Developing and challenging conventions in our music Video

Codes and Conventions• Codes and conventions are essentially a mutually agreed

system of signs in which the director and audience have agreed upon meaning and use to communicate. This makes it easier to create a product of a specific genre as you only need to repeat the conventions of that genre. This is useful for producers as they can instantly target their audience with a plan and an audience can identify a genre when looking for music as conventions help audience identify what type of text they are viewing. Conventions are split into technical and symbolic. Symbolic are generically specific these describe a genre through costume, props location etc and technical vary in genre but include camera and editing

Artists with generic similaritiesKe$ha is similar to our artist she has a rebellious, fun, attitude and is also a pop artist. Her music attracts a similar target audience to Lola, focusing on 15-24 year olds. Ke$ha looks organic in the way she dresses. She wears rock like clothing that is not so revealing like our artist, she also wears her hair very natural like our artist further emphasizing her as organic

Star Image

• We are portraying our artist as organic with synthetic aspects, this is challenging the conventions of a normal pop artist as they are usually fully synthetic, such as Rihanna, Beyonce. We used symbolic codes to promote our artists star image such as her costume, she is dressed like a punk in the video with ripped jeans and a ripped like black top, but we wanted her to also show a girl next door look, so she is wearing red lipstick with her natural curly hair so portraying her as organic. We have represented her star image as being symbolic as a fun, upbeat teenager so we use props such as alcohol, balloons and costume to emphasize this.

Use of camera in our video • Long shots- we used this convention in order to show how the artist presents herself e.g her clothing,

her dancing, also to show the setting of the bouncy castle to show a youthful like environment. We challenged conventions of a normal pop video by making it child like. In this shot the audience can see the artists outfit to further show her star image

• We used close ups to show our artists emotions of being happy and excited here we conformed to conventions as most music videos use close ups for the same reason. The close ups were her laughing , winking to further show her as young and care free

• We used tracking shots, here we conformed to conventions as we used tracking shots to show the location as well as to show the kids having fun and show the change from adults to children. We showed her walking down steps as if she is a queen in a position of power she is the center of attention

Lip Synching- SymbolicIn music videos, it is actively encouraged that the artist makes eye contact with the camera as it gives a sense of communication with the audience through the lead as she is singing directly towards you. This was desirable in the case of my music video, the lead singer was lip synching nearly throughout the whole video. Lip synching can emphasize the artists star image as it gives her more camera time. Also lip synching allows her to portray her personality through singing in our case this is her being up beat and fun

Narrative • We had a performance element as well as lip synching. We tried

to make a narrative of children acting maturely and adults acting immaturely to create a youthful rebellion. This was something that is not conventionally done in music videos, therefore through our narrative we we trying to subvert conventions as we were trying to make her look more rebellious than the average pop star. We are using her youthfullness in a music video and rebellion through the alcohol and child like behaviour to set her apart from other popstars so despite merging the narrative and lip synching together which is not conventionally done in pop artists videos unless they are lipsynching all the time we created our narrative of youthful rebellion