When making my media products – the music video, print advert and CD case, I had to make sure

they were suitable for the genre.

After researching some music videos, I picked up on different aspects in which they followed. I noticed

that in my chosen genre, the music videos were all very redundant to the music. You saw what you

expected from them. However, although music videos in the genre are very redundant, our group

decided to make our video have some entropic aspects to it. This was to give it a bit of originality and

not follow the rules of the genre.

In our music video, we had lyrics on pieces of paper throughout a lot of the video. The lyrics matched

what were being sung. We got this inspiration from All American Rejects in their music video Dirty Little

Secret, where they aren‟t holding up lyric cards as such, but holding up cards which say people‟s „dirty

little secrets‟. We thought this was a cool idea which is entropic to the genre and made it seem more

quirky. Also Bob Dylan‟s Subterranean Homesick Blues was another inspiration with the cards.

The lyrics on the card also link to Andrew Goodwin‟s theory of relating lyrics to visuals. This is typical

for the genre, as it allows audiences to feel that they can relate to the video by understanding what

they are singing about literally word for word, as appose to some deeper meaning which audiences

have to think about.

We got inspiration from the Olympic ceremony countdown of different

numbers from different places e.g. door numbers.

This idea made the video look more quirky as it meant we could mix

and match different door numbers from around Ludlow – Ludlow itself

being a fairly „quirky‟ town gave us the advantage of having the „girly‟

door numbers. It meant we could mix between a variety of different

colours, fonts and textures used on the door signs.

We thought this was a nice idea as not only was it quirky, but it also

reflected Andrew Goodwin‟s theory of relating lyrics to visuals.

The Great British Bake off was another example which inspired the

mise-en-scene of our music video. We thought that the style of that with

the cute, stylish, girly cakes would be a good thing to have in our music

video when making our cakes. Another inspiration was from Alice in

Wonderland style, with the tea party and feminine, vintage feel of

things.

We felt that these would appeal to our mainly female target audience

as they would be drawn in by these things, but also give an entropic

sense of feeling to the video.

The idea was shown in our pitch which we then gained valuable

feedback from our target audience, who let us know that it was suitable

and appealing to the genre.

Audience research directed our creativity in that after we had created a first draft of our music video we asked a small focus group (while recording) what they thought of our music video and how it could be improved. They told us that we needed more performance elements to our music video, we agreed as we knew we needed more performance for it to look redundant for the genre and more performance meant we were promoting the artist more, which was another factor we needed to take into account.

We decided also to change our singer from Grace to Jess as Jess seemed more appropriate for the part and she was more “quirky”. We also got back from our feedback for our music video that we needed more movement in the performance element. We acted upon this as well when re-recording for our final music video. I also referred back to the pitch and mood-boards from the start of my blog to try and keep with the target audience and if they would approve of the designs of products.

I also did a questionnaire for a number of people to answer on my magazine advert and CD case, this allowed me to know what they thought about the products and how I could improve them. But they also told me what was good about them and how they suited my audience.

The products I created – the video, the print advert and the CD case were all made with

standard technologies, as we did not have the budget and technology that others have to

make an extremely professional music video.

However, this was not a sufficient downfall for us, as our genre is all about vintage and

quirky so the fact that we used “vintage” and “quirky” things in our music video and in my

print advert and CD case made it seem more effective for the genre.

We didn‟t really do much editing to our music video, except for making it widescreen

effects, which made it look more stereotypical that way. We thought that the colours in

the video were necessary to keep in order to show off its “girly aspects”. In my print

advert and CD case I made my photos black and white, to give them the vintage feel but

made the writing girly, pastel colours to show off the girly side and the vintage side.

The locations we used around Ludlow, of the coloured houses and door numbers, and

the drama studio in college made the video seem very effective for the genre. The

“quiet, rural town” setting of Ludlow made the video very redundant and the drama studio

I feel was quite an entropic feature as you have the bright backgrounds then her in a dark

room playing the guitar singing. The contrast of the two worked well together though.

We knew to make a good music video we would have to follow the stereotypical requirements of the genre. This meant that there would have to be a lot of redundant features as people want to see what they expect in that genre. We followed this by having the location as Ludlow – as it is a very quirky, vintage town with the house colours and old fashioned houses, the market, all aspects that seem quirky and suitable. We put our artist in clothing that they could relate to, stuff that they would wear too as we want them to feel as though they could be her and the genre is not about glamour and bling, but all about the music. I followed this in my print advert and CD case too for the same reasons. She hasn‟t got a lot of money anyway, she is just dressed casual but stylish in a way that her audience can relate and love. Another redundant feature was her playing the guitar on the performance aspect of the music video. This is very typical of the genre and the audience can connect with this. Again, with the writing on my print advert and CD case is very redundant, as it is in a bright bold font which draws the audience to look at it, but the colours are very quirky and can link back the to music video, which makes it redundant again. However, we did add a fair amount of entropic features. We thought that this would give the music video a nice twist in that it makes the audience feel “wow” which watching it. We had a lot of jumping fast shots in our music video as we thought these make it seem fun and quirky. It wasn‟t a redundant feature of the genre but it still suited it well. We also added still images, for example the glue stick. This is not really redundant to the music video, but it makes it seem different and interesting. In my print advert and CD case, I would say that the fact that the pictures are in black and white aren‟t really entropic, but the contrast from the bright coloured fonts and the photos make them overall pretty entropic.The overall effect of using redundancy and entropy in our music video and in my print advert and CD case was to draw the audience in and give them an interesting video/digi-pack to look at. I wanted them to be drawn to these things and think “wow”. Not view it as the same as every other music video in that category.

Steve Neale said that audiences take pleasure from genre because of „instances of repetition and difference‟. I think we followed this well with our music video because we had repetition throughout which the audience could relate to and feel close with but we also had difference throughout which the audience perhaps wouldn‟t expect.

Digi-pack and Advert designI tried to make my digi-pack similar to others in the genre, such as

Taylor Swift. This applied to Steve Neale‟s theory of „instances of

repetition and difference‟. Audiences like things to have the same genre

conventions, such as colours, house style and layouts. You can see the

similarities between the covers of mine and Taylor Swift‟s album Red.

I also got inspiration from Marina and The Diamonds album The Family

Jewels, where on the back Marina is lay in a way which has her face

upside down, I used this idea on my side picture of my artist looking

interesting on the side angle.

How different are your products to

„real‟ media products?We wanted our music to be different to most mainstream music videos in the sense that

most have a clear narrative and performance, which are built up and developed

throughout the strong binary oppositions and Propp‟s stock characters.

However, our music video needed to be suitable for the „indie‟ genre so we chose to have

a less conventional narrative. Our story doesn‟t have a strong structure, but our liminal

characters that hold up the placards give the video a more relaxed, fun showing side

which reflect the genre as well as the artist.

Levi Strauss suggests that binary opposites are present in all media texts – in our music

video, we presented this by having a female character in a protagonist light, through low

empowering angles, natural lighting settings. We didn‟t show a male antagonist although

the lyrics talk of him, we used a black hat to represent him instead – the black of the hat

is meant to connote a dark and negative character.

Like a „real‟ music video, we used a lot of different shot types throughout the music video.

We also used a lot of close ups of the artist, which Goodwin noticed as a genre

convention. The close ups are stereotypical of a real music video as they are used to

promote the artist and sell them.