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

What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback ?

What have you learned from your audience feedback? from Rory taplin

How Effective is the combination of our main Product and Ancillary Texts ?

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

In what ways does your media product use , develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products from Rory Taplin

A2 Media Coursework : Directors Cut

A2 Media Coursework : 'Hive' By Earl Sweatshirt

Digipak/Ancillary task

Explanation:

This is our music magazine advertisement. We have gone with these conventions due to connotations of the background. Our nature theme is related to camouflage, this convention reoccurs frequently in Hip-Hop culture. It comes in different forms wither it be through outfits or through backgrounds, an example of this can be 'Upper Echelon' by Travis Scott (this album is shown below.) Here we see very similar conventions including the real tree camouflage, we found this to add a anonymous mysterious atmosphere. These conventions help us to conform to our underground hip hop genre of our music. We have decided to implement the bare minimum of textual information into our work. Using 'Earl Sweatshirt' and 'Parental Advisory' on one page and 'Hive' and 'Release Date April 20th' on the other. Our reasoning for implementing such a small amount of text in our advertisement is so that there is an element of mystery surrounded the work that we are about to release. this has been achieved by a number of conventions, as well as the the camouflage which could signify that this music is blending into is surrounding and is not easy to find out about we have opted to mask the actors identity. The fact that we are unsure of the actors identify adds a number of new features to our advertisement. Firstly it adds another aspect of mystery into our work, but also it conforms to a stereotypical convention of hip hop music which is gang culture. It is common that gang members opt to keep their identity a mystery, due to the fact that there are a number of gang references in our song we feel that we could deeper the conventions of our work by implementing these features. We have added a parental advisory sign to the bottom right of the page, this is due to the explicit language this features into the original version of Hive. We felt that we had a responsibilites as promoters of the content to inform our audience of any harsh language that comes up in the song. The font we have used in the advertisment is called 'Friday 13th' we have used this font due to the fact that it has been used throughout all elements of our music video, this is to show that we have paid close attention to continuity throughout our coursework.               

Album Layout :

Inside = Left 

Back  = Middle 

Front Cover = Right 

Explanation: 

With our actual album cover, we have continued the camouflage theme (this can be seen above). This again highlights how we have put creating a theme throughout our work and continuity as the utmost importance. As as well as this we have identified the popularity that camouflage has in contemporary hip hop music. Acknowledging that we have implemented TV static and other blurred affects in other aspects of our work we felt that we could add a slight blur to our work just so our audience are familiar with convention moving from one piece of our work to the other. We have shown continuity again throughout the inside of our CD case with the background being the same as the disk, this camouflage is different from the outside of the case but very similar. This has been done so that they can have something refreshing to look at when they are actually greeted with the content but still keep it relevant with the camouflage features. The blurred background was achieved by using the noise affect in Adobe Photoshop. This was used to create an intoxicated feel which conforms to drug use which the artist behind our song Earl Sweatshirt openly speaks about in him lyrics. After undertaking extensive research into existing Hip-Hop album arts we found that it is a common layout to keep the album art very plain and minimalistic. This was the kind of layout I felt would be the most affective and relevant to the genre of music we were creating for. By only featuring the bare minimum of what is needed to be put on our work we have made the music the main focus of our work. However we have implemented on feature which didn't have a fundamental purpose, this is the artist sat in a trolly. We chose to implement this into our work for a number of reasons. The first being so that the audience are familiar with the artist before watching the video. Secondly we took inspiration of the Astroid Boys album 'Bacon Dream' (which can be seen below the analysis) where they have a character sat in a trolly. We chose to implement this into our work to show subtle references to our groups local culture. By this I am referencing local British slang term of "Being Trollied." This means that someone is under the influence of drug or alcohol. Due to this being a relevant these themes we felt that we could put our own twist onto this song and the meaning of certain conventions. Another way that we could justify the implementation of the artist in a trolly could be in reflection of the artists social economic status. Earl Sweatshirt and the featuring artist Vince Staples both make repeated references throughout the song of the harsh ghetto conditions they had to endure whilst growing up. This can be represent they social economic status by it being a common convention of Hip Hop artists to be sitting in flashy cars and stunting there wealth but we can use a trolly to bring a clear indication of their poor lower class position.    

                                                                                                                 (This Album art is "Bacon                                                                                                                          Dream's" By Astroid Boys)

Disc: 

Explanation:

Above is the disk for our ancillary task. Again we can see that we have implemented a camouflage background to the disk highlighting our attention to detail and continuity throughout our task. We felt that the colours scheme we have created is very aesthetically pleasing to the eye and the red accompanies the camouflage to create a clean piece of work which is fundamental to any ancillary task. We opted to yet again keep the format very basic we have featured the name of the artist 'Earl Sweatshirt' and the songs name 'Hive'. These two aspects have been created in the Friday the 13th font which was the font that we have used throughout all aspects of our music video production, showing yet another example of continuity.