Evaluation

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

The song we used for our music video was ‘’Rum and Red bull’’. Our genre for our music video was dancehall. We start of our music video by having a DJ in his DJ booth announcing the start of the song. This is similar to the video ‘’Dude’’ by Beenie Man as he also had the radio announcing the start of the song.

In most dancehall videos the women in the video are sexualised for the purpose of the male gaze. In popular dancehall video’s such as ‘turn me on ‘– Kevin little and ‘gimme the light’- Sean Paul the girl in the video’s are dancing half naked around the lead singer. We decided to use that form and convention in our video but put a twist on it. Taking in to consideration of our target audience starting from 13 years old we decided that it would be too inappropriate to show a half naked woman so we dressed our dancer in a black lacy top which is still sexy and appealing to the male gaze but still appropriate for the male gaze. We also decided to place the male and females separate. We had the girl dancing in one scene with the rum and redbull and the performer in the other scene singing to song in a studio by himself this challenges the codes and conventions of a dancehall video as you would not usually see this.

In most dancehall video’s you will find big groups of people dancing with the main performer with a specific dance like the video ‘’ Willie bounce’’- Elephant Man. However since we decided to concentrate on the concept side of the video rather than the performance we decided to not add a big dance scene in there.

As the music begins we have a tracking shot of the messy pool table in the party scene. This also works as an establishing shot of the scene showing of what to come. The messy pool table is also a metaphor of our video as a whole as it shows that the video is random, abstract and unique. A video that uses a tracking shot at the beginning is ‘’Last Friday night’’- Katy Perry although this is not a dancehall song it is still a party song that is similar to our narrative. Another shot we used was titling the camera as if it has fallen. This is not typical to dancehall videos as they like to use simple shots.

Whilst editing we added effects like the mirror effect and we also speeded up some shots. Our shots were quick and snappy synchronising with the music which matches most dancehall videos like ‘’Nuh Linga’’-Elephant Man.

Regarding intertextuality, our graveyard scene with Michael Jackson was very similar to old black and white silent movies like Charlie Chaplin and laurel and hardy. The slapstick chase scene were Michael drops his hat is amusing aiming to get cheap laughs like the old silent movies. Intertexality is not a common thing in dancehall video’s as they like to focus on the music and not the actual video as they like people to dance along which is where the name ‘’dancehall’’ originated from.