions  are usually that the visuals and lyrics work well together, work well and fit with what's on screen, this is what we aimed to do.We challenged the conventions slightly as the main character in our video wasn't as 'glamourous' as some of the rappers in the music videos we analysed, though we still had various costume changes and references to money.

2.Our music video, digipak and magazine advert work well together to sell the style and image of our artist. The three products together are aimed to show what the artist is about and puts across the genre and style. We focused more on the music than the artist in our final products. The concept in the music video was to sell the artists image, meaning we had him in the shots more than anything else. Whereas the digipak was there to put across the style, we did this by referencing ket themes from the music video like the basketball and the red shirt. Kyle Rapps being an underground artist we planned to put this across in the digipak by not showing his face but picking out key themes and colours instead. Our target audience follows the same set ideas as Kyle Rapps, most of his videos fir around schools and colleges and the locations show this as they are usually college and libraries, schoolyard and halls. a lot of his lyrics fit with this conventions by filming in the college basketball court and breaking it up with other things like parking lots etc. I think this would attract the younger target audience we were aiming for as they can relate.

3.The audience feedback was positive mostly, it showed us that our synchronizing of the video worked well and matched the mouth movement. another positive was that the genre came across well throughout the costume and locations and the settings plus the hand and body movements helped make the lyrics clear to the audience. the pace of out video also worked well with the lyrics, the amount of cuts were at the correct pace, though we could have improved the parts with both Reece and Steve by cutting away to more things.This is an improvement to our rough cut feedback, as we corrected the lip syncing that was slightly off, we also added more cut aways to make the pacing quicker, we took the advice about sharpening our footage with video filters and colour correctors. we also experimented with fading, bring one shot from behind then fading it out again. Although our video was improved we could have done more walking shots to make it less simple and re-shot Reeces part near the end.

4.The first thing we did for this was research, we did all of it using 'Apple Mac's' in the classroom with the internet and Blogger to take down our research and ideas. This was useful as it was easy to keep track of everything in one place. We then used the still camera to photograph our planning forms and sketches as to upload them to the blog to make it easier to look back at them. Once we had planned , we shot the footage using HD cameras, this allowed us to get good footage for our product. These were easy to upload onto the computer and insert into the programme 'Final cut' where we did all our editing. Although the software was effective and gave us a lot of potential we sometimes found it hard to use or didn't know how to get the effect we were after, this meant a lot of time was wasted playing around with the software. Syncing took the longest to do. One of the other software's we used was Photoshop which allowed us to manipulate the photos we took using a NIKON camera, it was easy to open up the images into Photoshop though using it on a mac was harder than i was used to as the positioning of the editing tools was different. We also created our digipak and magazine advert in Photoshop using templates which made it a lot easier, you can move around text and images a lot easer than most other softwares. Overall I think we did well with the technology we used and the products looked as good as we wanted them to.