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

As part of the question I thought it would be useful to run through what conventions are and the major conventions of the genre.

Conventions are the things you automatically associate with an object, place, scene, pretty much anything and you expect to see them when its used again . In the context of a music video its often the genre which people think of conventions. For example a rock genre video would have performance of the band, this is a popular convention of this genre.

Conventions in a music video are still something we expect to see. These are things such as performances, narratives, instruments, equipment, actors, artists etc. The conventions in a music video are what we familiarise ourselves with a associate with a music video.

For the hip hop genre, there are many conventions that numerous artists stick to multiple times. These are what I feel to be the most popular conventions within the genre:

• Money and wealth are frequently displayed and have a prominent theme within the majority of the hip-hop music videos.
• Girls, girls are shown in the majority of hip-hop music videos, more often that not in provocative attire and dances.
• Black and White shots are predominantly used in a large number of hip-hop music videos. This has been done for a number of years and is still used today.
• Urban locations are another convention, they are used in a lot of videos and is something that has become expected in a hip-hop genre music video.
• The editing is nearly always very fast paced with quick cuts in and out of shots. There are exceptions where some artists challenge this convention but it's very often used.

To put into context come conventions of hip-hip I have out them into a wordle. These words not only have a direct link to the genre but also the conventions as what they mean is often taken into account and reproduced in the form of the video. E.g. "ghetto" - An urban location would be shown in the video. 

There are literally hundreds of conventions within the hip-hop genre but these five above are the ones which the general public are familiar with.

To help make out music video a more professional looking piece, we took inspiration from a variety of videos in and out our genre. We have used an array of conventions from these videos to help us make our piece to a higher level.

• We have included many black and white shots within our video. I think using the black and white has made the piece more genre specific. 
• We used a black male as the main character. The artist is black and the hip-hop genre is predominantly black males so this made a more authentic piece.
• Another convention we used was uand change quicklysing urban locations and also the club locations. These locations have been used in hip-hop videos for years so us using them helped with the authenticity of the product.
• There are very small clips within the video that show a female in a provocative manor. This is something which is used in a large amount of hip-hop music videos.

As we have recreated a video, I thought it would be worth while to compare our video with the original headlines video.

We took inspiration from this video in the instance of editing. The edits in this video are very fast paced, and change quickly in time with the tempo. We both thought this worked very well and is a popular convention in the hip-hop genre so decided to use it. When a certain drum beat or percussion beat comes into the song, the tempo is very quick, and so we interchanged a number of clips with quick transitions. 

There isn't much of a narrative in the original video, its predominantly performance based. This is another element which we have taken into account and reproduced in our own style in our music video. We used this because it is again a popular convention of music videos, and hip-hop music videos. By using something you expect to see in a music video, we thought it would help with the authenticity of the piece. 

In the original video, there are a huge variety of different shots, these keeps the viewers attention focused on the video for longer, making it more effective. We partially used this but it didn't work quite as well as the original.

Another aspect we used from the original video was the locations, the original video uses a lot of urban locations and so in ours we have included urban and inner city locations, but to keep them different we used less and focused more on other locations. The urban locations are a connotation of where the genre originated from and a slightly unorthodox genre.

Actors and clothing were chosen carefully and the original video gave us some guidelines in which to go with so it seemed a more authentic piece. We used a black male dressed accordingly to how the original black artist is, this all helps with the authenticity of the finished product.

There are certain existing videos from the hip-hop genre that we used to conventions of, developed challenged.

One that was used is the use of black and white. We used this convention from Jay Z's song 99 problems, not only does it appear in this song but in many more in the genre. With using this convention it will give a more realistic feel to the video, helping with the authenticity and keeping the consumer more interested and thinking its professionally made piece.

 

Another convention we used is the scene in our production where the artists smashes a glass bottle against a wall. This is similar to an aspect in Tinie Tempah's video "Pass Out" where he smashes a series of filament bulbs.We used this as its a very impressive looking scene and tried to recreate it. In a way we developed it as we used a different prop and in a different location. 

A convention that we challenged was showing the wealth and power of the artist like in the majority of hip-hop genre. There aren't a lot of videos especially in the hip-hop genre that haven't done this so it's something different and will hopefully gain attention to our video.

Another convention I felt we challenged was the way the artist was predominately alone. In most cases in hip-hop genre productions the artist is with a group of peers and this is the case with the original music video for headlines. Challenging this convention helps to make something different and can help with keeping the viewers intrigued. 

There is also the ancillary task to take into consideration when comparing them to the conventions of an existing product. For the majority of cases in our ancillary tasks, we used our own ideas and just decided on what we thought looked best. We still included some conventions from existing adverts and digipak's such as the dates, layout, small picture of the album, small print etc. By including these small aspects it has helped with the authenticity of the products and is something that looks a professional product.