Evaluation Question 1

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

(Unfortunately, our directors commentary didn't work out the way we wanted it to, mainly due to technical faults)

Our music video was inspired a number of videos; some R&B, some Hip-Hop/Rap videos, primarily, the inspiration came of Eminem's way of working, the fact that in most of his videos he tells you a story in some way, shows you that he is a narrator. We have duplicated this style but with a more original, but simple narrative style; using the basis of Eminem's narrative style, we intended to create a video that has a beginning and middle, but we leave the video on a cliffhanger as well as the fact that we show a mixed timeline, using both past and present. At the beginning of the video you see that the video starts with a sequence of acting, this comes from our inspiration that we found in the video, 'Stan'; in the video you see that the two main characters have a heated discussion before the video starts. Other videos that notably, have this in their videos are, 'Russian Roulette' by Rihanna, 'If I Were A Boy' by Beyonce, 'Love In This Club' by Usher, 'Run This Town' by Jay-Z just to name a few. A typical convention in Eminems videos is the dress codes that he has; as I've said before, his clothes symbolise his authority, masculinity, and seriousness. So that we didn't totally copy his dress code we added the black jacket to truly add the authority and seriousness.

Going back to the beginning of the video one other convention that relates to other videos in the R&B genre, is the idea of the males flirtatious and prowling of women; basically they generally show the males pursuit of a female companion. A video that clearly shows this is 'Forever' by Chris Brown. We wanted to stay true to this convention, because it also gives us the options that we needed to make this purely about a domestic violence relationship. To explain this, we can look into, Chris Brown's video; in the video he is pursuing a woman who is playing 'hard to get', we could easily turn this around into a domestic violence case by giving the male character a bad temper and the female showing total rejection, this allowed us to lead into the blackout and the sound of a remote being thrown and a slap to the face.

In terms of a typical music video, our video displays four out of six convention suggested by Andrew Goodwin, having already looked at this you can see that most obvious ones that we stuck to all the way was the way in which we show direct links between the lyrics and video just as we do with the music. An example of both of these can be seen when the 'artist' raps 'But when its bad, its awful. I feel so ashamed, I snapped...' this is follwed by a visual interpretation, which shows that we have stuck to the convention that shows a similar style to Eminem, in which we tell a story, giving our video a true narrative style.