Music Video Final Cut

Here is the final edit of our music video... We hope you enjoy it!

Finished Digipak

L Zafo Records Website

The following is the link to L Zafo's website, "L Zafo Records". 

https://lzaffonw11.wixsite.com/website

Evaluation Final Cut

Here is the final cut of our evaluation, enjoy!

Written Personal Evaluation

Underneath is a copy of my written personal evaluation:

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

I think our media product does all of that to forms and conventions of real media products. It uses many conventions of a typical old-school hip-hop video that we have tried to recreate. Examples of this include a tense atmosphere, dark low-key lighting, smoke, hoods up and of course bling. One would usually split old-school hip-hop songs and videos into two sections – ones that represent the dark side and grim nature of being a thug, and ones that portray the riches and luxuries of being a successful thug. Taking this into consideration, our video outs both sides of old-school hip-hop into perspective, showing a more tense side (i.e. hoods up, darkness etc.), and a more laid back side (i.e. fancy clothes, car, champagne etc.). The video of the song Ain’t Goin out Like That by Cypress Hill can be reminiscent of our video in it’s dark, tense fashion, whereas scenes in our video can be compared to some of Biggie Smalls’ videos that try to show the luxuries of being a rich gangster.

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

Our video, being part of L Zafo’s album Golder’s Green, has a dark yet upbeat feel, which is meant for the audience to re-embrace the old school hip-hop vibe of music and life. Although lighter at times, the video is supposed to have quite a suspenseful feel. With my digipack being the cover for L Zafo’s album, which explores the struggles of his life as a teen drug dealer, I tried to stick to the funky gangster feel of it. For instance the Zafo written on the front cover of the digipack looks like it has been spray painted as graffiti, and the L has a gold chain hung around it’s foot. Also, the other photos in the digipack are of a more or less cartoon nature thanks to filter’s on Photoshop, which suits the funky old-school vibe, along with everything revolving more or less around the colour green, which is also common of hip-hop genre, to stick to a color, like Wu-Tang Clan have done in the past as you can see. Now because the video and digipack were of this more funky, gritty nature, I tried to give a certain degree of elegance to the website, as it is not in fact a website for the album Golders Green but rather for L Zafo Records – The record label which L Zafo founded and uses himself . So this is where all L Zafo songs, videos, tour dates and tickets are released, sometimes involving other artists completely in collaboration with L Zafo. So I chose this elegancy over funkiness to be able to target a wider audience. There is background information of L Zafo on the website, something that may interest one completely not into old-school hip-hop, and for this reason I made the website look like this, so even a sixty-year old who despises hip-hop can go onto my website and not be completely turned off, thinking… ‘Ah, its just another one of those gangster rappers’… as it does not appear that way, and actually looks professional. I actually asked a few members of our audience focus group to take a look at my website and digipack – at the time still under construction – and they seemed to really like the digipack – my guess is because its hip, its artistic, its colorful, its nice to look at – but for my website, rather than comments of how nice or bad it looks, they all basically said the same thing – that although its not finished, the ideas were good, and it gave a nice balance to the vibe and mis-en-scene of the video and digipack. So I took this advice, and carried on in this matter as you can see.

•   What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We had two audience focus groups – one supposed to create a primary target audience, and the other imitating a secondary/tertiary audience. The primary target audience was made out of a group of 6 friends of our age,  who are all very into the hip-hop genre (especially old-school). Their reactions were all very positive, with all of them very much enjoying the video overall, and only a few others commenting on some unfinished edits, which was completely normal, as we hadn’t even finished our music video by then. One member of the audience pointed out moments of slight emptiness in the video, which we have thoroughly worked on since.  The other audience focus group (recreating a secondary/tertiary audience) was made out of my mother’s friends (aged 30-50), all actors and directors themselves. Although we still received some really great feedback – especially directed at the success of the dark tense nature of the video in gripping someone, and the charismatic side to the video which was ‘fashionable’ or humorous’ as they said – a few of them didn’t seem to enjoy the gangster feel of the video, and some others seemed to be even insulted by some of the profanity in the song. I believe this came down to the fact that some people will not like this genre, and some people will be offended. It has been the story of hip-hop from day 1, and I believe it is because it challenges certain aesthetics.

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

We used a Panasonic 4K camcorder to film the music video, using it with a manfrotto tri-pod to support it, or handheld. For many moving shots in the video, we used a gimble (Ronin DJI) to steady the camera whilst we moved, and it worked beautifully. We also used a Rotto light to light ups some shots in the dark, with a reflector as well to help. To produce our websites, we used Wix, which is a cloud-based web development platform that was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company also called Wix. Its so simple was a great aid in helping us both create nice websites. Wix ADI is the program on Wix.Com that helps create your website using artificial intelligence after collecting data from you of the ideal aspects of what your website is about. This made the process very smooth, and I can say for myself that Wix ADI did help create and create itself some stunning stuff. We both used Photoshop to produce our digipacks. It was an excellent choice as it is a complex yet ideal platform to create pictures and i-dents, and there are so many different effects and filters that you can apply to photos. For example, as you can see in this photo of my digipack, I have applied a filter from the filter gallery in photoshop. There are an array of selections and the control of color contrast is great. You can easily change the shades and tones of different components of color in your photo. Although the layers and all the different tools got us really confused at times, all these tools and such are very necessary in advanced graphic design task such as ours. I did use Illustrator as well, but only for one part of my digipack – to draw the L in the L Zafo on the front cover of my digipack. I used illustrator as it is certainly the best platform to draw and illustrate things as the lines have very smooth curves and that do not pixelate as they tend to do in photoshop

Evaluation is done!

I have received word from Bruno on the other side of the Atlantic, that the Evaluation is complete! This is great news as we are now ahead of schedule, and we will be uploading it to our blogs shortly.

Editing Evaluation part 2

For three more days now, we have edited our evaluation. All there is left for Bruno to edit when I leave tomorrow, is the fourth and final question on technologies used. This is more than doable for Bruno, and I am in fact very relaxed and stress free leaving to America.