Evaluation Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

This is our finished music video. The genre was Hip Hop. We created a music video for a song by Canadian rapper, Drake to his single 'Headlines'. 

To come up with an answer for this question, I think it's best to go into detail about what conventions even are. A convention is a way in which something is usually done, within a particular area. We get conventions in everything. Here I am going to focus on the conventions of music videos as this is the media product which I have created. A music video is a videotaped performance of a recorded popular song, usually accompanied by dancing and visual images interpreting the lyrics. Conventions of a music video are things that we expect to see throughout. These include:

• A variety of camera shots. Long shots, close up, extreme close ups, and mid shots. Close ups are used to reflect the emotion within the song and the lyrics as well as a connection with the audience. 
• A variety of camera movements, such as tracking panning and arc shots. These are used to follow the artist or the actor throughout the video.
• mise en scene:

- Props that are appropriate to the genre. E.g. Hip Hop would use Bling.

- Costume that is appropriate to the genre.

- Lighting that is appropriate. E.g. outdoor natural lighting, or indoor artificial lighting.

- Actors that are appropriate tot he genre. Such as ethnicity, age and gender are all important.

- A setting that is appropriate to the music genre.

• We all expect to see the artist or band members throughout the music video too.

Besides conventions of music videos, we all expect to see certain things in a particular genre of music video. We have created a Hip Hop music video. This had many conventions that we met, developed and challenged throughout. Hip Hop is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, which is a rhythmic speak that is chanted. This includes artists such as Jay Z and Drake. Conventions of the Hip Hop genre include:

• Usually a male artist in the foreground, dominantly in the camera and highly confident.
• The use of black and white in Hip Hop is often used in editing.
• Usually filmed in urban areas, this can suggest the characters life or background, such as 'rags to riches'.
• Females in the Hip Hop genre are usually wearing provocative clothing, showing a lot of skin and cleavage.
• Males often are the opposite to the females in Hip Hop, and wear baggy clothing with a lot of Bling. This connotes Hip Hop well and shows wealth.
• Lighting is often low key, reflecting on what the song is about.
• Actors are often bold and confident and proud of who they are. Sometimes we may class tattoos as a connotation of Hip Hop too.
• Props we expect to see are, a lot of jewellery, phones, money, sometimes guns. These are all things that make the artist look wealthy, or show a lower to higher class contrast. The gun being stereotypical of the genre linking with crime.
• Narrative - The storyline throughout Hip Hop music videos are usually about women. The artist usually left alone and not winning the girl. If they are not about women then the other storyline is often about crime and street life. We know this by the artists/characters roles and how the lyrics match with the visual.
• Iconography is signs and symbols that we expect to see throughout the video. In Hip Hop, we expect to see dollar signs, brands, clubs/parties, dominant gestures, big houses and champagne. Young money's 'Bedrock' below, is a video where lots of iconography is shown. 

Shots and editing used in Hip Hop:

Some of the shots that i found were often used in Hip Hop videos were:

• Low angled shots, these made the artist have more power and showed dominance and importance to the video.

• There is often, bright and coloured lights in editing and in club scenes. These make 
• Editing fits to the pace of the music in Hip Hop music videos. Meaning that if the music is fast, each frame will have to be just as quick.

Considering all of the conventions of Hip Hop as listed above, we met, challenged and developed these throughout our video. 

Conventions in our genre that we met:

• The appropriate use of black and white in editing
• Black artist/actor
• Fast paced editing

Conventions in our genre that we developed:

• A club scene, without the crowd.
• Having provocative girls around him, we linked a clip of a pole dancer to him instead of with him.

Conventions of our genre that we challenged:

• Bling, would usually be exaggerated, we kept it simple and classy
• We didn't have any of the artists friends around him throughout which is something that usually is throughout Hip Hop videos that we challenged.

To get some inspiration on what we wanted to include in our music video, we researched other music videos in the Hip Hop genre. We took things in videos and made them our own, developing the conventions throughout. Tinie Tempah's 'Passout' music video was useful as it gave us some ideas of different shot types and angles. Tinie Tempah smashes filament lights to build suspension in their video. We liked this idea, so we decided a bottle smashed by the artists was a good interpretation of this. 

Tinie Tempah's smashing of filament lights.

Editing:

Our developed interpretation.

The beginning of our video starts with establishing shots, and quick paced shots flickering between each other to establish the character and the setting, setting the scene throughout. Jay Z's video to 'Money,Cash,Hoes' also uses establishing shots for us to identify the setting, also showing the characters in the first few seconds of the video. I think this works well to our chosen genre as it fits with the pace of the editing.
Below is two shots from the start of a hip hop video by Jay Z. In comparison to the similarity in  our music video opening. The first two are shots from a Jay Z video. The second two are shots from our own video.

We decided after watching many other videos from the genre Hip Hop that editing was a key thing to think about and whether or not we wanted to keep it up with the pace of the music throughout. We did decide to keep up with the music after looking at music videos from the same genre. There are many effects used in Hip Hop music videos, some even being surreal effects. I found a Drake Video 'Over' which uses consistent effects throughout the whole video. Some of these effects I wanted to have in our video. We interpreted each effect differently. The use of green screening and the background effects worked best for this. At 1.25 in this video, the blurred effects of the artist is something I wanted to include in our music video. So that it wasn't too similar I had a look at many effects and below Drake's video is my interpretation of the blurred editing.

In many Hip Hop videos, girls are shown provocatively. We met this convention, however didn't have it throughout our video very often. We met this by having a girl pole dancing. The flashing lighting helped to set a scene that is often relevant in Hip Hop. Her gestures are very provocative which is good in Hip Hop because this is the way in which girls are represented in this genre . Below I put together two clips which we included in our music video.

We used different types of shots throughout our video, a lot being still yet we had a few hand held shots to represent the artists lifestyle. We have seen in various Hip Hop music videos, the use of handheld shots in effective ways. An example of this would be in a video that In analysed at the start of the year, again by Jay Z '99 problems'. This uses hand held shots effectively throughout.

Our videos hand held shots are when the artist is walking through a club. This is used to make him look important and hand made. This is an screenshot off our video of where we have used hand held shots.

Digipak

For my ancillary task I used a lot of conventions including track listing, bar codes, release dates and having the artist on the front cover.  I used these as they fit with the usual conventions of a digipak.They are an essential convention of a digipak so it was vital I included one on my digipak. We decided to have the artist on the front cover as I feel that this will draw people onto looking at the CD cover as it has a well known artist on the front. This is also a regular convention of a Hip-Hop digipak, as the artists are often very confident. 
An album that I took some inspiration from was Jay Z's 'reasonable doubt'. I liked this digipak because even though it was quite simplistic, it works well in promoting the artist and the genre.The use of black and white is effective too as this is a convention in the hip hop genre. This album also used a parental advisory label on. These are all things that I wanted to have on our digipak. His magazine advert for this album showed clear brand identity between the two as it has the image of the album on the front, also the same fonts and sizes which all link together showing clear brand identity.

After looking at this album and previous ones I have analysed earlier on, we came up with our own complete digipak which I think meets all the conventions of Hip Hop.

Advertising Our Product

We are now very close to completing our media product: a music video. So we thought that we should think about where and how we are going to advertise our product. We think that our target audience will be the sort of people that listen to Radio1xtra. This is a radio station that plays a lot of Hip Hop songs, old and new. They advertise new songs on air, and they also have a website where we think that our product could be successful on.
The majority of our target audience are online, and are fully interested in the music industry. Therefor we feel that another great way to advertise our music video would be online. The age group we are aiming to please too are those that are probably following their favorite artists on twitter, and liked them on Facebook. This tells us that Twitter and Facebook too will be a great way to share and advertise our media product. Reaching out to our target audience successfully. YouTube too, is full of advertisements to the latest tracks in many genres. YouTube will probably be one of the best places to advertise our media product.

Filming: Night Club & Studio

This is our final shots of filming that we did. Firstly we filmed the studio scene in a small music room at school. This room was very small and it was difficult to get the shots that we wanted. But we are still using the clips as cutaways throughout the video. These are the shots of Gideon in the studio. We put this shot into black and white on our music video. We did this because black and white connote the Hip Hop genre.

We have now filmed in Tokyo night club in Lincoln too. This was during the day, we got permission to use any of the rooms. We chose to use the VIP booths and rooms. We used a variety of angled shots, also a handheld shot of Gideon walking through the club. This was to represent the hectic lifestyle of Drake. These are some of the shots we used.

 Below are images of the two rooms that we used to film in.

Shooting Schedule

We are hoping to film for the last time to complete our video to a higher standard.
We are going to film at De Aston School once more, using the music rooms mixing and recording desks as a studio, so that the video has a bit more of a narrative to it. We have also received permission from a night club 'Tokyo' in Lincoln to film in a VIP booth for a couple of hours during the day. This should help to improve our video greatly as they're both professional looking places. Both in which we hope to look professional in our music video.
We are going to use a variety of shots for these scenes, as we have noticed that the camera throughout is very still, besides one pan that we have at the moment. We hope to include high angle shots, hand held effective shots and a high angled arc shot.
Below is our shooting schedule just for these two scenes.

Shooting schedule template from hjacklinmedia

Green Screen

Something we see in many Hip Hop videos, is the use of green screening. This can show the artist on any background wanted. Using the chroma key on Sony Vegas we put Gideon onto a black background. Chroma keying, is a special effects technique for compositing two images or video streams together based on color hues. So here, the background and the artist we wish to put together. These images are when we were filming using the green screen. We vhad to make sure that he stayed inside the screen so that when it came to editing, we didn't cut out any parts of his body.

I think that green screening worked really well for our video and we have managed to create some great effects that you are likely to see in  a Hip Hop music video. Below is two shots and backgrounds we made using the green screen and appropriate use of editing on Sony Vegas software.

 

Our Final Magazine Advert

This is our final poster advertising our digipak. We made this poster using Photoshop. The font for the title of the album 'Headlines' is the same font that we used on our digipak. We did this so that they had a connection to each other. I think that the black and white contrast works well on this magazine advert. We used a gradient colored banner at the bottom of this advert to promote the digipak. Without the digipak shown on the advert, we didn't think it was simple enough to show what it is being advertised. We included, young money record label's logo on this advert too. This was to promote the record company and artist too, as well as the digipak. 
Having a large and central image of the artist on the front worked well because it helps the audience to focus on him without any background clutter that leads the eye away from the image.
I am pleased with this advert as i think that this promotes the digipak as well as the artist successfully.