Explain how you used conventional or experimental narrative devices in one of your productions.


I'm going to discuss theories of narrative in relation to my advanced portfolio. This was a music video for The Rizzle Kick song 'Im 17'.We started off by researching and analysing real media products, this was to ensure that we had a good grasp of what conventions of a hip hop video and rock video due to the song we picked being a hybrid. I began by creating a Goodwin analysis of snoop dogg's 'Drop it like its hot' video to understand the rap concept of our video as it clearly portrays a the conventions of baggy swag varsity clothing, it is important to examine real media texts. We decided that we were going to show some of hip hop conventions of varsity clothing.we also decided to show as a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, which is one of the key features considered by Goodwin.


After analyzing the lyrics of the song, we interpreted that the song was about a teenage boy aged 17 who simply wanted to enjoy himself by involving himself in materealistic acts as well as certain illegal acts, this helped us to develop the hio hop side of our video.To make sure that indie side of our video was also portrayed we decided to make the acts such as studio recording part of the video as the key concept showed in these . We crafted a narrative about a boy who is living a hedonistic lifestyle and even though at college he puts in minimal effort and spends him time messing around.

We decided to create a narrative which targeted specifically our target audience of adolescents and young adults for optimun result. therefore this narrative was seen to attract a closed audeince but could have a snowball effect of attracting secondary and tertiary audeiences of teenagers and the twin audience of hip hop and indie. In terms of narative todorov's theory came in handy as the five stages were recognised and help build a basis for the narrative story which was interwoven throughout the video. the initial equilibrium shows that our character is getting dressed before a  typical day at school  and the disrruption occurs when  he realises that working in school is time that could be spent making a hit rather tideous work and he storms out of class. The disruption occurs when the character decides that to be a star he must imitate the lifestyle of drunken behaviour which is reflected in the drinking and partying that occurs in the video. In an attempt to repair the disruption the studio scenes are cut into the video to show the more serious sign of achieving the dream. by the end of the video a new equilibrium is established as the character has realised to achieve his goal he must work hard and put in the effort like her would at school and this is reflected in the shots of him working on his lyrics. Although it does not appear in this order in the vidoe we thought a fragmented narrative would be effective as it  adheres to the concept of narrative and is experimental.

Our narrative in our product fulfils the target criteria as the target audience can empathise with character and his antics feature in the video. We researched our target audience so we could deliver a product that would have all the conventions which they would expect ; our peers acted as our trial group as they were the age of our target audience so and their feedback was vital to our success.Our main character features myself aka iceburg to deliver the narrative of our 17 year old character who chooses to engage in activities simply because it is fun. The narrative speaks about being "down for a laugh" and this is reflected in Icburg getting involved in drinking games for example the shot of him with a beer box on his head. This was put into the video as it would be a visual which had relation with the lyrics which is a key concept of Goodwin and it also included a story which our target could relate to as the age range was 16-21 of the primary audience. Though this doent portray Iceburg in a positive light it shows that he is a regular artist that the fans can relate to which is an image developed by artists such as Rizzle Kicks and Ed Sheeran who are also shown to be regular people who participate in casual adolescent activities.

This product from our Advanced portfolio shows that we have used many conventions of a music video whilst including  the forms of narrative described by theorists such as Goodwin of matching the lyrics with visuals and Todorov by including the five stage theory.