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

The music video we have created meets some of the conventions of real media products but not all. The fact it doesn’t meet all conventions allows us to show more originality and creativity that would help to make our product stand out from the rest.

The track “Kick Dat Down” should immediately be recognized to be from the genre of grime. The artist himself should be able to give any viewer the thought that this is grime. To create this video and target the right audience, we had to look analyse other grime videos. Grime is in fact a very unknown genre to the public however to any youth, its known very well.

Grime videos vary quite dramatically though, some videos by grime artists eventually turn more mainstream meaning the track and video gets classified as hip hop or rap. Some grime videos aren’t known to be music videos but known to be hood videos. Hoods videos are when the artist would be filmed in his own local area.

Some grime videos are actually filmed professionally in studios or with professional camera crew making their video appeal to a broader audience. Finding an grime artist wasn’t that much of a difficult challenge, in today’s youth there are alot of grime artists who are aged 12 and old.

By viewing many different grime videos, we were able to collect ideal conventions that could be possibly be used in our own video.

Andrew Goodwins theory talks about general forms and conventions of a music video;

• Relationship between music and visuals

• Relationship between music and lyrics

• Music video showing genre characteristics

• Close up of artists

• The notion of looking

• Intertextual reference to other media

• Voyeuristic treatment of female body

We had noticed a common trend in the types of clothing most grime artists have worn. Most of them would at one point have a hat on, hood up or both at the same time. We knew this was a common convention for grime so we just had to make sure our artist followed the same convention however this image of having a hood up or hat can make anyone victim of being stereotyped into being a bad person. This is also known as mis-en-scene

Since other grime artists dressed like that, it was most obvious we had to have our artist dressed similarly too.

Here are many different shots from our video of our artist where you can see the convention of wearing a hat and a hood are put into full play. There are many scenes that show our artist dressed in this typical grime way that is also known throughout today’s youth culture.

Another convention we had noticed from grime videos is that the videos are often filmed in the streets of London especially if the video is about London or thats where the artist is from.

An iconic symbol of London that has appeared on many videos is the red bus that often goes past in the background. Although this wouldn’t immediately be noticed by every viewer, its something that can be identified by any media student.

Often grime videos which are filmed in London have the camera focused on the artist instead meaning the background is slightly blurred however you can see there are buildings behind.

So after watching other grime videos, we decided the ideal location for our video would most definitely be the streets of London. This would be mean the artist is to make reference to local areas within London and would also make the video look far more interesting that just filming next to a brick wall. As we had noticed the iconic London bus appeared in a many grime videos, we decided to include a similar shot of where the red bus just happens to pass by however we didn’t want viewers to be distracted by the background so we simply entered the clip elsewhere so viewers could still keep focusing on the artist.

From our chase sequence we had learnt how to use the camera most effectively. On the day of our video shooting, we managed to think of an very original yet creative shot we wanted. This was when you make the camera go out of focus on a set of lights that would cause it to have an very interesting effect. Immediately we were pleased with the shots we had managed to get and we wanted to make sure this would be added to the beginning.

However funnily enough I had actually come across a recent grime video which features the same effect we used for our video! This seems to be very surprising but of course this isn’t something regularly seen in grime videos so im sure we can still be proud of thinking and filming this kind of shot that looks impressive in our video.

One idea which came towards the end of our video editing was the use of lyrics to included in the actual video. The track name “Kick Dat Down” was included in the video with rapid straight cuts from word to word with a little fade effect added in between. There are other lyrics included from the chorus in the video however the most important lyrics are in fact the track name which were given their own second to be on the screen.

Similarly the artist JME had once used this technique in his own video called “Over me” however in his video the lyrics are repeatedly visible on the screen where he actually picks up and throws the words around as well as walks round them and through them.

Whilst looking through many grime videos I realised that most videos were very simple. They had a start and a finish and mostly were really edited at all. They were simply joined together with not many effects at all. The only videos that had effects were from the current “superstar” grime artists who actually are known publically and there only a few. Most grime videos simply consist of the artist just saying his lyrics.

We wanted our video to stand out from the crowd. We want grime to be more recognised so we decided to actually include some interesting effects into our video that would make the viewer far more interested in the grime video. The two main effects that do stand out are shown above. The image to the left has the effect called “Bad TV” which we found on Final Cut Pro. This effect made the screen shake, split into two, lose colour and then back to normal. This effect was used that at the start of the video when the artist was first shown. The second effect was when the artist moved his hand diagonally causing the current clip of him to move across the screen diagonally allowing a new clip to be placed in immediately.