Final Music Video

Dolla D website

https://ethanlabelda00.wixsite.com/dolladofficial

We created a website hoping to conform with rap genre conventions. To do this we researched other similar artists websites, such as Ed Sheeran and Drake for inspiration. This proved effective as we created a website that had all the aspects sought after by our target audience.

This is the home page of Dolla D's website. This page includes Dolla's name in the heading and has the different page options at the top of the website to add to its professionalism. We added the picture of our artist with a graffiti background to build his star image, as it shows he's an urban located artist which our target audience can relate to. It will also be the first thing our audience sees so we wanted it to be as eye catching as possible.

This page includes a short biography of Dolla D and how music entered his life. This is effective and useful in an artist's website as it gives his audience the opportunity to learn about Dolla and his upbringing. We felt this would also help to his star image as the audience can feel closer and relate to him.

This page shows his upcoming tour dates. This is effective as this gives fans the opportunity to see Dolla D live, increasing his fan base size and increasing revenue. This would make his fans feel excited about our artist.

This page has official Dolla D, '$treet Kid' tour merchandise. We created this merchandise on various different websites. The inclusion of this merchandise is important as this helps make Dolla D look professional and gives fans the chance to buy his official clothing, building his star image and having a connection with the audience.

This page was important as it shows where Dolla D's representatives are based, his email, and his social media account.This means that his fans can contact him via his representative or via social media. This can make them feel like they have a good connection with him.

Task 4- how have I used digital technologies in the research, planning and creation of my products

How have I used digital technologies in the research, planning and creation of my products

In A2 my skills developed immensely compared to AS, in the research, planning and creation of my products.

For the research of our products, we wanted to get the best products possible so we researched into many other similar artists to get inspiration from their products. We looked at artists such as Ed Sheeran and Kid Cudi.
We researched into their music videos, on platforms such as YouTube, where you can upload and share videos via the internet. We wanted our artist to be organic to send a message to the viewers, yet have some traits of a synthetic artist to build his star image for the audience. From this, we gathered a lot of inspiration for our own music video. Ed sheeran and Kid Cudi inspired us to help send a message across to the viewers in our music video, which would be drug abuse within teenagers and how badly affected they suffer from mental health issues as a teenager, and how people can suffer from being homeless. We felt this was a good narrative for us as we know that many teenagers suffer from their emotions and their is a vast majority of people out there who are homeless and need help and inspiration. Furthermore, it was essential that we ensured our target audience felt they could relate/like this narrative, so, we used our mobile phones to interview prospective target audiences and get as much feedback on the idea as possible. Mostly everyone was impressed with our idea. The knowledge we gained from this feedback helped us create our music video, therefore it will make the audience find our artist even more relatable. Once we had our idea for our music video, we did some research into these similar artists' star image. We found out, by using the internet, that locations in a music video are extremely important as the audience decides how they perceive the artists star image. Therefore, we used urban locations in London where the walls are filled with graffiti to give our artist a urban look about him which added to his star image. We also used the internet to research similar artists' websites to see how they presented themselves and how their websites were layed out. In addition to this, while looking at similar artists' music videos, we wanted to conform with the traditional shots and editing techniques that are used in our genre, rap. After this, we planned a story board which would clearly show all the shots that we would film to put together and make our music video. With the story board, we created an animatic which had the track ‘day N nite’ playing whilst it ran through the different shots on the storyboard. We used modern technology to create this animatic, using the program iMovie on a MacBook Pro laptop. It was a simple process as all that was needed to be done was to take pictures on my phone of the animatic and export them from my laptop onto iMovie. This was an improvement from last year as it was evident that planning was crucial to achieve excellent results, whereas last year not much detail went into our planning. Once we finished this, it was time to film and then eventually edit. To film our video we used a Canon XF200. We used a tripod for stable shots to ensure that we would get the perfect shots. We filmed in a range of different urban areas such as back streets in Brixton, and skate parks to help create the star image of our artist. We also had to film in many different angles, using different types of shots, so we could pick and choose which ones we wanted to include, according to what the animatic specified. Examples of specific shots we used to outline Dolla D's isolation and loneliness were extreme close ups, outlining his expressions to show how badly he is suffering. This highlighted how he is always alone. When it got to the editing stage we used final cut pro. Final cut pro is suited for importing footage and we researched thoroughly how to use it in the best possible way, via YouTube. An example of how we used Final Cut Pro was ensuring the visuals matched the beat and lyrics. We uploaded our first draft to youtube and then created a survey monkey asking questions such as "what aspects of the video did you dislike". With the responses from the feedback from the survey and the feedback we recorded in class, we made a few changes to our video and uploaded the final draft.

Once we uploaded our final music video, we began researching similar artists' digipaks via the internet, which gave us the information we needed to crete the most effective Digipak as possible.For example, we found out the artist’s name and logo was important. as it helped build his star image even further. We used photoshop to create our digipak. We used photoshop in a much more effective way than last year by using the internet to research how to add the essential effects we wanted. We once again used our mobile phones to ask questions to focus groups on what they liked and disliked about our DigiPak so far. We then listened to their feedback and would make suitable changes to the finished product accordingly. We then researched similar artists' websites. We created the website on 'Wix' which taught us many different techniques and guided us on how to create a website most effectively. It taught us how to include a short biography of our artist, tour dates, merchandise and a contact page. The contact page included his social media accounts so that the website would give our fans the opportunity to let them follow him on these accounts, such as twitter, and they can interact with 'Dolla D' which would help build his relationship with his fans even further. Once again, we recorded feedback before and after the finished product using mobile phones to get the best possible products for our target audience.


Overall, I used digital technologies throughout the research, planning and creation of my three products. The use of digital technology really helped my understanding of how to create the most effective products, and it really developed from last year and helped me improve immensely as a media producer.

Evaluation Task 3- What have I learnt from my audience feedback

Task 3- Audience Feedback

Task 3- the feedback process

Task 2- how effective is my promotional campaign

Task 2- chat show

Task 1- website conventions

Evaluation Task 1- Digipak

Evaluation Task 1- Music video conventions

Evaluation task 1- Keith Negus

Dolla D's Spotify Page

Facebook Profile of our perfect audience member

This is the facebook page of our perfect audience member. As you can see, his likes include rap music and walking around London. Hence why we implemented these aspects into our music video, catching Leon Mescudi's interests.

Aditionally, from learning that Leon is in a Facebook group called 'This is Hip-Hop', we can infer that he is likely to appreciate all generations of rap music, and therefore the generation of 'Day N Nite'.

Leon is in his mid-to-late twenties, which is our target audience age. We hope to capture similar target audience members, like Leon.

draft digipak feedback

To summarise the feedback we got for our first draft of our Digipak told us that we should keep the black and white theme as our target audience really like it and found it eye catching. However, the feedback also told us ways to improve it, which we put into our final product, as they encouraged adding more panels and pictures to the Digipak to represent the star image more, and to also change th font so it would match the graffiti background.

Our Digipak

feedback survey for music video

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LQPS7VJ

From this question's results, you can see that the age groups of the people completing the survey match our target audience age group.

From this question, it is clear to see that our audience enjoyed the shot which has multiple versions of our artist in the same setting.

This question's results tells us that the lighting in certain shots wasn't great. This is becausde of the time of day we chose to film in, for example, the night shots had to be under a street light.

People could clearly see the narrative our video attempted to connote. One respondent speaks of how depression is 'prominent' in today's society, which was a message we were keen to pass on to our audience.

This question asked what artist is similar to ours in term of star image. Many respondents said Drake which was surprising. However, some respondents, including the one at the bottom of the page, said Ed Sheeran, who we agree with completely. This is because we took inspiation from Ed Sheeran during the creation of Dolla D and 'Day N Nite'

All of our respondents said that they wanted to see more from Dolla D, which is encouraging because it means they enjoyed the video.

One of the survey takers explained why they liked the extreme close-ups of our artist - because you can really see the emotion on his face.

Respondents liked the shots which included animations ('graphics'), which we included at different points in the video to add to the 'trippy' vibe of the music video.

Overall, the feedback was positive. Our target audience felt that the video conformed to rap genre aspects through the narrative of our music video and the star image of our artist. Therefore, we were successful.