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

The forms of media created for our media product consisted of a music video, album artwork and magazine advert. These were all based around the genre of grime, in which our chosen song, ‘Next Hype’ was well suited as it is performed by grime artist Tempa T. The music video is primarily performance based while loosely complimented by narrative, following the generic codes and conventions of the grime genre as well as the intervention of house music which plays with the basic foundations that are commonly composed in a grime music video.

The main star of our production plays an important role in our music video as he is the main attraction and label that the audience will recognise and admire. This is shown through the use of close up and low angle shots that promote the star as a powerful and influential image.

The artist keeps close eye contact with the camera creating an impact of intimidation that connects with the audience; a feature that is typical of other grime music video’s such as So Solid Crew’s ‘21 seconds’.

This corresponds with Richard Dyers star theory in which the vocalist is embodied into an image of power, anger and angst allowing the audience to be manipulated by the star successfully appealing to our audience demographic.

Album artworks following the genre of grime usually conform to the same set of codes and conventions. Our group applied these similar rules to attract the same audience. For example Wiley’s album ‘Playtime is Over’ uses similar codes and conventions in his album artwork as we have in magazine advert and digipak. This consists of the use of dark colours, urban locations and urban clothing (e.g. tracksuits, hooded clothing) that represent the lower class and the unorthodox society they follow. This consorts to Andrew Goodwin’s six point theory in which he suggests there are often intertextual references made in a music product.

The camera work and pace of editing of our music video relates to the conventions of our chosen genre as the use of free form camera work changes between moments of grime and house music, as we used a remixed version of Tempa T’s ‘Next Hype’. In moments of house music we used a still camera (tripod) to represent the difference in music genre. The grime melodies of the song are featured with a free form style of camera to represent the aggression of the genre,

while a still camera represents the simplistic rhythm of house.

This relates to Goodwin’s theory of a relationship between music and visuals. By using these techniques we were able to establish familiar conventions of the genre of our song in order to contain our target audience, while at the same time challenging the conventions of our music genre and pushing its boundries.



Our music product also uses conventions of real media products by the use of the similarity in the music video techniques used between our music video and grime artists Wiley. In Wiley's music video 'numbers in action', the use of jump shots filmed by a still camera while multiple Wiley's perform actions in the background relates closely to the techniques used in our own music video in which jump shots are used to show the star moving across the rooms performing different actions and sitting in different positions.

http://www.wix.com/asaproduction1/aromalo