Evaluation - forms and conventions of real media products

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

My music video is in the genre of Hip Hop/R’n’B, whilst researching this genre I found that the common connotations found in a music video of this genre are often females

dancing in night clubs, being portrayed as "sexy" and promiscuous. This was found from analysing different digi-paks, album covers and adverts of the Hip-Hop music genre. As seen on the album ‘stripped’ by ‘Christina Aguilera’ the image on this album is of her centred in the middle of the album with her body being quite revealing, this is used to sell the album by attracting audience attention.

As stated above we found artist of this genre are shown dancing in night clubs, we challenged this genre by showing the artist dancing on the street. This was used because is gave the impression to the audience that you can “Dance your cares away” wherever you are and whenever you are feeling down, you don’t need to be in a night club to do so. This technique of challenging the idea of common setting of this genre was used as a way of relating the artist to the audience, making the audience more attracted to the artist shown on screen.

We have included some of the common connotations of the music video as we wanted to maintain the genre of our music being R’n’B/ Hip-Hop. In our music video we did include a lot of close ups of the artist as this is often found in a music video of this genre as another way of selling the artist. Although the use of close-up camera angles was used in our music video not only to sell the artist but also making the artist emotions obvious to the audience. From the audience feedback we received, we found that the audience had trouble understanding the meaning of our media video, however we chose not to change this because it kept the audience inclined to watch the video as they wanted to try and discover the meaning of the video as they continue to watch it.

In hip-hop videos you often find them to be quite serious, as our music can be seen as serious through some scenes, we tried to introduce some humour by involving the public in holding up “Dance your cares away” posters.

My music video challenges the ideology of having the artist miming the lyrics of the song whereas R'n'B music videos often include this connotation. Instead we focused on the way the artist showed meaning by her actions throughout the video. Focusing on this idea we thought we would be able to sell the artist more as the audience would be more interested in the meaning of video, rather than seeing the expected artist miming lyrics of the song in an average hip hop/R'n'b music video.

Although we did challenge some of the normal conventions of the hip-hop genre in our music video, we kept the common connotations of an album from this R'n'B genre similar to ours. We did this by having the artist centred on the album cover as shown on the album ‘I’m not dead’ by the artist Pink. We used this image of the artist in order to make the album easily identifiable to the target audience of the R'n'B genre and therefore result in selling more albums.

The main focus of our music videos is to sell the artist; we achieved this through our music video creating anxiety for the audience as they want to watch the music video more and more to understand the meaning. We also ended our music video on the artist being happy this was showed by a long shot of the artist shown dancing on screen with other her friends; the camera then zooms in to show a close-up of the artist smiling. As the artist is shown to be sad through previous scenes in the our music video as a way of the audience being able to relate their personal life issues with the character on screen, the close up of her smiling is used at the end so the audience remember this character as being positive. This may encourage the audience to buy the album as they are motivated by the personality of the artist shown on screen.