What I did was I made a mood board and explored the conventions of the Rap genre. I conducted research and used my own knowledge of the genre to find what was typical to wear for the MES and discovered that there are many characteristics which are related to the rap genre that give the genre it own attitude. For example I found that commonly rappers would wear dark colours and jewelry.

We then encoded our model with all the typical rap MES conventions such as wearing jewelry, dressing in relaxed clothing and trying to copy the same body language as most rappers.

Our audience were asked to decode who and what he was. They responded by describing him as urban, hip-hop and rap which means that our encoding was successful and they had read him correctly.

We then took several photos of our rap star in various poses which were similar to the poses on the mood board of rap artists, for example we had the model wear the coat he was wearing half way down his arms to give him a more edgy look. We also explored different camera angles, we used a low camera angle to try and create the sense that the rap star is above everyone else.

My favourite image is the one where the model has his hands up to the camera but not the one where his had covers his face, his posture connotes that he is the best and gives a very arrogant look.

When I come to design my star for my magazine I will have to make sure that I make the stars features such as the hair style, facial expressions, posture and clothing specific to the audience and genre in other words that the MES is conventional to the genre and the audience will decode him/her correctly.