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

Narrative theories

Our music video and digipak use, develop and challenge several conventions belonging to real media products. Firstly, we challenge narrative theories as there is no clear narrative in our video, just like in many hip-hop videos. Instead, there is a consistent pattern or emotion associated with the song. For example, in Vince Staples 'Senorita' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OAYMMod9Wo) and Joey Bada$$' 'Waves' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51e1gIkzHgk) there are no clear narratives conforming to the different theories like Propp's theory based on the different types of characters. This means that we have used conventions of other music videos and developed them to make our own unique video. An advantage of adopting this form of video enables the audience to develop their own unique interpretation of what the videos displays, whereas a narrative tells them what occurs. Thus, challenging the audience more to solve the videos meaning in contrast to giving them the content and telling them what it means. Due to this, we have shown a conformity to elements of Barthes' Enigma code as our video has no clear narrative, so it illustrates a puzzle. This keeps the audience guessing and enables them to perceive it however they want to. Although, we still challenged this code because we didn't 'solve' the puzzle for the audience, instead we simply kept it a mystery as to what the story means.

2 characters

Here are the 2 actors in our music video:

Driving, lip syncing, clothing, skateboarding and location

We additionally used conventions associated to the genre of hip-hop through mise-en-scene. Many videos include scenes of driving (Kendrick Lamar, 'Alright'), lip syncing (above), skateboarding (Joey Bada$$, 'Waves'), eerie locations (Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples, 'Hive') as well as the artists modelling hip-hop clothing like Supreme, Palace, Adidas and many more. In our video, we used dark, creepy locations to conform to this convention, where our actors wore Carhartt, The North Face, Converse and Travis Scott merchandise whilst lip syncing and occasionally driving in these scenes too. These brands are under the association of hip-hop clothing or were made by hip-hop artists themselves (Travis Scott), showing that we have conformed to this convention. The use of these conventions intrigues my audience due to their association of these conventions with hip-hop; the genre of music that they listen to and follow in terms of fashion and themes e.g. clothing, driving and hobbies.

Comparisons

Drug and alcohol connotations

In almost all hip-hop videos, there are actors who have been consuming drugs and alcohol. We have used this convention without actually consuming anything illegal e.g. by incorporating psychedelic effects to connote drug use. It is known that certain drugs make you delusional and hallucinate, thus making this inclusion relevant as it shows what is going on in the actors mind, without actually showing them consume anything. Moreover, in some of our shots we have used a smoke machine from behind the camera. This allows the smoke to diffuse across the lens and make a blurry and unique image of actor on screen. The smoke also has connotations of drug use due to the popularity of cannabis consumption in the world of hip-hop. An example of psychedelics in a music video is SchoolBoy Q's 'Collard Greens' (below) and an example of this effect from our video is also shown below.

Digipak

The majority of digipak's produced by professional rappers are extremely simple, but still unique, effective and enticing. I believe we have achieved this ourselves whilst remaining original. For example, an album of Kendrick Lamar's (arguably the biggest hip-hop artist alive) simply features an image, the album and artist name, and then a 'parental advisory' label. This doesn't bore the reader with detail. Instead it is straight to the point, telling the audience necessary details, and an image to associate with the album or to act as a symbol. We also devised our digipak in this kind of basic form, showing that we have used conventions used by extremely successful rappers.

Nonconformity to Laura Mulvey

However, stereotypical rap videos consist of a conformity to Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory that states 'the audience are made to view the media text as a heterosexual male and to represent woman as an object instead of a person'. We decided to challenge this convention by not displaying either gender in a sexual way. This allows our music video to appeal to both genders and sexualities as there is no sexual or revealing content.

Lighting

In relation to lighting, my research showed that videos with darker lighting often have a more serious and gloomy meaning, which is accompanied by the tone and pace of the song itself. In contrast, upbeat songs have bright lighting in their music video. Consequently, it was clear that the lighting had to be darker, so we did the majority of our filming at night and then used the appropriate filters to get the perfect lighting to portray the intended gloomy feel. From this, it is clear that we used and challenged conventions of hip-hop videos as we conformed to the darker lit videos but subverted from the lighter ones. The shots below clearly illustrate the type of lighting we used:

References

Kendrick Lamar 'Alright': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY Joey Bada$$ 'Waves': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51e1gIkzHgk Vince Staples 'Sensorita': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OAYMMod9Wo Earl Sweatshirt feat. Vince Staples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FcDXL5Aw0o SchoolBoy Q feat. Kendrick Lamar 'Collard Greens': https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=_L2vJEb6lVE

Conclusion

Overall i think it is crucial that we used and developed these conventions as, according to Andrew Goodwin, there is 'genre-related style and iconography', which means that we needed to follow usual conventions shown in professional hip-hop videos in order for us to accurately represent the genre itself, explaining why we did so.