Q1-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The huge stereotyping of R'n'B/ Hip-Hop videos in my opinion has pushed artists to start to challenge these stereotypes and bring a new dimension into the world of the genre. Chris Brown in the early stages of his career was seen as a typical R'n'B artists and song such as "Forever" and "Kiss Kiss" followed the common conventions of R'n'B songs and music video's such as money, girls, and partying.





A common these in these videos is dancing, mostly by Chris Brown himself, but in some parts he is assisted by a group of people. Dance is a convention of R'n'B/Hip-Hop, but it is one that we have challenged in own own video by not including it. We chose to challenge this convention because we feel that 'Shouldve kissed you' is one of Chris Browns softer songs and it therefore needs more performance to generate feeling and emotion.

As Chris Browns' career developed, his status in the industry allowed him to experiment with his music without much of a risk, and subsequently some of his music has ventured into the genre of rap, and some softer songs, such as 'Shouldve kissed you' could even be classed as more pop than R'n'B. The song is slow in tempo and not really the that you would expect to find on an album by an artist renowned for being a big name in R'n'B.

As you can see in the video for the song, the focus is purely on the performer and there are no other actors involved. This is not the case in our own music video for the song, as we have an extra actor as well as the performer, giving us the chance to include a lot of narrative to get the story of the song across to the audience.

The constant attention on the performer is one of the main conventions of R'n'B music videos, and in my opinion this is linked to the stereotypical view of artists in this genre as being self-centred and naive. As this is the case, we have in fact challenged this convention as well be including a fair chunk of narrative. In fairness, overall our music video is probably about 70:30 in favour of performance over narrative, but this is still more than in most R'n'B videos, such as 'Riding Solo' by Jason Derulo.




There are very few occasions in this video which shots could be classed as anything to do with narrative or the story of the song, but on the other hand it could be argued that the song is about doing things for yourself and living your own dream, or 'ridin solo' as Derulo says.
The lighting in the video for 'ridin solo' is also significant because it highlights the fact the the artist is doing well in terms of his career, and the large board of lighting behind him helps to add superiority and status. Quite frequently in our video we used natural lighting therefore most of it is set in the daytime, but whilst this challenges a convention in itself which is the nightlife, it also means that costs were kept to a minimum when it came to production. High costs of production have become a convention of hip hop and R'n'B music videos as more and more money enters the industry, along with technological advancements that make it possible for videos to have the quality that they do nowadays.

We did use a common convention of R'n'B/ Hip-hop music and this was the sexy female. We chose Fade because of her looks and I think this has a positive effect on our overall video in terms of the look and the pairing of the two characters. We enhanced the sexiness of the girl by having her walking around in a towell, highlighting her shape and figure. However, with the use of the sexy female convention came another challenge. Commonly in R'n'B videos there is a situation in which a rich black man chases a white girl, but in our video we reversed this and had a white man chasing a black girl. This was an important stereotype to challenge from our point of view, because it is something that is almost never seen in todays music videos and because of this it makes our piece more individual.