In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Before we produced our media product, we considered Andrew Goodwin’s “Dancing in the Distraction Factory” (Routledge 1992) and the theories it explored. One of Goodwin’s theories state that all music videos demonstrate genre characteristics meaning that one could associate the music video with its genre without even listening to the music.
We thought about what area of a typical pop music video we should focus on and with the help from many different pop icons and their music videos such as Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” and Katy Perry’s “Waking up in Vegas” we discovered that that most pop genre music videos mainly consist of a performance and a narrative.
We chose “Nobody’s Perfect” by Jessie J, a typical song of the pop genre which allowed us to easily include the discovered pop characteristics into our music video. When thinking about the narrative of the music video, we listened to the lyrics; the song had a definite narrative about a girl who has lost a close friend because of something she said and how she regrets saying it.
Another theory from Goodwin’s analysis states that there is a relationship between lyrics, narrative and visuals within a music video which is illustrative, amplified or contradictory. In our music video we have tried to illustrate this narrative throughout the music video; in many shots, her friend that was standing next to her would suddenly disappear and she found herself unhappy and alone. Another shot shows how we have amplified some of the lyrics in which alongside the lyrics ‘tears falling from my eyes’, a shot of crying eyes with fully ruined eye make-up is shown.This allowed our video to conform with a typical pop music video in which the narrative was both illustrated and amplified.
The music video also consisted of many performance shots, when filming we had to consider Goodwin’s theory of how the record company label would include the need for close-ups but we also had to consider Laura Mulvey’s “The Male Gaze”; in a typical female pop video, the artist shows herself as an object with flirtatious looks into the camera or the positioning of their body as the audience positioning is assumed to be a heterosexual man. Many shots, therefore, have these close ups of her face and also costumes that show off the artist as a figure of sexual objectification. However, the costumes also relate to Richard Dyer’s “Star Theory” in which the artist or “star” wants to align themselves with ideology; in this case the modern, quirky clothing that she wears throughout the video associates her with the pop genre but also gives her a unique style.
One aspect of our media video almost challenges a certain characteristic of what the audience would typically see for the pop genre; there are very few music videos that also contain a conceptual idea as well as a narrative/performance, particularly from a female pop artist. When looking at Goodwin’s analysis and thinking about the relationship between the visuals and the lyrics, we decided to create an idea of a grown young woman re-living her childhood in a twisted yet quirky way. We developed this through the setting of the video and the props used. The majority of the shots were filmed in an old victorian house that resembled a child’s playhouse, creating the idea that this artist is happier pretending and playing tea parties because the reality would bring her back to deep regret she feels.
Therefore, when looking at our finished music video, all aspects of our music video conforms with the main characteristics of a pop genre music video, we have added our own little twist to make it stand out.
wix website : http://www.wix.com/emily_phillips_10/evaluation
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