Mohammed Jawaad Ansari

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 

In terms of camera we challenged the conventions of grime videos as most of our video was filmed with a GoPro, which is different as majority of it is point of view. This sort of camera technique is important as it brings realism to the video and allows the spectators to engage with the video more. In our music video the point of view shots are the most important as it puts the spectators in the shoes of the protagonist as well as them getting a taste what it is like to stereotypical youth.

 

Furthermore, in terms of editing; our video follows the conventions as we have a lot of fast cuts, jump cuts and cross cutting. This makes the video more engaging for the spectators as we can show a weekend through a 3-minute video. We included jump cuts as it makes the spectators feel uneasy, as we don’t show everything, which can create enigma code as the spectators will wonder why certain things happened in the video. This is conventional as it is in some grime videos such as Lock Arff – Section Boyz. However, we also challenged these conventions by making our narrative similar to ‘a day in the life of a youth’. This challenged the conventions, as we didn’t do the typical cars, money & girl narrative. We also used something called invisible editing, which is when no transitions are used throughout the video.

 

Our Mise en scene challenges conventional grime videos as we used urban and rural areas when it came to filming. The urban areas fit perfectly with our video, as it is a common place where things such as drugs and criminal activity are most likely to happen. We chose stereotypical locations that represent youth in many negative ways. For example, we chose an alley for the drug robbery, as it is discrete and wouldn’t happen in an open space.  When it came to costumes we chose to wear tracksuits and fashionable gear as it is what the youths are on top of these days. We also chose dark and dull colours, which represent danger, as it is the color of the hidden, the secretive and the unknown, creating an air of mystery. It keeps things bottled up inside, hidden from the world. This is relevant to our video as we keep the main character a secret until the end of the video. As we switch from various locations we avoid to show the characters face as it creates enigma code which  We challenged the conventions in terms of props and costumes as spectators are used to seeing symbols of wealth and status. Whereas, in our video we chose to represent the complete opposite as we didn’t want to Americanize our video and wanted to keep it British. The whole idea of this is that it gives it more realism and able to easily identify the artists.