How do your products represent social groups or issues?
Within the production process of our Digipack, Social media page, Music video and Website I wanted to incorporate our artists ethnicity and gender to represent particular stereotypes but also to go against this to ensure we captured the main audiences we directed our whole campaign to - BLM supporters or audiences with black ethnicity, and young male audiences. Generally, the stereotypes of the male gender is to appear as an admirable and strong character to audiences, which Laura Mulvey explains in her ‘Male Gaze theory’. I followed this theory as I believed it would include an even broader audience, so in our music video I included the ‘Male Gaze’ and in our social media this is particularly evident. Our social media page features particularly masculine themes which I represented through pictures with typically masculine body language, and captions such as “Couple well earned pints” with our artist in the pub, furthermore conforming to masculine stereotypes. As well as this, famous hip-hop rap icons such as Biggie Smalls have a typical dress of casual 90’s style baggy jeans, basketball caps and chains. I contrasted this by having our artist wear a suit in our video, to represent the success he has made as a mixed race artist. I represented campaigns against racism in our modern day society such as the black lives matter campaign, which I have posted a lot about on Don Pedro’s instagram page as our artist is of black ethnicity, to make others with the same heritage be able to relate to our artist, who may share similar issues and experiences with racism. I made a ‘hilight’ dedicated to the BLM campaign on our instagram, to present my artists support and beliefs reflecting his ethnicity which overall gave a personal, raw and real touch to the audience.
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of branding?
In our whole campaign we included a pattern of colours, images and other materials to ensure that overall the sense of the brand for our artist was evident. In my work overall I used mainly a neon pink and yellow colour palette, for example in our social media page I filtered each photo pink or yellow to match our digipack and website. Our website was neon yellow overall with hints of pink to accompany this, I used the yellow in particular due to it being a very typical colour for hip hop rap and rap albums such as the “Be” album by Common. I felt that the neon pink would also accompany this as the two colours generally clash which adds a sense of rebellion and power. The two clashing colours represents the uniqueness of ‘Don Pedro’ making his branding out of ordinary. On our ‘about’ section of our website I included ‘Don Pedro could be an experiment’ to show the mysterious and cool connotations our artist carries leaving the audience interested and intrigued to find out more about our artist. As well as this, throughout our whole campaign I included graffiti, which I encouraged would be his trademark showing his unique branding, with it also being a familiar link to the hip hop rap street style sterotypes. In the digipack the pink and yellow colour palette and graffiti is particularly evident, to encourage familiarity of our artist. Overall our branding includes some similarities to the hip hop rap culture, however I have contrasted this with Don Pedro’s own unique style to ensure interest and to engage our audience.
How do your products engage with the audience?
During the production, I found Blumler & Katz’s theories gave me a concise idea on how I wanted to engage my audience. With our digipack I gave the audience a sense of escapism as the front cover is an original portrait of our artist with our ongoing use of graffiti, making the audience interested with the mysterious and unique aura which Don Pedro carries compared to other artists. His intreguing cool star persona on our whole campaign represents other main areas of escapism, almost acting as a role model. In our music video we contrasted the typical outfits for hip hop rap stars with a smart suit which will furthermore intrigue the audience with the uniqueness we have carried. We dressed our artist in this way to show the success he has had as a mixed race artist, which can go against stereotypes of rap artists with black ethnicity furthermore, letting a black audience notice he has achieved as a successful artist regardless of his race. This particular audience will give them a sense of hope and inspiration in their own personal life, acting as there escapism. On many occasions my artist moves close up towards the camera in our video, and he directly raps to the audience with body language as if he is talking to them through the screen, creating a more personal experience for our artists. As well as this I have presented our artists personal relationships online via social media, which will appeal to Don Pedro’s young audience as he is portrayed to have a similar lifestyle as a typical 20 year old.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
During my development process of my campaign, I came across two music videos which stood out for me which assisted the success of our end result video overall. These were the two videos ‘This Is America’ by Childish Gambino which inspired me with the strong message which was sent from the video and not falling into typical music video conventions due to its message, and ‘Straight Outta Compton’ by N.W.A. which followed the stereotypes of classic hip hop rap perfectly. In our own video and our campaign we included typical hip hop rap stereotypes of run-down street backgrounds evident in the ‘Straight Outta Compton’ music video, so our unique interpretation of this was adding the graffiti throughout our whole campaign. After researching many hip hop rap bands we found a lot of the music was about racism in society, which we reflected in particular with Don Pedro’s support for the black lives matter movement conforming to the hip hop conventions. Adding to this, we had a Frank Ocean poster on the left of our set reflecting our artists appreciation of other successful black artists, but also an Oasis poster to show the old skool style Don Pedro is which I also showed in the polaroid style pictures on the Instagram page. I deliberately showed a mixture of conventional and unconventional aspects within our hip hop rap genre, to present a clear representation of the stereotypes within our genre style, however going against these in some ways to show Don Pedro’s individuality, letting the audience feel excited and interested which will draw in a wider audience.
