The main aim of a music video is to market the song and the artist, with an ultimate goal of increasing sales as much as possible. In relation to the music industry, a real media products main aim is to market their artist positively and as much as possible, and to ensure this they market in a conventional way which gets exposure and avoids controversy. However, media products that challenge forms and conventions will go against this idea. They rebel against conventions and are not too concerned about what the public think or marketing tactics.
Developing these forms and conventions is somewhere in the middle. It’s taking the main ideas and bringing in new ideas that would have been seen as ‘against the grain’.
I think our music video uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions. The main aim of our video is to sell the story of the song. We have used glamorous locations and associated glamour with money and Vegas to make our artist look current. We have shot in numerous locations to keep the video interesting which is done in the majority of videos and we’ve had our artist feature as the main character, which ultimately goes towards the goal of marketing her. We feature her in a heterosexual relationship which is the conventional way and avoids any possible controversy; conscientiously avoiding this is to protect an artist’s image. Another feature we have used is careful placing of lighting or chiaroscuro. We have used this technique in our video in a number of shots, one being where our protagonist is in the club, she walks through a crowd of people and is the only one with a light over her head, it acts as a spot light so all the attention is on her even in a crowded club and gives it more depth. It also represents the way she feels inside at that particular moment, she feels alone, and the single light over her conveys her emotional state to the audience. We continue to use lighting to portray the emotional state of the characters throughout the video, there is a scene near the beginning where they are arguing and we have used low key lighting. This reflects their dark mood at the time, and in the next scene where our protagonist has won the money there is a huge contrast in lighting, the room is very bright and again, reflects her emotional state. Another way we have used lights to show a change is for the flashbacks. When the first picture is taken the flash of the camera brings her back to real time (flash-forward), and the flash is also used to signify the moment the coin goes in the fountain and brings bad luck. I think we used the flashes well; however the storyline was not clear enough for them to be as effective as we’d have liked. The flash technique is one often used to represent flashbacks in different types of media and I think our use of it shows we have good use and understanding of intertextuality. Another instance where we have demonstrated this is in terms of theory. We have developed Todorovs theory to suit our video, it proposed a basic structure for all narratives; he stated that all films begin with an equilibrium and a disruption causes a disequilibrium, a period of unsettlement. Our video has this basic structure, but is more of a rollercoaster of disequilibrium to suit the song. The choruses often coincide with an unsettled period and the verses with the build up to the disquiet. This is all followed by a state of peace and the couple reunite at the end and bring the chaos to an end. There is also a very basic idea of Levi Strauss’ binary opposition. It is described as sometimes being as simple as two characters fighting, which is the main feature of our video and a simple form of structuralism. This leads us to Propps theory which is a view that all media is inevitably in the form of certain fixed structures. These structures are culturally derived and form expectations in the mind of the audience. An example from our video is the heterosexual relationship or the expectation that the couple will reunite at the end.
Our video also challenges forms and conventions of other media products. The saying “sex sells” is reflected upon when looking at all different types of media. Everything is sexualised, from half naked women in music video, to raunchy lyrics, album covers, and provocative magazine shoots. It is all to market the artist and sell them on sex rather than the music itself. However, our video and all the females that feature in it are in no way sexualised. The video is about the story the song tells, not anything else. There are no sexual references of close ups of lips/legs or any other body part deemed as sexual. This is reflected upon on our digipak, where there is only one picture of the artist and its form the waist up on the inside of the pack. This challenges the forms and conventions of media products today which are dominated by image and sexuality. Our video has a sense of female empowerment, she is calling the shots, and she’s got all the money, she’s the one out clubbing and she is not portrayed as a sexual object. The powerful role the protagonist plays in the video could also be seen as challenging conventions. Cultural change can force structures to change in this way, where in the past the male would be expected to play the powerful role.
By using and challenging forms and conventions, we have developed them too. We have put the focus solely on the music and ignored the pressure to use sex to sell. We’ve moved away from the idea that such heavy marketing of the artist and their image is needed to sell, and focused on the music and the story it tells. We’ve challenged expectations of who should play the powerful role, and developed theories to suit our video.
How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?We created a digipak and magazine advertisement to market our artists and record. With each different piece of media we’ve considered aspects from our other products.
Our video is based on the opulence of Vegas and this has been reflected by glamorous, lit up locations. Therefore in our ancillary texts we’ve used bright colours and loud fonts. The front cover of our digipak is a picture of London and was taken in a blur format to capture the effects of the bright lights. We altered the contrast so that the bright lights stood out but the darker areas were dark enough for the main image to stand out. This all links with the setting of our video and the bright lights featured regularly in it. The main image is of our artist doing the “v” sign which is of course a representation of the song and is the logo we are trying to establish as her own. This all links in with the theme we are trying to create in all our texts. The back of the CD is a plain white background with the track listing in black. We thought this would go well with the rest as too many bright colours would be too much and plain would work alot better. The inside part of the digipak features the first picture of the artist so that the consumer sees her once they’ve bought it. This fits in with our idea of selling the music rather than her image. Throughout the digipak we have stuck with the colour theme of orange, black, white and silver, they go well together and give off the bright opulent image we want to portray, this continues through to our advert which is the same colour scheme. For our magazine advert and with consideration of our digipak we decided to cover the page with a image of her because of our lack of images beforehand. As it will be in a magazine which is based on image we thought it best to promote her more, we let our digipak and magazine advert connect and work together. The magazine advert is styled as though it’s a magazine cover and all the headlines are about her. Her name is in a big font across the top and is a contrast to how we tried to play down marketing her brand on the digipak. Because of this contrast the two texts work together well. A picture of the digipak features in the bottom right hand corner, the consumer will see this front cover and the "v" when they see the digipak in the stores and automatically recognize it. I think this is a really effective link between different texts and would be effective in establishing a brand.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I thought hard about the distribution of any questions, it was important that they got to our target audience and that it could be a fair amount of people giving feedback. Social networking sites were the perfect place as the questions would reach my target audience of teenagers who are on the clubbing scene and would appreciate a video based on Vegas and partying. I put questions on Facebook and Twitter and got a lot of helpful feedback. I learned that an audience appreciated a storyline more that the artist singing into the camera, which contributed to our decision of how to film. We also learned that they like an artist to the song a little and also play a character and not mime. So a mixture was what we went for in the end. Another important contribution from our audience was that the majority liked the Rolling Stones album cover over the others, which didn’t feature a picture of the band but instead the lips which have become iconic. We also used this feedback for our album cover. The feedback was integral when making our products and we used alot of it in the final cut. We thought that gaining our target audiences feedback before we started our video was very important so we could incorporate their ideas and opinions and not have to edit it afterwards. We made sure we considered their view points as ultimately, they will be the ones buying into the brand.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages?
First of all to research for our video we used a number of search engines. Bing and Google images helped us find a number of album and single covers we could evaluate. YouTube enabled us to find music videos of all kinds of genres to get inspiration and ideas for camera angles, lighting, mis en scene and any other techniques. We used this blog to post research and planning, it helped us document our way through the video making process easily, so we could embed videos straight onto it and discuss them underneath. It also enables us to upload pictures without hassle; we simply uploaded them onto photo bucket which gave us the necessary HTML code to put onto our blog. The blog also enabled us to communicate with the school through their blog on which they posted lesson material; we could also gain some audience feedback through the questionnaires we posted. We then used a video camera and portable light to film our video, and uploaded it onto the computer once finished. We used adobe premier.pro to edit our video. It was easy to cut the video and move different clips where we wanted them; we also used a number of effects, for example flashes and fade outs. For our digipak, we used a digital camera to get our images, we then used Photoshop to edit the images, for example air brushing. We have previous experience using Photoshop at AS, so didn’t encounter any problems using it. We developed fonts, picked colours, and any other effects we wanted and developed both our advert and digipak from scratch using this programme. The use of the internet was integral in our planning stages, and premier.pro for the video. Technology made the majority of things possible, if not alot easier.
Here are a few screen grabs of things i have talked about above:
We strategically placed our characters either side of the hope sign, and in the background there is a crowd of people to convey the location.
Our use of chiaruscuro sets apart our character from the rest, even in a busy nightclub.
This shot shows our characters walking towards a number of signs reading "love" and various other things. All a hidden meaning, and done on purpose.
This is a collage of our numerous locations. We changed it regularly, to keep the audience interested. If they actually were in Vegas they would be in lots of different places, and we have portrayed it in our video.
