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

From the beginning of our course, we decided that we wanted to do a female pop artist due to the fact that it vastly dominates mainstream music today and they have very clear characteristics so there would be several examples for us to access and research into, be it a music video specifically or a case study of an artist or band. However, pop music is also a very broad genre that has many different sub genres, such as pop-rock or indie-pop and after analysing several music videos and digipaks of artists such as Rihanna or Katy Perry who are more mainstream pop and then artists such as Florence and the Machine or Marina and the Diamonds, we decided that our artist would fall into the indie-pop genre because it had a more artistic, edgy element to it as opposed to bubble-gum pop which would be quite restricting when it came to production.

So we started our project by researching more into indie-pop artists, analysing music videos from artists such as Oh Land and Lykke Li, where we found that, whilst performance and a focus on the artist’s image and fashion still dominates, there is also a strong element of an artistic influence throughout their products – the clothing is often more edgy and slightly more eccentric, as opposed to revealing/colourful, sometimes novelty outfits of pop and there is a generally a bigger focus on the visuals or a concept, as opposed to performance; they will often employ more sophisticated visuals such coloured lights or projections, instead of a long take of the artist singing and dancing.

Keeping these conventions in mind, we began to draft our own artist. We were influenced by artists such as Lana Del Rey and Marina and The Diamonds whose stage names were even artistic and catchy and so we named our artist Isla Harris, with particular focus on her first name rather than her surname. We decided our target audience would be females aged 16-26 to mirror the age and maturity of our own artist and that she would embody a free-spirited, fashionable and creative persona. This persona would be reflected in our music video: we incorporated the use of physical polaroids and a polaroid camera to communicate this artistic influence and also incorporated long exposure for the same reason. As music videos are primarily a marketing tool, we generally wanted more shots of our artist on her own and to incorporate several close-ups to identify her as a selling point and link in with Goodwin’s analysis so we chose one of our locations as her bedroom because it would provide a personal, intimate atmosphere and for practical reasons, this location was easy as it meant we had little time constraints and no permit issues.

It is key that the visuals link up with the pace of our song and as our song was very upbeat and fast-paced, we wanted to use several quick cuts and jump cuts to reflect this. This meant that our shots would have to be engaging and we decided that we wanted to focus on the fun side of youth as the title of our track is “Youth Knows No

Pain” and after brainstorming, we decided to use an arcade as our primary location, particular focusing on bumper cars, because of the fun, playful connotations. We also decided to incorporate other people in our music video during this sequence, so friends of our artists, to also emphasise on the youth having fun.

The shots in the arcade also had neon lighting which helped provide a playful atmosphere and the location was also practical for filming as it was inside, though we sometimes struggled with strangers in our shots. For our last location, we chose London because of the iconography it holds though we had to be careful that we focused on landmarks in London as opposed to just the city streets in order to avoid urban connotations that would not fit our artist. Shooting in London was postponed and had to be rescheduled due to the weather conditions and again it was difficult to avoid the general public in our shots.

Our concept was a day in the life of our artist having fun with her friends. Our three locations are mostly structured to our artist in her bedroom first, before meeting up with her friends to go to an arcade and then to explore London, however we often cut between these locations to ensure that it remained engaging and was not repetitive. Similarly, we varied the outfits that our artist wore; for female pop artists in general, fashion is a huge part of the overall image and so we attempted to use clothes that were fashionable and reflected current trends and also drew on our artist’s feminity.

We often referred to Goodwin’s analysis during our research and planning stage to help us. As an indie pop artist, it was very important to include the performance element in our music video and so we ensured that there were regular, consistent shots of our artist miming to the track that were frequently close-ups. We also used a flower crown prop as a subtle reference to one of our inspirations for our artist Lana Del Rey. Both to communicate the artistic influence of our music video and to establish a relationship between the music and visuals, we incorporated photos into our music video and cut them to match the beat in our track. We also included shots of our artist singing into the mirror as a reference to the notion of looking.

Overall, I feel like our music video mostly uses forms and conventions of other music video as we specifically mirror hegemonic values and conventions of firstly music videos in general (Goodwin’s analysis) and an indie-pop artist.