The document discusses how the media product uses and develops conventions of the hip hop genre. It uses conventions like graffiti style fonts, images of the artists, and urban slang. The video includes medium close up shots of the rappers, as is common in hip hop videos. Colors, fonts, and imagery are consistent across pieces to tie them together. Feedback noted some scenes were dull without enough artist engagement, so more dynamic shooting is needed. Overall it aims to capture the aesthetics and styles seen in real hip hop media through visuals and film techniques.

1. Evaluation
Luke Atkinson

2. We took aspects such as smoking that is
used in almost every Hip Hop video and
transformed it comically for a different
effect. Here we made a toy duck luck like it
was smoking to open our video.
A main convention of Hip Hop videos is
the use of medium close up shots that
show the rappers. We used this aspect a
lot in our video to reflect the Hip Hop
style. This supports Andrew Goodwin’s
theory that certain record labels have a
demand for close ups to show the artist
as a motif to the particular genre.
Camera effects like fast motion are used
in some of the real media products and
display a kind of establishing shot or
view. We took this convention and
changed the establishing shot to a full
room view in which characters move and
interact in fast motion.

3. For the digipak, we used
graffiti style fonts to give the
urban look that UK Hip Hop
aims for. We also took a
picture of a broken road to
use as the front cover to
demonstrate the urban
territory that is associated
with this particular genre.
We felt that the inside of the digipak
needed to be thin in texture and easy on
the eye which apposes to some of the
common conventions. We took a picture of
a wall at an indoor skate park and made it
dark in colour. The wall stated ‘Welcome’
in a graffiti style font which we thought
was appropriate.

4. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
The use of graffiti style fonts
is a huge part of the Hip Hop
genre and is used here in
both cases. This convention
makes it immediately
appealing to the specific
audiences. The real media
product also shows the
actual rebellion of spraying
graffiti itself.
Images of the artists are
usually shown as a
convention of the genre
which we have used here.
Hip Hop artists are keen
about showing off their
look.
We also used urban slang which
the specific audiences would
understand: “Go cop the new
single from…” litrally means “Go
get the new single from…”

5. How effective is the combination of your main product
and ancillary texts?
Colour schemes and fonts were an obvious
continuous convention that we incorporated into
the project as red and dark colours along with
graffiti style fonts summarises a lot of Hip Hop style
texts.
We used an image taken
from the video for the
magazine advert which
displayed all three
rappers. The logo for
the artists ties together
with the mise en scene
of the video. For
example, the clothing of
the rappers and the fact
they are smoking all link
with Hip Hop
conventions and bring it
together in a coherent
way.

6. “I like the bits outside and the bits in between the verses.
The start of the first verse is good, the bits where you’re sat
inside are a bit dull though, on Mattys verse its just his face
but then it goes to a great scene with him rapping to the
camera and you two bopping behind him which looks cool,
but I reckon there should have been more of it.”
What have you learned from
your audience feedback?
This comment told us that there
wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm in a lot of
the scenes from some of the actors.
This caused parts of the video to look
“dull” in places. To over come this
problem we should of made sure all
the rappers knew the words well
enough to act like a rapper at the
same time. Due to time, there was a
large amount of the video that
contained this “dull” sequence as we
did not have time to shoot different
scenes.

7. “It looked really convincing as a
rap video with the clothing and
stuff. The camera was on their
faces for most of it which is like
real hip hop videos.”
We made sure that the mice en scene of
the video would meet the conventions of
the genre by taking aspects like ‘clothing’
seriously. We studied the characters shown
in real Hip Hop media products and
demonstrated the use of flat caps and
hooded sweatshirts worn in an “urban
style”. The camerawork used in the video
was also specific to the genre as the rappers
are portrayed in, mostly, medium close up
shots in order to show their “style”.

8. How did you use media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Blogger
We used blogger to upload our progress online
from research of real media products to the final
JPEG’s of our final pieces. This helped to organise
the whole project and retrieve feedback on our
work.
Final Cut Pro
We used this software to produce the music
video. It took some getting used to but made
it simple to fit images with the music. We
figured out how to use effects like ‘fast
motion’ and transitions to move one shot to
another in various ways.
Photoshop
We used this software to produce
our magazine advertisement and
digipak design. It proved very useful
because we could import and
manipulate images with effect to
meet conventions of the genre. For
example; we changed the saturation
and brightness of the front cover
picture to fit in with the darker
mood of the whole piece.
YouTube
We used YouTube to upload our
final music video in order to
retrieve feedback from the public.
This website made it easy to upload
the video and easy to find when
needed.

9. Survey Monkey
We used survey monkey to create a
survey about our specific genre and send
it out to the public to get responses that
we could analyse. This website was free
and made it simple to create a survey
and send it out to people.
Canon 600D Camera
We used a Canon 600D camera and a
tripod for recording to ensure steady
shots could be taken. We used zoom
focus to make the quality of the image
crisp and clear and the playback feature
to make sure we could use what we had
recorded and re-shoot if not. This
camera used an SD card with captured
both videos and still photos which meant
that we could use it for still images on
our digipak as well as our music video.
Being digital, the SD card also allowed us
to transfer the memory to a computer
with great ease and without any degrade
in quality.
Most of the technology that we used for
this project was digital. This meant that
most of the softwares and hardwares that
we used could be linked with great ease
and clear quality. For example; YouTube is
a digital social networking site that allowed
our digital video from the camera to be
showed to the public digitally and allowed
them to give us feedback on it.