Evaluation Question 1.

EVALUATION 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Research and planning had a major part to play to our final video as it enabled us to get a clear idea of how we needed to construct the genre we were looking to do and make it as professional as possible. We were going for the Hip Hop genre and we needed to use the correct scenes, mis-en-scene and props to bring this foward, if this did not work the whole video would not have been succesful and look a mess. The start of our research and planning was based around another song compared to the one we used in our final video so we started looking for conventions used in these to put into our video and to use this to bring the genre across. As we then changed our idea because we did not think this video we were thinking of doing would be a proper music video and although we had some great ideas for that video we thought it would be best for us to change the video and idea to something we both enjoyed and agreed on. The research and planning allowed us to get across the correct form of media and most of the feedback we got from people told us that our music video followed the correct conventions and genre of hip hop. Our new idea and song, has a narrative in the lyrics and we followed the lyrics to create a narrative.

Firstly, there is the digipak which i spent alot of time looking for inspirtations towards it. I analysed many different hip hop digipaks (as you can see from previous posts) and chose a few that i took my inspiration from in order to make it look professional and fit the conventions of the genre. After looking at numerous album covers from the hip hop genre i thought i would try to challenge it by looking into other genres and seeing if there is something i can add to the digipak to make it look different. I soon realised that this would not suit my digipak and realised that the genre is very strict and it has to look like a hip hop album cover in order for it to look correct as being a hip hop album cover. For this reason, i wanted to keep it simple and use the colour pallette most hip hop album covers contain to bring the right genre across for the digipak. After looking at various album covers, I found the digipak that I wanted to base mine around and this was the artist PUSHA T and his album EXODUS 23:1. The album was plain yet the colour scheme allowed the title and artist to stand out very well and also brought the genre of hip hop across. I therefore used a black background with white and maroon text in order for the text to stand out like it did on PUSHA T's album cover. Another convention I noticed with hip hop album covers was the use of props which were mostly expensive, shiny jewellery for instance RICK ROSS's album TRILLA where he shows of his watch and ring. I developed this convention onto my own digipak by adding a gold chain to the top of the digipak. I believe this will catch the eye of the targeted audience as it has all the relevant Hip Hop conventions that come with a digipak.

The video itself had many inspiring hip hop videos already done by hip hop artists and we took inspiration from all that we had shown on our blogs. Many Hip Hop videos do have a narrative that ties in with the lyrics, for example TUPAC ft ELTON JOHN with the song called GHETTO GOSPEL. Others have the artist rapping and in the background have something to do with the lyrics he is saying. This is where we decided to challenge the generic conventions of Hip Hop videos and have our artist rapping in the song as well as a narrative in the background which links to the lyrics of the artist. We used two videos that had a artist performing their lyrics in the music video and one of these was not a hip hop song which shows we did try to diverse the normal conventions of Hip Hop. The first song we looked at was 212 by AZELIA BANKS where the whole video consists of her on a grey wall singing her song, we also copied this idea with the wall shots used in our music video. Secondly there was the song HEADLINES by DRAKE in which he uses a range of different location for him to perfom his song; this also inspired us and is apparent in our music video. We wanted to create a video that had the same type of feel to general Hip Hop videos and this comes through with the darkness in the shots as this occurs in many of the videos we looked at. Hip hop is a genre which is very serious and colours represent this side of it a lot. We recognised this throughout our research and planning and for this shot most of our scenes during the night time. It also is a genre which involves a lot of showing of of your items and money and we also wanted to bring this across by using props and mis-en-scene like the big white car and the alchol bottle which is expensive and many people would know what, especially people in the target audience.
The artist himself had to wear correct clothing to link with the genre and this is very apparent in the wall shots where we used almost stereotypes to bring this across, this is by using dark clothing and a black NEW YORK hat which people would represent as being part of the hip hop genre and also worn by many famous hip hop artists, like JAY Z and LIL WAYNE. Also apparent in their videos is alchol and this usually shows wealth as they have high value alcholci drinks, for example Grey Goose or Ace of Spades and these are quite expensive to buy so in the modern times someone who buys this is thought of to be quite wealthy. We challenged this convention using the lyrics of the song which talk about him being down and wanting to sort out his life and used a drink to show a normality of wealth and that he is using it to overcome his sorrows.
The video consisted of mainly mid shots and long shots as general Hip hop videos only use these. We had several debates about using other shots but i had to keep reminding my partner that these are the only shots hip hop videos use in their videos. In the AZELIA BANKS video, that we used for inspiration, she uses close up shots of her lips and we also discussed this but we had to remember that they are two different genres and this would not look right by having it on our video. The fact that we are on the wall also was inspired by the Azelia banks video as this is what she does in the most of her video; it is a cheap and easy video to make and i believe, like us, she did not have a big budget (or did not use a big budget as she is a big star). For this reason we thought it would be a good idea to use the wall shots.