Overall, we tried to balance our uses, developments and challenges to the forms and conventions of real media products. After looking back, I found that we mostly used and developed conventions, and only challenged a few. Goodwin’s Theory demonstrates the conventions of all music videos.
Some of which are:
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A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals
illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
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A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals
illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music, editing to the beat
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Genre-related style and iconography present.
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Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist, develop motifs
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Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females.
This often means a voyeuristic view of, and an objectification, of women. The
emphasis on looking also includes the artist looking directly into the camera
helping the audience connect with the artist.
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Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.
I created a Youtube video with annotations with another group member, Alice, to highlight the points in the music video where these uses of conventions occur:
Conventions were often difficult to establish for our indie-pop genre as
we could not find many bands similar to ours. However, we found that the main
forms and conventions used to make this genre clear to the audience involved
the concept of the video, styling, mise-en-scene, and the attitudes in
performance. For example, in the projection set up the band wore dresses to
demonstrate the pop side of the genre, but also chains and chunky boots to add
a grungey feel. The lead singer was very dramatic with her performances and
instrument-playing band members are also conventional for indie-pop. Due to it
being a hybrid genre, we were able to look at other genres, for example pop,
and use some of their conventions.
Another big influence to our music video idea, was the music video for Rihanna's song, We found love. The theme of this song is about a relationship based heavily on the reckless lives of a young couple, and their association with drugs. One of our initial idea was going to be based around the downfall of a girl due to drugs, so this video had a heavy influence on the development of our idea, and affected our decision to incorporate a boy and girl in our video and how it can be a relationship that causes a person to go mad.
We decided to produce a music video
which was performance and concept, with the concept sections even having a
slight narrative. After researching other music videos, for example Hey Monday's I Don't Want to Dance, we
found that this was conventional for a band’s debut. It allows the audience to
get to know and identify with the band in performance shots, but it is kept
interesting and gives a stylistic feel to how they may continue in the future.
As labelled in the annotated video,
there are several occasions where we have links between the lyrics and the
visual. There are many occasions where we illustrated and amplified the meaning
of the song through the visuals. However, there’s a disjuncture in many other
places where the meaning of the song or lyrics has been completely ignored to
allow the audience to interpret things in their own way.
Intertextual references were
particularly useful for our music video as it provides the audience with clues
and a means of creating links and theories to understand the concept and why
the lead singer might be in the hospital. It was also effective in that we
could attract our target audience with other current forms of media, for
example television and film. Here is a video of the whole projection sequence,
although a lot of it is not seen in the final music video:
One of our biggest challenges was the
idea of straying from the typically pop girl-band. We found that being an
all-female, instrument playing indie-pop was pretty uncommon. Goodwin’s Theory
mentions the idea of a notion of looking and a voyeuristic view of women. The
notion of looking was heavily featured in our music video but this treatment of
the female body is definitely something we wanted to challenge. Our first shot
includes direct eye contact between the girl in the hospital and the audience.
This eye contact is maintained throughout all of the set ups, but is used in
the hospital scenes to create a particular effect. It allows the audience to
empathise with her character even further as everything she says becomes very
direct to the viewer. We tried to avoid a voyeuristic view of females
throughout our video. Laura Mulvey coined the phrase 'male gaze' in 1975 as she believed the audience have to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. She believed music videos in particular objectified the female body and did things like linger on female curves. We did not over-sexualise the band members' bodies, resulting in the
representation being strong and aspirational. We used lots of close-ups and
beauty shots, but all of these were of the face and no other parts of the body.
We took inspiration from various other music videos throughout the project. For the hospital scenes we took inspiration predominantly from 'This is Gospel' by Panic at the Disco. The video for this song is also based around the idea of someone in the band going crazy and needing to be strapped to a hospital bed, whilst he is singing, and resisting control. We really liked the effect which was created so continued with a recurring motif of restraint and ordered similar clothing for the nurses (including face masks and gloves).
The clinical white idea for the hospital came from watching Lady Gaga's, Bad Romance music video as we wanted to create a contrast between her in her scenes of madness and the flashbacks of her as she watches the busker in areas around Brick Lane.
When planning our album cover, we
researched a lot of real media products to gain some inspiration. We found that
the conventions of a typical album include:
- Strong images on the front and back cover
- Band name and Album name on front cover
- Band name and Album name on the spine
- Track list on the back cover
- Institutional information on the back cover
- Barcode on the back cover
- Synergy across all four panels
- Sense of band’s brand created
We looked at album covers of both
bands of our genre, and strong individual female artists and sought out
inspiration. We found that it was conventional of solo artists to have a striking
close up of themselves on the front. Although we were a band, we thought that
this would be quite effective and challenged the convention of the albums for
groups. We established that we wanted our cover to be individual and arty, so
we began looking through images of models and their photo-shoots to gain
further inspiration, and this is how we came up with the idea of the lead
singer being underwater in a bath. One of the album’s biggest selling points is
the enigma created around it, so we decided to further this with the title of our album, I.
However, we stuck to the
conventions we found for the back. We used a striking image with the lead
singer’s bare back and piercing eye contact, without sexualising her body. We
ensured to include all the band members on the inside panels as a debut album
needs to introduce the full band. After seeing this Steps album cover, we realised that this technique would be a perfect way of displaying the divide between the 'perfect' image of the band members to the wet image with imperfections. We created the synergy across all the panels by theming
them all around water.
We went through a similar process with the website, I looked at both the Florence and the Machine website and the Veronicas website to establish the conventions of music video websites.
Some of our conventional findings were:
- Top of every page: Menu Bar and band logo
- Pages: News, Events/Tour, Merchandise, Gallery/Videos, Music
- Links to social media littered throughout
- Consistent band branding (signature font and colour scheme)
- Lots of opportunities for purchasing
- Heavy focus on advertising latest album/single
- Institutional information and contact details
The website is extremely
important as it acts as the central hub for the band, so we tried to keep it as
conventional as possible. We decided on doing an opening page after being inspired by
Lorde’s website. We thought hers was very effective so used the idea of an
image within a letter to create our ‘I’ for the page. After looking at Lady
Gaga’s website we decided, like hers, we wanted our website to be heavily
orientated around the album, hence the background of tessellated Is and
pre-order links on many of the pages.
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