question 1 - in what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media product ?

Throughout the course of our music video, 'Aladdin' by Not3s we aimed to challenge many conventions through the course of grime music videos.

These conventions were:

The narrative 

Within the genre of grime we discovered that most of the narrative relate to the words. Many grime videos have a dull narrative that convey through actions in the music video. You can evidently spot this in current grime videos from artist such as Stormzy, Yxng Bane that specify in grime.

Grime videos generally base their videos upon reality. It focuses on the urban environment that uses common areas of their city. Most grime artists reinforce their narrative by using themselves throughout. For our project we decided that we would in force a wider range and make the video about two individuals that share common dreams of being wealthy and popular by making their best life by themselves. We used the iconology of expensive items featured in our music video. We felt this would be better as it shows the life of reality and a relatable subject to the youth of today. This made our music video more relate able. In the music video we used females instead of males being the dominant goal achiever. We thought this would blend in well as its rare to see women be the main feature to a grime music video as the women normally supports a male. This type of narrative is seen in Yxng Bane - Rihanna. Proving this narrative criticism may be a response from the audience for Bane from the way he displays Woman. From Not3s original video we see he uses the narrative of friendship and independence. We thought by using a mix of male and female presents an unbiased story line and no matter what gender every can dream and achieve the same thing.
Grime is focused on the friendships around and how it can affect one another confidence. This worked in our favor as we showed the two sides of both characters and how they are by themselves and what they want to become by using friendships to show their well-being.

Narratives in grime can often change from a protagonist rapping into a camera to following some type of narrative aswell. We we studied narratives we could identify disjuncture, illustration and amplification. We found more grime artists used disjuncture narratives. This means the protagonist raps into the camera but not always following the moral of their lyrics. Some artists also use illustration narratives to mimic the meaning of their lyrics by telling a story in their music video.

The original song of  'Aladdin' uses disjuncture. We decided to use the illustration narrative Through the process of our story board.

The visuals

In grime videos lighting plays a key part to the to overall product. It is well known to use dim lighting and shadows to create this effect. The grime artists also use natural lighting to help convey reality; this lighting is focused on more of a cloudy day as it brings the colour grey that gives a dull effect. This is seen in Stormzy 'blinded by your grace'. On top of the cloudy sky they added a black and white effect that was more sensitive to his lyrics. This use of colour conveys they story of his past, like a flash back.

In this screenshot from the video it we can see there is no lighting through the cloud as it would come up almost a white colour in black and white. We can tell its a cloudy day because the effect is still relatively dark. Grime has a dark past in their meanings of an artists song and the use of black and white reflect this genres intentions of truth by not seeing detail of the people. Everyone is just as equal.

However in our music video we aimed to challenge this convention. Our initial intentions was to use dim lighting. Instead we used natural lighting to understand the character and the detail of interest they come across.

In this screenshot we used natural sunlight to show theres always hope and dreams. Brightlight can represent ambition and determination by giving off a positive vibe. We wanted to show there was a dream that was hoping to my achieved.



In this scene we used a reflection shot which is common in grime. A reflection shot can give an impression on the audience on how the character looks and has opinions on themselves. For this scene the character has completely changed from before and towards the end is more concerned on herself rather than materialistic thing, such as the cars and watches. This interprets our orignial for both females as they looked more refreshed and healthier. This showed that they had bettered themselves and tried to live and follow their dream of looking wealthy form the start to finish.

Mise-en-Scene

The mise-en-scene interlinks with the narrative of our video. We used the outdoors to show what kind of environment they live in. This represented the hardship of every young child.
For example the window shopping is very common at a young age as its not possible to get a great paid job to afford designer brands. We revolved our music video around other people to represent friendships and how the people in the shopping center do not interact with young children and are segregated to fit in with society.

In the party we discover that the first female has friends. We showed a positive relationship by using a friendly environment of people having a good time all together. This worked well as we could link this to the narrative of confidence as it was low at the start and higher towards the end.

To show that days were progress and both individuals changed over time we can see by their clothing and lighting it is was a different day and at the end it was a darker environment that had bulb lighting and different clothing. These small changes helped convey the narrative.

In Grime music videos artists use a lot of  natural environments and parties much like Belly Squad 'banana' (and remix) as we can see from these screenshots it a group of young people with positive vibes much like our scene. For our music video we wanted to interlink this factor so it can relate to the grime genre as we can see the audience gave back mostly positive feedback which is what we aim to do.

Digipak 

We conformed to challenge the convention of digipaks in the grime genre. We used bright colours that relate to uplifting narrative but did interpret some typical grime cover ideas. Many grime digipaks use dark colours that represents a serious narrative. We used a dark background to represent out serious narrative but bold colours on the illustration and picture of our protagonist to convey a contrast of a serious message but also positive. The use of our bright colours helped us do this to better the appearance and change the mood. On some grimw digipaks you can also evidently see the protagonist. We conformed to this by the inspiration of Giggs 'Landlord. An example of a serious grime digipak is Stormzys 'Gang signs and prayers'. You can see this bellow.

Gender

We planning the process of our music video we had to deep gender representation. We wanted to challenge the stereotypical view of woman being an addition/object to the main male protagonist in a grime music video. We used the main protagonist as females with their own individual narrative. This shows that woman can also achieve and dream like males. Females are generally seen wearing tight, revealing clothing dancing around provocatively. We decided to use baggy comfy clothing that is suitable to weather condition much like reality. The image grime artists represent in their music video isn't a good image on the audience and can effect some. In addition, we challenged this stereotype to make every individual feel confident regardless of traits/characteristics.