2. *
* During planning, I intended to comply with the conventions of
narrative in the hip-hop genre as I was going to follow the
lyricism of Kendrick and make the video about the struggle of
living in such a poor environment. This was the approach I took
and a large part of the lyricism was acknowledged and
manifested as the video was split in two different settings: One
side represented the hardships of the working class streets
Kendrick and his friends lived on, and the other showing the life
after Kendrick has accumulated a lot of money out of his rap
career. My interpretation of the song is that each verse was a
letter written from his comrades still living in such a rough social
climate and therefore Kendrick reads these in his back garden
for the video. In this sense, I conformed to the genre's
conventions and some of Andrew Goodwin's theory in that the
video reflected the lyrics.
3. *
* Merely exacting the lyrics with action in the
video is something I think would lack creativity
and would bore an audience. Although
Kendrick's lyricism is detailed and diverse, I
decided to create the general ideas and
themes I saw in the song; gun violence and
knife crime. This is why I created the repeated
shootings of the protagonist which reflects the
amount of death and pain described in the
lyrics.
4. *
* The visual effects broke the standards of the hip-hop
genre as usually rap videos nowadays are made with
one of the rappers holding the camera, which creates
a very low budget style. This is arguable as there are
many different periods of rappers such as the early 90s
when it began where the videos were planned and
filmed at MTV standard which groups like Souls of
Mischief or N.W.A. In contemporary rap videos, we see
much more improvisation as the Internet gives a
market to anyone with a microphone and a camera.
The Internet rappers therefore created a style, which
more upmarket rappers have used. I tried to fuse the
two in making a structured video that looks partially
improvised.
5. *
*I think this was successful with the use of the shaky
camera. The VFX use supported this hybrid although
I don't think it was successful in that they weren't
natural enough to make it look partially improvised.
However, it could be argued that with the access to
the software, Internet rappers like Onoe Caponoe
use a lot of heavy and seemingly random visual
effects, which could be what was created in my
music video. The camera motion in the garden also
showed the improvised styles which uses the
conventions of hip hop.
6. *
In terms of matching general music videos'
conventions, the video follows Goodwin's theory
in matching the style of the artist but not the
genre's characteristics.
