Evaluation: Question 1

Q1: In what does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions or real media products?

A number of videos influenced us while we were planning our music video. One of these was the original video to the track. One aspect we took from the original video was the pace of editing and amount of cuts. While researching this, we tried to count the number of cuts in the original video but lost count after around 200. This made it clear to us that we would have to film A LOT of footage and also spend a lot of time on the editing, which we incorporated into our plan. 


Here is the official video for our track:

Julien seen walking next to our motif (on the wall)

The real motif for the track in the original video

The image below shows the artist performing the lyrics. You can see the body language is quite bold and aggressive, which is conventional in rap/grime videos, as the artists are usually aggressive and angry when rapping/performing.

Here is a video I created in Final Cut showing a clip from the start of the original video and a clip from the end of our video. It shows how we used the same technique of filming a tracking shot of the actor and then speeding the footage up in Final Cut Pro. In the original track this is used to introduce the character at the start of the video, and is in time with the white noise sound effect. We decided to use this technique for the final shot in our video, to make it seem as if whatever the character was running from has caught him. It follows the convention of the camera and editing being in time with the music, as it ends on the last beat of the song. I think it works well as a climax to the song, and acts as a sort of resolution to the narrative, but could also be seen as a cliffhanger. This challenges one of the conventions followed by many music videos, as most narratives do not usually have an ending.

I created the video below by downloading the original video from Youtube and importing it into Final Cut beside a sequence from our video, and then using the Image & Wireframe feature to make the clips play alongside one another. The clips show the climax of the song, and the fastest paced editing in both videos. Obviously, the original video has a greater range of shots and more cuts than ours as it was made by a professional music video directors/editors, but I think ours is still edited well and creates the same excitement and feel as the original.
Other conventions our music video follows are the use of a base track of the artist, and obvious edits to draw attention to the cuts.

Our video features both an actor and artist, which is unusual for a music video as many use the artist as an actor as well, performing the lyrics and acting as a character in the narrative. We used cross-cutting to go between the narrative and performance elements of the video. There is roughly an equal balance between the two, which is conventional in many music videos.

I think my Digipack is quite conventional as it features an image on the artist on the outside cover, but challenges the usual convention of having the artist's face on the front cover. Instead, one large image of the artist is used to cover the whole back and front cover, with the artist's name & album title on the front, in big bold font. Although some of the text for the track-listing covers some of the image, the artist's face is still clear. My Digipack also uses a simple colour scheme (which is black, white and grey) as almost all real CD covers do, avoiding vivid colours which can look tacky.


My advertisement uses the same image, font and colour scheme as the Digipack, with the addition of the red font which is used to make it stand out and catch people's eyes.


My ancillary products also follow the genre conventions for grime/rap music with the colour scheme, font, and the dark/urban feel to the products.