Q1.

How do your products use or

challenge conventions and how do they
represent social groups or issues?

Before getting into a detailed answer I will first introduce my

advanced portfolio in which my partner Fatima and I made a music
promotional package for our artist R A Z A.

Using our artist we created a promotional package followed the

ideology and theme of targeting the social issue of sexual
abuse, in our society as we have seen this issue effect our
friends, our families and people surrounding us. The promotional
package its self will be including a music video, a digipak and
a website.

The ideology of and artist is really important to their targeted

audience’s as seen in our survey, that is why we needed to make
sure that our artists ideology and views on the social issue
were clear. Using the music video for the portrayal was really
important as it was the easiest way to imply our ideology,

As we choose sexual abuse as our ideologies main focus, it might

look like, “oh take the most mainstream social issue and we’re
done.” But no we really put our thought into it just even
knowing the fact that our friends talk about being harassed on a
daily bases is just simply WRONG. Tackling this issue was really
important to use as a lot of people being abused feel guilt as
if they did something wrong being their fault and some are just
too young to even understand what is happening, we wanted to
make the music video as an empowering and hopeful video giving
victims the chance to come out and not feel guilt and help them
grow out of it, using the hypodermic needle theory making the
audience believe that if the characters in the video can do it
then so can we. In-addition we wanted to brake the convention of
people thinking that the #metoo campaign is only for women, IT’S
A HASHTAG FOR ANY SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIM. And showing our artist as
an sexual abuse victim himself we wanted to show that he himself
wants to break the convention of only girls using #metoo so that
male victims have some sort of support to come out using the
artists media products because having a digital platform to come
out on is what most people would feel safer coming out online
rather than coming out in public and actually talk about it face
to face.

Our music promotional package ran under the genres of eastern

folk and soul which went perfectly with our theme as both genres
are always driven my emotion and meaning which gives them their
respective names as folk means, people, who are the symbol of
emotions and feelings and Soul means the spiritual part of a
human, becoming the reason of creation of the emotions, the
meaning behind the emotions. Both genre’s as music genres use
soulful voices focusing on the artists voice giving the audience
raw and unfiltered emotions.

Seeing the genre as music video genres they follow similar

conventions of simple cinematography again focusing on the
feelings of the character or the artist using slow paced close-
up, mid close-up cutting. These genres usually follow an old-
school feel with a simple mise-en-scene with conceptual meaning
behind most props, costumes and locations. We incorporated this
factor into our music video giving everything on screen a
meaning and purpose. I will be elaborating on the conventions
and styles of my genres using my music video.

The music video I created is a hybrid including factors of

narrative and performance like most soul music videos, following
a nonlinear narrative. For Color palette soul and folk genres
usually use a lot of de-saturated tones which we used following
the theme of black, whites and blues and I also sued a lot of
de-saturated effects while editing adding to the lifeless
feeling of our characters. With duller locations, darker
lighting and mostly using natural and simple locations like
bedrooms, bathrooms, gardens and etc. to go hand in hand with
the conventions of these genres. I used simple props like
guitars in-order to fill the shots, which is a common prop in
most folk and soul genre music videos and it adds to the star
image of my artist in-addition to using contrasting locations
like plain white grey walls and old wall fort’s to show contrast
and add feeling.
The reason why I didn’t want to challenge the conventions of my
genre was because. Firstly, I wanted to give the video a more
main-stream look due to which we could market it to a wider
audience as we wanted our message to get to as many people as we
can and secondly, the song we choose, Sathi rey was going to set
best with the conventions of the genres. Furthermore using the
conventions of the genre gave me a sense of direction as to what
colors to choose what type of location, what type of editing and
etc, but everything has a negative to, due to this we limited
ourselves to a boundary but it while pay off as the audience
will be able to take a better guess as to what the video will be
like.

As we were focusing on a social issue which had created a

curtain mind frame in our society, we really felt the need to
break the conventional thinking of our society and show a
different perspective. SO Fatima and I started with a double
narrative one of a girl being sexually abused and one of a gay
man. Now truth be told doing a double narrative, trying to
showing gay men and trying to keep the narrative subtle was not
turning out the way we had envisioned it and with our juries
advice we changed our male narrative to sexual abuse in
children, we did so because showing sexual abuse in men would be
harder as in the 17-20 age group men are aware of their
surrounding making it harder to portray and convey the
narrative, in-addition to making our video monetized which is
something we don’t want as we wanted to keep a sublet feel so
that any actual victims watching the videos don’t get effected
in any bad way. In-addition showing the artist as an actual
victim coming out himself using his music furthermore making the
ideology and theme of the brand more personal really connecting
to the audience.

Coming to the digipack and website we wanted to carry out the

black and white theme with making the digipack and website along
simple and sharp lines keeping a subtle, minimalistic but bold
effect. We need to make multiple media products in-order to make
sure that the audience is given multiple different ways to
interact with the R A Z A as a brand. We added a contact us page
so that the audience can directly communicate with the brand
again following the theme of personalizing the brand making the
brand reachable.