In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms & Conventions of Real Media Products?

Having researched different videos in the hip hop genre, I picked up the conventions and stereotypes of the hip hop and r&b genre. For example, the posters used by different artists/bands always used the artist themselves as the focus point and rarely ever just used an album art on their own. Such an artist known for this is Kendrick Lamar. I chose to develop this point as I thought this would be better for a new artist rather than trying to challenge the forms and convention of real media products. This meant including the artist in almost every single digipak. As a result, I could create a recognisable image for the artist by highlighting the artist and the artist only. This has been backed by my target audience through word of mouth when I advertised the digipaks through social networking sites. 

My music video as well as the digipaks and adverts challenge common conventions and add to them further. One example of this is in my music video, the hip hop genre is notorious  for its use of money, sports cars and sexualisation of females. In contrast, I went with an alternative approach that would suit the song better. I focused the entire music video around the artist performing. This showed the artist expressing his own emotions which reflects the lyrics of the song very well. I feel like this may be a minimalistic idea for a music video however, the focus on the artist shows the artist in a 'better light' for the audience. This is through the audience seeing that the artist is down to earth and in touch with his 'previous' self before the sudden fame from his music career. My digipak again although minimalistic, stands very boldly and attracts the audiences eyes through the bold white text on the black background. Having analysed different digipaks such as 50 Cent 'get rich or die tryin', it was clear that digipaks in the hip world were gradually getting minimalistic yet they still attracted the audiences focus. I feel that my digipak works around this concept very well as the bulk of the digipak consists of only the artists face and some singing equipments. The digipak produces a humble atmosphere and makes the artist more desirable to follow by the fans. Largely, conventions of hip hop were mostly fought against which again, for me, makes the entire digipak line stand out for the audience. This works well for the artist image as well, it shows that the artist is very unique and not like the rest.