In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our music video subverts as well as follows typical conventions of the genre 'Garage Rock.' The main theme that we have chosen to create is the rebellious aspect of love. In many garage rock videos "teenage love" is often show as a spontaneous relationship which often leads to random illegal activities. The inconography of rebellion is a prime feature of our music video as well as others of the genre as it fits with the fast pace/ tempo of the conventional garage rock. The urban setting which we have based our music video around is often conventional of the genre due to the fast pace of life it creates. The album package/ artwork, however, is fairly submissive of the garage rock genre. Our album package features highly the artwork of graffiti which is a common element of the Hip Hop genre.
Use.
Firstly, after the analysis of album packages by artists such as "Muse" and "Coldplay" and video analysis of artists such as "Kid Ink" and "Galantis" I became influenced by many of the features that were presented. Finding the hidden messages of these videos and forms of promotion helped us to use those certain conventions or dismiss them. The album package for the band "Led Zepplin" heavily showed images that related to graffiti. The colours that were used or this promotional package influenced us to use the same features on ours. Even though our music video does not contain a lot of colour, our album packaged does does from the graffiti element. I chose to analyse the video "All American Boy" which was created by an American artist called Steve Grand as a prime example of a homosexual relationship. Seeing as this was also the main narrative for our music video, I was influenced by how this relationship between two males was portrayed in terms of editing and muse en scene. Both males were shown in similar outfits, subverting the idea that there should always be a more 'masculine' one in a homosexual relationship, we also used this element as both of our girl characters are 'girly'. Also both guys were staged equally, they both had a similar amount of screen time and neither were in alliance with the camera. We were also influenced by this form of camerawork as we wanted both of our characters to be shown on equal grounds. This video had a lot of relevance to our work as it portrayed similar messages to the ones we were going to use throughout the making of our video. The music video for Galantis' song "runaway" influenced the pace of our music video considerably. This video is also set in an urban environment and the pace of life is exactly what we used in our music video in the form of our being shown running e.t.c. There was also a key element of layout in Galantis "Runaway" that we wanted to use in our music video. We wanted to show shots of the city area such as buildings and graffiti and then go back to our music video narrative of the two female character and "Runaway" does this simultaneously. This creates the fast pace effect of editing which we were trying to go for in our music video to give off the message about the "passing of time."
Develop.
Furthermore, we chose to develop the primary theme of love in our music video and make it a more widespread occurence across all sexes and age groups. As love is a key convention of Garage Rock, we developed this to become more fitting to our initial ideas of having a homosexual relationship portrayl. We thought this would express originality as a lot of relationships are often categorised by a male and female according to Barthes' cultural myth which focuses on the stereotypical straight relationship. We wanted to change this stereotype because there are other alternative methods of love as well as musical genres as our genre is also commonly known as "alternative rock". Many of the album covers produced by Garage rock bands/ Rock bands in general show some form of artwork that may be an eye catching source for their target audience. We developed this by taking a form of artwork also but connecting it to the urban setting of our music video to change the view of garage rock imagery. We altered this convention as we knew that we wanted to include graffiti in our music video as an ongoing theme. Many media platforms and music videos show the theme of love but we wanted to take it one step further so that our music video was not generic or "mainstream" in the hope that it would gain more attention from audience members. We employed interpellation in our music video as we did not show the typical heteronormative ideology in the way that it is often presented. The girls are shown to be a couple, together, not two individuals. Overall, our work is more unconventional of the Garage Rock genre.
Challenged.
Moreover, we challenged the conventional form of garage rock music videos due to making our performance a narrative based video. Typically, garage rock videos show a performance of the band as well as a narrative and keep switching back and forth to keep up the fast pace. We thought that performance based video were now becoming out of fashion and that this was due to cinematography. TV and music videos such as Taylor Swifts "Love Story" and the TV show "Pretty Little Liars" are becoming more cinematic which means that narratives are becoming more and more important in the production of music videos. The times of media are forever changing and we felt it was a good idea to stick to the more modern features of generic music videos as our band is extremely modern also. This compliments Goodwins theory of the presence of links between lyrics and visuals which leads too performance, narrative or concept based music videos. By us challenging the performance based vides was also done for practical reasons as we could only have contact with the band over the internet due to their tour in America. In this sense we were contradicting stereotypical conventions of garage rock videos. We also challenged the theory of gender complicity in our music video as we chose not to present as 'ideal' version of gender. We chose to make our characters rebellious to fit in with the generic convention of teenagers in music videos and the fact that both our characters were girls shown to be "drinking" and "smoking" creates more of a downcast on the idealised version of a teenage girl which is supposedly much more tame.
We also challenged the cultural myth by Barthes of archetypes as we did not show the traditional heterosexual relationship in our music video. The fact that we made our characters supposed lesbians in a society that does not necessarily agree with that label shows that we have challenged the cultural myth of love only being found by a man and woman. The binary oppositions of our music video challenge the typical area of conflict interest such as a heterosexual argument as we do no intentionally show the bickering between me and Lauren. There are moments where we are pictured alone (as the two girl characters) but we do not clearly film our argument as that is not the characterisation of our relationship. Our album package shows us alone, there are three images of me and one of me and Lauren together which is the only real evidence of us being outcasts from society as even though we are surrounded by the bustle of the city, it is only us two and sometimes the loneliness takes its toll as I am supposed to represent on my own. This is why the conflict of our video is fairly low-key because we are challenging the aggressive convention of teenager relationships that are often shown in the garage rock videos to fit with the fast pace of the song.
To conclude, we have used many genre conventions in our music video in order to showcase 'Garage Rock' as it is not seen as a mainstream genre. The character recognition and the disjointed narrative that we used in our music video in the form of our montage and variety of settings and the image of our female characters in the emo 'glam' style is very fitting to the garage rock genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment