Magazine Advert Analysis

Music Video Director - Hype Williams

Music video director

The music video director I am analysing is Hype Williams born in 1970 Queens, New York. Hype Williams is an American music video, screen writer and film director of African-American descent. He earned the nickname of ‘Hype’ as a child who was hyperactive and first displayed his work of graffiti which showed off his interests in colour even then.

Hype Williams is an extremely successful music video director who has made a large amount of videos that people listen to and watch even today. He has worked with some big names in the music industry such as R-Kelly, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Will Smith and Beyonce.

Hype Williams first recorded music video was in 1991 by BWP (Bytches With Problems) “We Want Money”. This video consisted of simple shots and not many quick edits or cuts which may seem far too simple nowadays was very complex and amazing in the 90’s. They used a lot of low angle shots and two shots and the affect of the camera spinning really quickly.

Hype Williams has a very long list of music videos he has directed. He has worked with a number of artists and these videos are extremely well known and remembered. Some examples of these are, R-Kelly “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996), TLC “No Scrubs” (1999), Kanye West “Gold Digger” (2005), Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys “New York” (2009) and these are only a selected few. Hype Williams has been an extremely successful director since the 90’s and is still directing music videos as his list goes up to the year 2011. He is also a film director and has a film called ‘Lust’ coming out in 2012 which will be his most previous work yet.

All the videos I have seen by Hype Williams are all performance based videos. He always shows the main performer/singer as they are. Mainly dancing or just singing. They are not usually telling stories or show wacky visuals. 

Hype Williams has some signature styles which are used a majority of his videos. An example of this is called the ‘Fisheye lens’. This was an effect on the camera that distorted the camera view around the central focus. This style was used in videos such as Busta Rhymes’ “Gimme some more” and Will Smiths “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It”.

However this was dropped by 2003 when Hype experienced his lowest ever viewing levels since the beginning of his music video director career.

 Another signature style of Hype Williams is one of his better known.

This Signature style involves putting shots in regular widescreen ratio while a second shot is split in half horizontally and then placed in the upper and lower bars of the video. This was used in videos such as Ne-yo’s “So Sick” (2005), LL Cool J ft J.Lo “Control Myself” (2006) and Beyonce’s “Check On It” (2005).

Hype Williams received MTV’s Video Vanguard Award for his achievement as a filmmaker in 2006 and is being nominated for Video Director of the Year at the BET Awards of 2011.

Since 2003, Hype has adapted a new style which is a style combining a centre camera focus on the artist or artists body and a solid background colour with a soft different coloured light in the background to give a sense of illumination of the background by the foreground subject. This style is shown in Beyonce’s “Video Phone” (2009) and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” (2005)

Evaluation Question 4 - Alex

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

When doing the research, planning, construction and evaluation, I used a lot of new media technologies. Such technologies included programmes like Final cut, Garage band and Photoshop.  Overall, the main research was done through the internet and search engines. This helped us find everything we needed to know about our chosen music genre and the conventions that are associated with it. This helped us find videos on YouTube of typical ‘House music’ related videos to base our initial ideas on.

With video production, we used a SANYO HD camera and tripod to keep our shots steady and still. This had a safe set up with pan and tilt controls. We were very organised through our shooting stage as we had planned thoroughly exactly what we wanted. Most of our camera shots were done using the tripod so it wouldn’t look shaky on film and which ultimately makes it look more professional. We also used it as a handheld camera at some points to fit the conventions of the genre. We found that some of our shots did come out shaky or blurry and so these were resolved by converting the clip into a Quicktime still image. By using a HD camera I think that this enhanced our footage in making it look professional and not so much a ‘typical student film’.

For our editing we used Apples Final Cut Express, Adobe Photoshop and Apples Garage band. Luckily these were provided along with the Macs in school which gave us the best opportunity of making a good film. As a beginner of using these programmes I think we coped extremely well. We learned how to add effects to our filming such as making our whole film black and white by desaturating it as a whole when doing our final pieces of editing.

We added speed into our clips, either speeding them up or putting them into slow motion.  We also learned to reverse our clips for example someone walking backwards instead of them originally walking forwards. We used this a few times as it turned out to be a good effect in our music video.

We learned to use such feature by using tutorial clips on YouTube. When using such a powerful website such as YouTube you can find almost anything. So we searched how to use slow motion effects, speed effects and split screen effects. They were very efficient and easy to do once we got the hang of them. 

The split screen effect looks so effective to do but we didn't know how to construct it. So again, we used another YouTube tutorial to help us. Once we got the hang of using the effects they became much simpler and we gradually got faster in doing so. Also, when doing effects on our video clips we had to make new tabs not to get confused with the rest of the video. This came in handy as it didn't mess up the sequence we had already made and gave us a chance to play around with the different effects that Final Cut had to offer.

Another effect we used a few times was subtitles. We added these when our characters in the video had a piece of silent dialogue which came in useful for the audience. This was a tricky concept at first as we had to make new subtitles for each cut clip we wanted to use. Once we had completed that we had to then go back and choose fonts, colours and sizes we wanted which ultimately made it a longer process when doing so. 

First we had to download our track from Sound Cloud, which is a Web 2.0 website that allows music to be created, recorded and shared on line. I also found myself having to cut the original song from 7 minutes down to 3 minutes using Garage band to make it acceptable to use for our music video. The whole song is instrumental so it wasn't cutting out any major parts. This was a tricky task but I believe that it was completed well and the cuts of music tend to seem unrecognisable to somebody who doesn’t know. Garage band is a very modern way of making music and would be something I would highly recommend in using.

The editing process as a whole was a challenge as we didn’t know how our video would turn out but without these programmes being available then our video wouldn’t have been produced to a high quality and wouldn’t have looked particularly good.

When making our digipak and magazine advert we used a Nikon D40 digital stills camera to take our pictures and then edit it using Photoshop. 

I found that I learned to use Photoshop as I went along. This was in a trial and error type way of working. For example, I would use the tools to try to change a colour of a certain part and by just trying different tools I found the one I needed and learnt from there. I had to try to change a lot of the pictures to black and white and as seen on the digipak and magazine advert Photoshop was used in both occasions. 

Blogger and wix.com have been used to provide all our research, planning and construction work to show our progress in stages and is a place to present our evaluation interactively.

Please visit my multimedia evaluation on Wix.

http://www.wix.com/guazzellialex/eval

Evaluation Question 3 - Alex

"What have you learned from your audience feedback?"

When creating our music video idea it was important to get feedback from our audience. As we had chosen a song from the house music genre it was easy to find the right target audience. As house music genre, this genre usually targets men and teenagers. So for our feedback we made up a fictitious character to identify the demographics of our target audience called Dave who was a 22 year old Barman. When creating our music video we had to keep this idea of our target audience predominant in our minds.


This is Dave. He is our researched target audience for our music video genre. We believe that the house music genre is targeted at a young audience from teenagers to mid 20s. His favourite musicians would be the likes of David Guetta and Sweedish House Mafia who huge influences in the house music genre. 

Also, when finding our target audience we had to research a bit further. We did this by determining which music channels would play our chosen song. We used an on line provider Broadcasters' audience research board or www.barb.co.uk of weekly UK audience figures and looked at all the music channels available to us.

From this research we found that our music video would only be able to be shown on certain music channels and chose a few for it to be broadcast on. These were Clubland TV which brings in 142,000 daily viewers, 4Music with over 1,395,000 daily viewers, MTV Dance and 166,000 daily viewers and Viva which brings in a staggering 1,555,000 viewers daily. From looking at the research collected we could see that not all of the channels above would be able to broadcast our music video and I believe that these channels would reach our target audience of teenagers and young adults. This is because some channels such as Scuzz, Kerrang! or Channel AKA only cater to niche music genres such as Grime or hardcore rock and so our house genre would therefore not be suitable.

The main representations of house music videos are usually based around one protagonist, who usually tends to be a female, at a party. In our case we have made our protagonist to be a female who would attract our target audience. But in this case she isn’t at a house party. It is usually very common for the storyline of the video to be based around love, drugs, behaviour etc.We have tried to include many close up shots of our main protagonist as she is an attractive female in the audiences view. This refers to Laura Mulvey's theory of the 'Male Gaze'. It is the concept of how the audience views the people being presented and in this case the way the characters are being viewed by a heterosexual males perspective. 

We constructed a survey for our classmates so that we could get some initial ideas to add to our video. We asked them 10 questions which were:

1. Are you male or female?
2. What is your favourite genre of music?
3. Do you prefer songs with lyrics or instrumental tracks?
4. Are you familiar with the "House" genre?
5. If so, who is your favourite artist with this genre?
6. Do you think music videos are most effective when they are conceptual, narrative or performance based?
7. Are you familiar with the silent film genre?
8. In your opinion, would an entirely black and white video be effective?
9. Do you regularly watch music channels?
10. If so, which three do you watch most often?

We then decided to use the results of the questions which were most relevant to show in the form of bar charts and pie charts. 

 Considering our class is made up of mainly girls in ratio to boys, the answer to this question was always going to be quite obvious.

 When asking if they preferred lyrical tracks or instrumental tracks the feedback was very much towards a songs with lyrics. We felt that to go along with the house genre we would need to find an instrumental track that we could highlight the main points of the music well.

 This was an important question to ask but the feedback was very widely opinionated as the narrative based video just about outnumbered conceptual and performance. All music videos contain at least one of these elements and sometimes even more. But we decided to go with our feedback and make it a narrative based video.

 The majority of our class also thought that an entire black and white video would be effective and this helped us to make our final decision on making our whole music video in black and white. It gave the video the type of feel we were going for initially, as an old black and white film feel to it. So this worked well in our favour.

Most of our classmates were familiar with the House music genre, but for those who were not, we played our selected song track 'Aspirin' By johnny Muse to the class so they could get a feel of the song and capture some of our ideas. 




 The feedback was very helpful as it helped us to determine which ways we wanted to go with our video including the storyline and the editing of it. Of course we wanted to go with our gut instincts but this survey helped us gain an idea of what others thought of our ideas and what we could do or alter to make it better as a whole. 

We also gained feedback from our digipak and magazine advert designs. The feedback collected showed views that our digipak showed the setting very well and that our magazine cover was simple yet effective and straight to the point. They said that it represented the genre well. 


These pictures show first of all a storyboard we made of all the images we thought represented our genre and idea well including aspirin as the song title suggests and also urban settings. 

We also photoshopped an underground sign and deleted the writing from inside and inside of these we had found the underground font to write inside of this sign 'ASPIRIN'. We thought it may be a good idea to present some colour on the covers in contrast with our entirely black and white video. 

Please visit my multimedia evaluation on Wix.
http://www.wix.com/guazzellialex/eval

Finished Music Video

Evaluation Question 2 - Alex

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

I think that our ancillary texts fit well with our music genre. Our poster and digipak convey the house music genre as you can see from the pictures that we have one main protagonist and that our video is set in a very urban setting.  We stayed with our black and white theme throughout the video and portrayed this onto the poster and photos within the digipak. We felt that this made it very simple but effective. The black background contrasts with the lightened picture and bold writing and makes the poster very eye catching.

when regarding our digipak, a main influence was Rhianna’s ‘Good girl gone bad’ album. We tried to make our cd look very simple but effective and her album showed exactly what we were thinking of.

As you can see, the style of the CD is very plain and simple but extremely effective. We stuck with our theme of black and white with our CD cover and I believe that it came across very well. 


The process of making our CD took a while. There were a lot of things we had to do. First we were given a template and to then decide what we wanted involved. So we trialled some of our location shot photos. These went into the background. This meant that we now needed to make a CD that would be suitable for the song, genre and to the audience's taste. Once t hey had both been put together, we knew that this looked right and really showed off the urban vibe.

When branding our video, we wanted to make it look like an old black and white silent movie. We wanted to add effect to this by using subtitles during our music video and we also used a countdown which are still sometimes used in music videos today. (Eminem 'Without you') 

Our influences were the classic film noir styles. These being black and white movies with little or no dialogue and heavily reliant on mise en scene. We were very much inspired by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and directors such as Hitchcock.

Regarding our magazine advert the branding elements of our media product followed through in that again black and white as dominant colours with simple white font styles and text which replicates subtitles in our video and old movies.  We also used key shots from our video as the main image on the poster. When making our poster we made up quotes from real life music magazines such as DJ Mag and Mix Mag which were also hugely influential to our music choice. 

Standard codes and conventions of magazine adverts would be that thy would sow the artist in the picture as they are advertising their product and themselves as a brand like Richard Star’s theory but as our song is in the house genre the dj isn’t usually  featuring in the video or on the posters which observes the codes and conventions of house music.

 Also, another part of making our video, digipak and magazine advert was deciding what was to go into our initial idea. By doing this we made a 'wordle' which contains all the words we thought would associate with our music video. We then used some of these words to influence us in our decisions later on in the making process. 

 When making our magazine advert we sampled a lot of pictures and settled on the main picture of our character laying in the cardboard box. This was our small storyboard of pictures we used to determine our ideas upon.

 Once we had chosen our picture we then had to use Photoshop to make it look perfect. This took a lot of 'Trial and Error' to see what we thought looked good. First of all we had to make the photo black and white. To try to give it a gritty feel we had to use a spray paint tool. We then added it to a black background and smudged the edges so it blended in unnoticeable. We then had to trial different font types to get the perfect one. We always stuck with the black and white theme so it didn't prove too difficult for us. Next we added quotes and star ratings to make it look professional and realistic. Then finally adding the last touches of a bar code, the record label and iTunes symbol purely for 'potential buyers' of the song. This all added to the realism of the magazine advert and helped it to look professional and acceptable.

The underground designs go with our potential album cover pictures. We originally wanted a photograph of an underground station. We found a large colourful picture that we were happy to use. We had to Photoshop the picture to deleted the writing and to add our own. We then had to make the picture black and white to stick with our black and white theme. We also researched the underground font and after a long time of trying finally found the perfect match. We used those letters found and pasted t hem onto the blank space available to spell out the artists name. Unfortunately we didn't have room to write the name of the song on the sign as well so in the end we decided to go in a different direction.  

 Also, when making our digipak's back cover we wanted a simple picture to display at the back. The picture we used was of an underground station that was used in location in the music video. We also edited the photo ourselves and made every possible use of writing spaces letting the audience know what they are receiving. 


An initial idea was to use some sort of graffiti as we were going for the 'urban/rural' vibe. We found a website where we could create our own. We added it to the back cover and started to work around it. But in the end we went in a different direction. We just didn't think it gave the right look or feel to the CD cover itself and so we went against it and stuck to a much simpler look. 

The pictures below are all used to make our Digipak and magazine advert look like the real thing. We added logos such as the record label of the song we used '2MR2 Records'. We also used a barcode that we created and also the new barcode you find on smartphones. As well with our magazine advert we added the famous Apple icon to show the audience that the track is available to download on iTunes. These features were added to make the product look as realistic as we could make it. 

Please visit my multimedia evaluation on Wix.
http://www.wix.com/guazzellialex/eval