Evaluation Post 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Music Video Conventions

Before evaluating the conventions of music videos, I found it really interesting to read up about different media theorists and their thoughts on both music videos and the state of the music industry itself. I looked at theorists both old and new, and whilst I found many answers to questions I had, I also found myself asking more questions about the area; a lot of what the theorists had to say really intrigued me.

Although a mixture of all three, our music video loosely followed a narrative story, (simplified to bored girl listening to music and daydreaming), the bulk of the video was concept, with a small amount of performance.

Performance

Our music video had some performance however our music mainly focussed on the narrative/conceptual side, which I believe is stereotypical of the genre. For example, "Red Lights" by Tiesto focuses mainly on narrative, however has some performance towards the end.

Narrative

Tzvetan Todarov’s narrative theory suggests that all narratives follow a three part structure, wherein at the beginning there is equilibrium, then there is a development that causes the balance to dissolve, and then finally there is a shift at the end that causes equilibrium to be restored. I believe our music video surprisingly does follow this, as our beginning equilibrium is the protagonist working, then the break in equilibrium comes in the form of this new track she listens to, (“Sun Goes Down”). This all happens very early on in the video, (similar to many films), and then over the course of the video is the journey back to equilibrium, (the daydreaming running its course), and finally the music video ends with the protagonist waking up and realising everything is back as it was, even if it may be boring in comparison.
For this reason I believe our video falls significantly within the narrative category.

Conceptual

Main character pushing the circles.

Visual imagery and use of symbolism are the mainstays of a conceptual music video. Although our music video does not make significant usage of symbolism, I would argue that it does fall quite heavily into the conceptual category as there are many points where not all elements have clear meaning behind them, such as the scene with circles being moved by the main character.

Iconography and visual hooks

CU and MCU of Orlando

Andrew Goodwin discussed iconography a considerable amount, one thing he pointed out was the importance of visual hooks and how often pop star's faces are shown in close-ups and how much these shots are repeated within a song. We followed these conventions within our music video, ensuring we used plenty of close-up shots of the singer, Orlando. This decision was also backed, I feel, by Dyer’s star theory, particularly what he has stated about institutions manufacturing stars in a fashion purely for financial gain.

Orlando joining in a party to portray
him as fun.

Richard Dyer’s star theory influenced the portrayal our artist a significant amount. Taking into consideration what he has said about hegemony, we tried to portray Orlando through the music video as a friendly, energetic, fun-loving character, one that as much of the target audience could relate to as possible. We did this by making sure shots always showed him smiling, and joining in when the rest of the characters on-screen were dancing.

Porter Robinson appears in many CUs
in the music video for "Lionhearted"

His stern expressions built up his
"bad-ass" persona.

Inter-textual References

As the music video for Porter Robinson's "Lionhearted" contained inter-textual references towards revolution, tyranny, and elements of Japanese street fashion, our music video also contained some inter-textual references.

Part of the Mars scene

We referenced the 2015 discovery of water on Mars through the Mars scene, with the knowledge that even if the audience didn't realise the reference, it wouldn't have a negative impact on their experience as the majority of the video is a dream sequence anyway. The main reason we decided to include this scene was because we initially felt it could end up looking rather aesthetically pleasing.

Glow raves

Some of our glow-in-the-dark section

We made strong inter-textual references to festival/rave culture through the glow-in-the-dark section of our music video. 

Editing

When editing our music video, we tried to generally follow the conventions outlined by Carol Vernallis, which fundamentally included breaking the conventions of normal continuity editing. These conventions generally entail editing the music video so that image and sound are synchronised. Our track had a very defined beat running through it so this gave us a good grounding to follow the conventions.

I made the following short video to breakdown what Peter Laurence said about stereo imaging, and how we applied it. 

Lyrics, Music, and Visuals

"Do You Really Want To Hurt Me"

In Andrew Goodwin's book, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, he raises the question of to what extent a music video shapes the experience of the audience, and what they perceive as the message of the video. The most notable example of this he gives is of Culture Club's song, "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" for which the music video shifts the meaning. The song if listened to on its own we would view as a simple tale of romantic loss, however upon viewing the music video we see Boy George singing to a courtroom judge, thus the message of the song is changed into an address towards homophobic attitudes.

Demonstrating the exact representation
of the lyrics 'sun goes down' in our music video.

Although we were aware of this idea of multiple meanings created by the music video and the music itself, we felt we'd achieve the best final result, (in terms of appealing to our audience), by creating a video that was the best possible representation of what we visualised when we first listened to the song. This way we felt we weren't at risk of creating a ‘challenging’ music video, as this is not a convention of the EDM/House genres.

Conventions of genre

Susan McClary and Robert Walser stated that one issue of analysing pop music, (and I'd argue this stems from the proliferation of electronic music and the integral part it now plays in modern pop), is the complexity of the music. There are many aspects of the music to take into account when forming an analysis, (tempo, rhythm, melody, acoustic space, timbre, harmony, arrangement, lyrics), and finding a way to relate all of these individual pillars of the music to one another can be an enormous job.
I'm suggesting that these issues are furthered by pop’s growing reliance on electronically-produced music, because producing music electronically allows for far greater customisation of the final result than standard recording, mixing, and mastering.

“Break Free” by Ariana Grande is a very interesting track to consider with this in mind. Up until the release of this song in 2014, Grande had practically only been performing within the genres of pop and R&B, whereas this track is classed as EDM, (as is the track we used, “Sun Goes Down” by David Guetta). “Break Free” exhibits the characteristics of what we call ‘pop’; the track is just over three minutes long, has a verse-chorus structure with repeated choruses, and also repeated melodies.

Artist

Goodwin also stated that the music's genre is generally demonstrated by the music video itself, something that we kept in mind when constructing our music video. Although we followed the convention of the influence of festival culture evident within the music video, we didn't totally adhere to the artist's representation

Representation

Calvin Harris' appearance
in the Armani brand makes
him synonymous with 'cool'.

Whilst most EDM artists stick to having a very serious, 'cool' appearance, we tried to challenge this convention somewhat by making Orlando appear as a more fun and energetic singer. We did this by having him smiling and joining in with the dancers in most shots, however there were a couple where he kept a more serious expression.

Porter Robinson's cool demeanour in
"Lionhearted"

Themes

The most common themes found in music videos for EDM and its sub-genres can include love, relationships, aspiration, freedom. The music video for Hardwell's "Follow Me" features many of these themes. It portrays freedom through the wide shots of desert landscape, alongside shots of the car driving away and Jason Derulo standing along in the empty landscape. Relationships are represented through the shots of Hardwell and his companion in the car together and also particularly the shot of them in a flirtatious stance.

Representation of relationships, many people
will also consider this aspirational.

Wide shots of Jason Derulo connote freedom.

Many EDM songs, specifically those heard at festivals, seem to reflect their upbeat rhythms through use of warm colouring.

Orange-ish filter in Hardwell's "Mad World"

Yellow-warmth in Tiesto's "Red Lights"

Album cover

We studied many different album covers before planning ours in order to ensure we were fully aware of the common forms and conventions.

Comparison of our album cover and one of Calvin Harris'.

Album covers usually include multiple images of the artist both inside and out in order to best make it obvious who the artist is. This is a convention of album covers as a whole as they are promotional materials for the artist.

Orlando digipak/album cover design

Ellie Goulding's "Delirium" purely has her
on the front cover.

Website

Orlando's website is synergistic with both the album cover and the music video as it makes use of similar colour schemes and style, and has the same logo as the album cover.

The final 'Orlando' logo, used across our marketing.

I have produced a Prezi presentation to discuss the forms and conventions we followed or challenged within the Orlando website.