One way that I have used R&B music video conventions in my own music video is the washed colour effect we have put on our video. We did this by turning the saturation down on each clip in final cut express. Below you can see a shot from our video with the saturation turned down, and some screen shots from other R&B videos that use this convention. The Drake and Rihanna video uses washed colour, whereas the Nicki Minaj has a complete black and white colour wash. My video is not fully washed to black and white, as we liked the colour on the artists hat and did not want it to be too dull. We have done this as bright colours often connote a happy bubbly atmosphere, usually used in the Pop genre. Due to us wanting a more downbeat/dingey feel to the video, to represent the idea of the artists struggle to success being a dark down time in their life. This is why we turned the saturation down to create washed colour.
Another convention I have used in my media video is the performance/narrative that run along side of each other in the video. In our video we have the artist standing in a warehouse for the performance bit, he is singing the song in these shots. On the other hand, for the narrative we have a story of a girl who is struggling to get where she wants to be, this is shown by her crying and arguing with her mother at the beginning, she then makes her way to the dance studio and uses her dancing as an outlet. We show this cross cutting between the narrative and performance with split screens which added an effect of showing what the singer is talking about at one specific time, this also links back to the struggle and the pain as one shot is one of her showing pain, and the other is her or the artist performing. Our split screens are shown below. Also we used cross and additive dissolves between shots of our artist and the character dancing in the video.
From my research and planning I found out that other R&B artists do this narrative/performance style video. Below are screen shots from my video showing how I used this convention
Screen shots of split screens
And here are shots from other existing R&B videos such as The Script who have a similar story line to us with the same theme of cross cutting between the narrative and the performance, shown in the shots below.
One convention I have developed in my media video is the artists clothing. Usually in a R&B video the artist is usually dressed smart, or in a very casual way. The smart dress connotes wealth and that they are successful, although some artists like to stick to their urban roots and dress in a more casual style. We challanged this by combining both these conventions together as we had out artist in a smart jacket, with a hoodie underneath, instantly making the outfit more urban. We did this to show that our artist is down to earth and relatable, but still has a sense of class about him.
Below are pictures of other artist showing both dress code conventions, and our artist representing the combination of the two.
A second convention I have developed in my R&B music video is our location for the performance side of our video. We used an old abandoned warehouse to film the shots with our artist. Using a grungey background location is a popular thing in the R&B genre, as for the same reason as us, the artists want to portray the struggle to fame. Rihanna uses this convention in We Found Love, and Chris Brown uses it in Don't Judge Me
In these screen shots you can see how we have developed the grunge location theme as the locations in these existing R&B videos are in rough looking places, but they look as if they are used by people. On the other hand, our location is very remote and completely empty. This made filming here very easy as there was no background noise, no people and nothing to distract us. The reason we decided to have this urban location featured so strongly in our media video as it is to show our artist going back to his 'urban roots' which is what the lyrics of our song are representing. We also knew that we could get some interesting shots in this location as the warehouse is very run down, we could get graffiti in the back ground and broken glass on the floor. Due to the wide open space we could also get some high shots, low shots and were able to make a spinning shot of the artist for the chorus which turned out really well.
A convention that we challenged in our media video is the typical love storyline that features in a lot of R&B music videos. This is usually due to the lyrics usually being about love. We decided to focus more on the struggle to fame theme in our video. Again, this is due to the link with the lyrics we have in our song saying 'the money is the motive' we decided to represent working towards getting where you want in life. I believe that this is effective, as it is not the typical storyline of a video, and we have made something a bit different meaning it would be interesting to our target audience to see something different. Below are some pictures showing the typical love story convention in a lot of R&B music videos.
Another convention we challenged is the girl in our narrative part of the video. This has been developed as usually, in R&B music videos with the narrative and performance running along side each other with cross cuts between, older actresses/actors are used. As our story line is similar to that of a proffesional R&B video, we have challanged this by the fact that we use a young school girl as our character for the video. This part of the video runs parralel to the performance part representing our artists journey, which she is now going through. We created a contrast between our artist, and the girl in the narrative, showing anyone can find success if they just try hard enough. Also we have not used an element of desire in our video, as most R&B videos have a girl portrayed as 'sexy' as this is a typical convention of this genre. We have not represented Phoebe as this at all.
One video that shows we challanged this is Tre Songs in 'Simply Amazing' as in the narrative he uses an older looking girl. This is shown in the picture below
Question 2. How effective us the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
For this question, we spoke about how our three texts linked and we recorded it on an IPhone 5, we then uploaded the recording to our mac, and edited it on top of parts of the video, and pictures that backed up what we were saying in the recording. Here is that video.
Question 3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Here is an annotated version of our video answering this question.
Question 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
This is footage of my evaluation question explaining how I used technologies creating my media product.
