Question 1B Genre

Discuss how you used Genre in one of your coursework productions to create meaning for the audience (25 marks)

For my A2 media project we created a music video which conveyed the genre of hip hop. This allowed use to be creative inside our genre although we had to stick to a certain amount of specific genre conventions, to make sure our audience understood what we were trying to convey.  In our video we conformed our genre in multiple ways to create a variety meanings for our audience.

I have decided to choose Steve Neale's theory of genres being created through instances of repetition and difference to analyse the ways in which different genres of music videos have developed and how the genre of my music video can be established by an audience. In my music video their are a short amount of urban locations such as barbican, shoreditch and the O2 arena. This is something which is seen continuously throughout the video of our artist in similar urban locations. When we constructed our research we found that many English rap artists have used some of these locations for example, Skepta's shutdown music video is solely filmed in barbican. In our genre there are lots of camera shots where the artist is centre of the frame, as he is considered as being the most important. In our music video our artist, C.DOT is in the majority of our shots as he is considered as the most important person, he is also found in the centre of the frame, in many shots such as the car shot with C.DOT singing with his back up group behind him in front of the car, which is seen mutiple times throughout the video. This is also used a lot in rap artist's music videos, for example ASAP Rocky's music video 'Peso' has a wide range of shots with him and his group of friends in the background, although ASAP is always in the centre of the fram showing that he is the most important.

The majority of our shots were centred and focused around our star performer, C.DOT. We did this by having a series of close ups and through the use of editing, we slowed down the pace of the shot on some close up where our artist was the only person in the shot. This was something that we learnt from Andrew Goodwin's theory that star persona is important and companies use close ups to sell them to the audience. As this was our artist's first release we felt as though we would constantly have C.DOT centre of the frame, aswell as having a large share of the attention. In our music video, C.DOT is seen by himself, this was because we wanted our audience to be focused on the artist as a whole. Camera is really important to the genre and it enables to create very quick certain atmospheres. We made sure that our camera work sticked within our generic conventions. We had a variety of low angle shots, where our artist is pointing down towards the camera in an aggressive manner. This therefore throughout the music video, we encoded this to evoke genre conventions of rap videos, this helps the audience understand the genre of the music video.

Mise en scene was a media language method which we used alongside our camera work. We had a series of props which all fitted towards the stereotypical hip hop genre, such as the gold grill. The gold grill can be seen throughout the video, although at the start we did a slow motion, close up shot of our artist C.DOT wearing a gold chain, whilst showing off his gold grill. We wanted to stay with our genre conventions. The close up of the gold chain and gold grill was a method which we felt as though we wanted our artist to stand out, as gold is represented as high class and expensive. In our genre hip hop the fashion industry is becoming increasingly popular, as it no longer a genre where artists videos are found in run down places. We wanted to create an image to our audience through the use of the props such as the long shot of our artist alongside a variety of different stylish cars. This would then enable our audience to have a different perception on our artist C.DOT.