Question 1
Donna Ella Drmac
One main theory I thought would be to focus on would be, Andrew Goodwin’s theory who claims that there are 5 aspects when analysing a music video: thought beats, narrative and performance, star image, relationship of visuals to song and technical aspects of the music videos.
When deciding the genre we decided it would be best to pick the ‘indie’ genre since it allows us to explore the song deeper since conventionally videos do not just reflect the meaning on the surface but a more meaningful message. We also picked the ‘indie’ genre since we were aiming to target a ‘niche’ audience because we wanted them to understand and enjoy our video more. We decided to stick to conventions witnessed in “Back to Black” (Amy Winehouse) and “Make you feel my Love” (Adele) because we wanted to entice our target audience to watch it.
We used a varied amount of close ups and wide shots of our artist since she was the main theme of our music video, with her story being shared through her music. We wanted to characterise our artist as a stereotypical girl going through the stages of love and being and unsure. We did this in order to appeal to the conventions because we understood that it would convey the message we encoded more effectively than if, for example, we focused on the guitar. We were very inspired for shots by the video of Joss Stone “You had Me” because of the use of extreme close ups and close ups on the face when in an interior setting and when she lip sync’s directly to the camera to emphasise her confusion and the narrative which is what we wanted for our music video.
In order to accentuate the star image we stuck with the conventional aspects of the ‘indie’ artist. We did this by making sure the artist keeps a straight face for the majority of the video and the use of costume where the artist wore an oversized red shirt and jeans with boots to make her more relatable for our target audience.
We decided for the visuals of the song it would be important to use the juxtaposition of vibrant colours in comparison to a very thought provoking song in order to emphasise the artists confusion. Although it is not very conventional of a music video we felt it was important to show her development and journey through love with the contrasts symbolising her positive outlook on a potentially scary aspect of being in a relationship which relates well to the target audience of ‘niche audience’ more specifically girls aged 19 -25.
We chose to instead of producing a narrative video a more performance video with narrative aspects conveyed through the cut-a-ways. We thought that a performance video would be more effective in in illustrating our message decoded to the audience than in a narrative. This is shown as she directly lip-syncs to the camera which re-enforces her star image of being an artist you can relate to and create a connection with.
For our digipak I found an album cover I really liked from Arctic Monkey’s “The Jeweller’s Hand ”I liked the font and the use of camera angle since it was more abstract and not a direct not of the face which in some way appeals to the conventions of the indie digipak.