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

In our video we have used the conventions of the grime genre as well as challenged them.
I used the conventions of the grime genre when I created my ancillary texts as I have used the same image for the advert as the album cover. This goes along with the conventions of our grime/UK hip hop genre as artists such as Chase and Status used this technique when they released their album 'No More Idols' as they had a bulldog on their publicity advert as well as the cover for the album. I decided to use this technique as it worked really well for Chase and Status as it has become a recognisable part of their brand identity. Also, other artist have used their name as a logo from  a varied range of genres such as Skrillex (Dubstep), N.W.A (American Hip Hop), Korn (Metal) and other artists so I decided to do the same for Jay through the use of the Urban Jungle font. This would make him instantly recognizable when his name is viewed on adverts or CDs.
We challenged the conventions of a grime music video through the costume as normally the costume  within the UK hip hop/ grime genre is either a tracksuit or someone wearing long baggy jeans with a baggy t-shirt. In our video me and Shehabur decided that we would change our costume to go against the conventions by including items of clothing such as  chinos which are used predominantly by 'Pop' artists such as JLS and getting the main artist to wear a body warmer which still is part of the grime genre but is less frequently used. We applied the conventions of a grime music video by having the main artist (Jay) surrounded with other people such as me and Shehabour as in many grime music video there are shots of the artist and his 'crew' around him like in 'Lethal Bizzles - Pow 2011' video.
Our music video is similar to other videos as we have used a stop-motion section in our video which has been used by Coldplay for their video 'Every Tear Drop Is a Waterfall' and although they aren't from our genre we felt that this technique was very effective as it makes the sequence interesting and as it is different to the rest of the video it is memorable.

We decided to use this technique but we grafted it to our genre by using shots which are similar to Devlins video for 'Teardrops' where he is writing his lyrics on a piece of paper as this song/artist is from our grime/UK hip hop genre. In order for it to fit with our video we made our artist write to 'Chloe', the girl he loves who leaves, saying that he misses her.

We have also decided to use a black and white effect to show that there is a flashback within the video as well as the white flash. We decided to use this as it separates it from the rest of the video as it is all in colour but to accentuate the fact it is a flashback we used a blurry effect which symbolises that it is a memory. We feel that this goes with the forms of real media products as a flashback has to be signified otherwise it doesn't make sense and the best example of this was Memento, where the past was signified by the use of black and white shots so we decided to use similar techniques but with several more effects as we do not have as long to show the audience that the black and white means 'flashback'.