Evaluation Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Forms and conventions is what makes different music videos distinguishable between all the genres of music. In our music video we didn't just want to follow all the conventions of hip-hop and rap music we wanted to adhere against some of the conventions as well we felt this would promote our antagonist image as being confused.

Music videos normally have one style: Performance, narrative and concept for ours we decided to do a mixture of performance and narrative because this makes the music video more enjoyable and intriguing to watch. Hip-hop music videos normally have low camera angles which portray the artist as having power, close-up shots which imply status because they have a whole camera frame for themselves. Hip-hop musics convention includes having a female in the music video because it shows how desirable the main artist is or the woman is used for provocative nature which could be associated with 'Mulvey's male gaze theory'.

Our music video challenges the hegemonic representation of gender as you would expect the woman to be chasing after the male character in the music video and him leaving her whoever it is the male character who wants to get back with the female. I feel as if this challenges the convention as in hip-hop/rap music the male character is usually free, dating multiple woman and having multiple woman in the music video however in our music video we have the male trying to win back the female while she sees other men.

Another convention we followed was having multiple locations, majority of music videos have various locations and this is something me and my group aim for because we believed that having multiple locations which were unique made the music video more interesting for our audience and keeps them intrigued. We carefully viewed many of Drake's music video as he was our main inspiration and in Drake - HYFR we noticed that one of Drake's location was a synagogue we thought that many artist rarely ever include their place of worship in their music video and we thought we would replicate this and we included a church as one of our location and this also relates very well to the title redemption. Below I will show a comparison of Drake's music video and our music video. 

This is the synagogue in Drake's music video for HYFR:

This is the church for our music video Redemption:

Well known artist usually have a piece of costume which is used in most of their music videos for example the rapper 'Nelly' always had a plaster on his face so if you saw a plaster you would associate that with Nelly. Another example is 'Neyo' who is a singer whom always wore hats in his music videos so an association with hats and Neyo was made with him and the audience. For our artist we wanted to do this as well so we thought that we would find a unique item and have our artist wear it throughout the music video which we did. We had our artist wear a cap which had the words 'Lost' on it we felt this costume would be most effective out of all the options because it also related to the song redemption because without his partner he is lost. 

In our music video we decided to subvert the stereotypes of gender in the hip-hop genre. We wanted to portray Ayo as a male who goes after the female who is perhaps the love of his life. This subverts the stereotype of gender in the hip-hop genre because a common feature of hip-hop music videos is the male around plenty of females who are in revealing clothes not thinking about having a relationship. An example of this is a hip-hop song called Future - That's A Check feat Rick Ross where in the music video the artists are around females in revealing clothing. We as a group decided to portray Ayo a male going against the conventions because we felt it would be more effective and shows that some males only want one female. As an overall artist we wanted to give Ayo a mixed persona so in the ancillary text some conventions will be adhered to and some will be subverted.

Most artist release their music videos on Youtube as it has over a billion users and people watch hundreds of millions of hours of Youtube videos a day and it generates billions of views. So the most obvious platform to upload our music video to would be Youtube however we wanted to be different so we decided to upload our music video to vimeo. As I have said before we wanted our artist have a confused persona and create a buzz for him meaning he will be someone who everyone talks about so when possible we try to go against the conventions so we used Vimeo as our platform to upload our music video.

Digipaks

With the presentation of our digipak we followed the usually convention of having the artists face as the front of the digipak and the song lists at the back of the digipak. From research we know that rap artist and hip-hop artist usually have gold jewellery evidently in their designs as it connotes wealth and status. Although we did not have the gold chains as an accessory we still kept the convention by giving our artist a gold ring so that the target audience can still relate. Additionally our artists name on the digipak 'Osikoya' is in gold writing which follows the convention. We decided to have the text 'Osikoya' in small font as we felt that the picture alone would be able to attract a huge following as people already know who the artist is from his face. The facial expression of the artist shows that he is trouble by something or something is on his mind this foreshadows most of the songs on the album this is stereotypical of most digipaks. The artwork on the front of album are usually forerunners for what the music inside the album will be like  

Inside the digipak we followed the convention again having the artist image integrated with a burning flame. The flame was done because at the start of our music video we had a flame being lit and at the end of the music video we had the flame dying out this was to signify our artist relationship in the music video. Lastly the back cover, we followed all the conventions of having the song list on the back cover as our main target audience is of the male gender and conventionally men are simple beings and don't really like complex designs so we thought we would just have the song list from 1-9 in a basic font so it's easy for everyone to read. 

Magazine advert

When we research previous magazine adverts of our genre we found that many of the adverts were for singles coming out so we decided to create a tour advert. In our tour advert we challenged the conventions because we had an explicit image in the middle of the whole advert. This goes against conventions and the social norms because as an artist you would want to appeal to all the ages however the explicit content rules out children straight away. This would create a brand image for are artist and gain him an even greater following and that is why his social media account is also there. 

At the top of the advert you would expect the artists name however we decided to subvert the convention and put the special guests at the top of the advert. This was done so that those who want to go and see the artist on tour will realise that they are getting an added value because as well as seeing the artist Osikoya they are also seeing well known artist such as 50 Cent. 

The artist costume is simple and he is no longer wearing his symbolic 'lost' cap this is because our artist is now adhering to the stereotype of males and is no longer 'lost' in a relationship and just wants to have as much fun as possible and rebel (as shown in the design with the artist swearing). 

Overall our ancillary texts have been successful in some aspects because we followed some conventions of the hip-hop and rap genre and we feel that we created a new brand image for our artist which is what we wanted to do.