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

The task that we had was to create a music video, a CD digipak and a magazine advert for a chosen song what we had found. When finding the song we had to look on the

internet, we first came across Inflowential on unsigned.com, but the song we chose wasn’t on the site, we looked more into the band on the internet and their myspace and came across their song ‘Wherever we go’ and we all agreed on choosing this song. The main purpose of creating a music promo is to promote the song, album or even the artist themselves. Throughout a music video if you were referring to the genre of our band which was Hip-Hop/Rap you would expect fast paced shots throughout the video. But many videos are different because of the genre, and relate to the song and the genre. For example if the music was a lot slower the changing of shots would be in time with the song, so you wouldn’t expect fast paced shot throughout a slower song such as a classical song. Most promo’s include narrative as well as performance, music promo’s do this so you can see the artists emotions through the song, performance is normally used to tell the a story what is to do with the songs lyrics, for example; would be one of professor green’s songs, ‘Read all about it’ with him performing throughout and also their being a narrative and a story being told throughout the video, as you can see below –



The conventions of a music video in the genre Hip-Hop/Rap relating to camera work would be fast paced shots, also with different ranges of shots, such as close-ups, mid shots, long shots. For example the close ups will be used for performance of the band or the singer to show their emotions when singing the song throughout the video, whereas a long shot will be used maybe at the start of the video to set the scene if there is going be any narrative throughout the video.

Also the typical conventions with editing throughout a Hip-Hop/Rap music video would be fast paced transitions from one shot to another. These are also mainly used in this genre to keep in time and in beat with the song to make the video as effective as it can be. Also with the editing some videos might just keep it in colour but they can also use black and white which can help emphasise a certain mood in the song or particular scenery throughout the video. The most typical conventions of Hip-Hop/Rap video would be things such as the use of alcohol throughout, well known clothing, expensive houses/hotels, fast expensive cars, attractive women and location is normally rough graffiti area’s where you expect gangs to be or in party atmosphere to show off their money. Examples of this are artists such as 50cent in his videos where he is the main character throughout, like in his video ‘Buzzin’ with another artist they are both in the video throughout with flash cars throughout to show they wealth, which is one of the typical conventions in a Hip-Hop video.

This screen shot shows many conventions of a Hip-Hop/rap music video.

When creating our music videos there were many videos that stood out for us which has had an influence on our final production, but the main videos and artists what had the biggest influence was Rizzle Kicks and Kanye West. Rizzle kicks influenced us because of the genre of our music was very similar to most of their music and their videos are very simple but effective, by using very simple camera shots and editing techniques to make a good music promo.

Our second influence was Kanye West and his music videos with all his different effects throughout, a prime example of this would be his song Good life, where during the video he uses all different effects to emphasise the lyrics throughout the song, this influenced because we wanted to get the same effect across to our audience with all the different editing techniques

Looking at the screenshots above from our video, it shows that we have used a wide range of editing and camera techniques throughout our video. We used green screen and typography throughout the video to use different editing techniques than usual. The video what mainly influenced as said before was Kanye West – Good life, this was one of our main influences because of the wide range of shots used, the different editing techniques such as green screening and typography which you can see from the videos below –

When planning our production there was plenty of places we thought of, but in the end we all decided on choosing Peterborough, we chose Peterborough because it has very urban look about it and all of us knew a lot of very good places for shots throughout our video what could work really well , on the day the shots came out really well finding some great locations such as –

Digipak and Magazine adverts –

Digipaks are a type of CD/DVD packaging made out of card or other heavy paper/cardboard material. Most digipaks can flip open like a book, or it can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left, with the CD in the centre portion.

Conventions of a digipak –

-          The name of the artist

-          The name of the album

-          Track listing

-          Record Labe;

-          Credits

-          Wesbites

-          Logo

-          Barcode

Typical conventions a Magazine Advert –

- Name of the band

- The name of the album or song

- The venue if it’s an advert for a tour

- Eye catching images and text to get people’s attention

- Links to websites, phone numbers both to book tickets if the advert is advertising the bands tour

- Reviews/feedback, things such as papers rating the album or band out of five stars.

- Tour/performance/release dates

Here is an example of a Chase & Status magazine advert, as you can see the magazine advert is an exact copy of the digipak and their album cover, the similarity will help people relate the band to the songs on their album and you can get the same technique of the eye catching yellow colour works. If our group was to take influence we would have to think about adding bright eye catching font or eye catching colours in general, also the use of using the same design for both the digipak and magazine advert may be something we could possibly do to attract people’s attention.

These are our magazine advert and also our digipak, I feel these work well together because they promote one another and can catch people’s eye to get their attention –