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

The first impressions when viewing our media products, the audience would think that the genre of it was Hip-Hop. However, the actual genre of our media products and Rizzle Kicks is British Hip-Hop. We challenged Hip-Hop conventions by not using typical hip-hop conventions in our media products. We didn’t use conventions such as money, fast car, an abundance of bling, half naked women, drugs, alcohol, violence and city estates. However, we did use a little bit of bling and manipulated a drug deal scene. We did use other hip-hop conventions such as the characters wearing flat peak hats, hoodies and sunglasses. We decided not to use vast amount of hip-hop conventions because the artists we were studying were Rizzle Kicks and we wanted our characters to represent their genre which is British Hip-Hop and we developed it by wearing, chequered shirts, summer shorts, plimsoles, polo tops, chinos and other mainstream British fashion clothing. We used real media products to help create our media products. We firstly studied the Kanye West – Good Life music video and were fascinated by the use of text typography throughout the video. The video influenced us to use a bit of typography in our music video with the words popping up in sync with the lyrics. Before we implemented the typography, we produced a demo by using the good life song to see how it looked and we thought it looked quite good, so we used it in our own video. We also studied the Wiz Khalifa – On My Level music video because that was a music video, which consisted of typical hip-hop conventions, and we liked the use of cuts in time with the beat at the start of the video. We used this idea for our music video in the second verse where there is a small section where the beat of the song is emphasised, so we used cuts to match the beats in time. We also used the official Rizzle Kicks – Down with the Trumpets music video because firstly, this was the song we were using in our music video and it would give us an idea of what we should use in terms of mise-en-scene such as the mainstream outfits, suburban locations, camera shots and ideas. For the locations sections, we studied the locations Rizzle Kicks perform in their video and tried to find similar looking locations in our town. They used some alleyways in their video and there were plenty of alleyways we used in our video. Also they used a location, which consisted of vibrant coloured buildings/houses, which looked like the Port Marine vicinity of our town. We used their music video to pinch some ideas but we interpreted them in our own way. One example was at the start of their video they used a cassette player to start their song so in our own video we used the same proposal but instead we used a vinyl record player to start the song. We used the vinyl record player idea because it looked quirky and retro and it was kind of cool in a geeky way. Another idea from the official music video we used in our video was the ‘drug deal’ scene because we thought this was the most important part of the narrative of the video where the trumpet is introduced so we thought we would use this scenery in our video but we interpreted it in a different way to make it our own.