Evaluation- What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses a variety of forms and conventions that are typical of existing media products. One of the aspects we include is on our digipack design, in which we use the convention of having our artist as the main focus, filling the cover. Like other media products, we felt that we needed to sell our artist, and to make sure that he was well known. To do this we made sure to feature his face on the front of both the media products we created, putting focus on him in both the poster and the digipack. We used a mid shot of him standing in front of a crowd to emphasise him standing out from everyone else, while still being an elusive face in the crowd. We filled the back cover with a large close up of his face to show him with a greater importance, and wrapped the text around him to show how important he is.

Another way we utilised the forms and conventions of existing media products was with the working of the locations we dominantly used. The three main locations of the recording studio, the skate park and the water front, all show our intended conventions successfully. The recording studio gave a feeling of wealth and status towards our artist, two things that are commonly hinted at or implied in existing media products. The high tec equipment also helps us to mirror the idea of power and importance used in existing media products. The graffiti covered skate park gave the music video an urban feel, showing that our artist is 'street' and therefore relatable to our audience, but also gives homage to the original concepts of hip hop when it was first developed. Graffiti played an important role in the development of hip hop, as well as a skateboarding culture, who grasped the original style for their own. We felt that we would develop our conventions by subtlety hinting at hip hops historical background in the locations of our video. Lastly our final location gave a feeling of power and also put emphasis on our urban 'street' persona we tried to portray, showing our artist in a street environment whist having a blank sky backdrop, giving him an extremely high status by having nothing else to distract the view.

Finally the costumes we used in our music video and ancillary task were effective as they used conventions of our genre quite well. Our artists costume consisted of a dark coloured jacket with jeans or chinos. These suited our genre well as the dark colour scheme is like that of artists from our genre and the clothing styles are also typical of our genres existing artists. I believe this helped our music video and ancillary task follow the conventions better as well as matching to each other, by having the same style of clothes being worn in both. Our female artist Angel wore two costumes, one dark and one light. We predominantly used the lighter coloured costume to contrast the genres typical colour scheme. We wanted to show angel as being sexy, but not as being a romantic interest for our main artist. Thus the use of the light colours created a feeling of separateness and disengaged the audience from seeing the two as a romantic couple.