My music video challenges some conventions of real hip hop music videos but also follows some conventions: - It does not include typical elements like cars, women, drugs and uses dimly lit, deserted locations instead to convey the character's loneliness. - It only features one character whereas real videos usually include multiple artists or people. This helps audiences connect with the character's feelings. - However, it does use heavy lip syncing as real videos do to make the artist appear cool, which helps connect with my target audience.

1. Q1
IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT
USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND
CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

2. I think that my media product has mainly gone against typical conventions of real hip
hop music videos. From my research into existing videos I realised hip hop videos tend
to follow a certain list of things it must have to be a hip hop video and to make the
artists have a cool personality. These things consisted of cars, attractive women, drugs
etc. However my video doesn’t include any of these things and focuses entirely on my
main artist and the things he’s going through. The whole narrative of my video is that
my character has had problems with family and his girlfriend and now he has ran away
from it all. He is now dealing with these suicidal thoughts which links in to what the
song is about. So in my video the locations used and so on are very against typical
conventions of real media products, as I tried to use unpopulated locations that look
deserted in some way to link in to what the character is feeling. As you can see below
the first shot of my music video sets the whole tone for the rest of it. I would say it is a
very dimly lit video compared to real media products which would usually use bright
colours. The image on the right is from a hip hop video from artist Lil Uzi Vert and uses
a bright exotic location. The image on the left is the first shot from my video so you can
see that I have gone against conventions.

3. Another way I have challenged conventions is by only having one character in the music
video. My music video is all about this one character which I did purposely because I
wanted the audience to connect to him feeling lonely and so on. So I thought having the
character all on his own would make the audience understand what he’s going through
more. With real life products there is rarely a video where it is just the artist on their
own, as I mentioned there are things such as women to back them up or other artists in
the video if the song contains one. So I would say by having only one character in my
video is challenging the typical conventions used in real life media products. The
screenshot on the left below is a shot from my music video, as you can see I really
wanted to capture the fact that the character is on his own from the location and so on.
And the screenshot on the right is from a Travis Scott video where the artist is backed
up by another artist and includes things like exotic cars and attractive women in it also.
This shows that I have challenged the typical conventions of real hip hop music videos.

4. I have not completely gone against conventions of real life products however. For
example a convention that I have used heavily in my music video is also used heavily in
real life hip hop videos and this is the use of lip syncing. Lip syncing is used heavily in
hip hop videos to make the artists look cool and for other reasons. I decided to use lip
syncing a lot in my music video so the artist could connect with my target audience
which is 16-30 year olds and especially teenagers. I thought that the use of lip syncing
could make the audience really understand what the character is going through. Lip
syncing was also featured heavily in my music video as Josh the actor for the video
learned the whole song for me which was a big help. The image on the left below is a
shot where lip syncing is used in my music video, and the image on the right is from a
Big Sean music video where lip syncing is used. This is just to show that it is a typical
convention of real media products.