Emma Tackney

One key convention of a normal music video is to have the artist star in it. For our music video the actress we used is personifying Paloma Faith. In this light it means we have conformed to the convention of the artist staring in their own video. This is used in many music videos, helping to promote the artist and in return sell records.

Another convention deeply connected to the promotion of the artist is the camera shots and angles used. Close-ups of the artists predominantly create a sense of intimacy for the viewer. It also emphasises the product on sale in terms of the artist and the song itself. As fashion is a big part of the music industry mid shots are often use to again promote the artist by showing the clothes they are wearing.   We have followed these conventional camera angle and shots having several close ups and mid shots to advertise our product.

The Edits in our video our quite slow which is in reflection to the music style and pace. This is a convention we've upheld as slower edits are associated with mellower songs.

Another code and convention that our music video upholds is the code of dress reflecting the music. We have dressed our character in a 50s inspired dress which relates to the 50s feel to the song.

For our 1950s theme we had to research the codes and conventions of a women living at this time. Our research results found that women were seen as nothing more than housewives, which follows centuries of traditionally submissive roles of females. This research meant we could mould our 50s female dream character into the perfect 50s housewife. For example when she looks longingly up the stairs after he takes the suitcase up for her; this shows that she is a loyal housewife and servant. This we see in many adverts and Tv shows of the time. If you look at this advert from 1950s its shows what both females and males jobs where seen to be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjHDuvMlESs So in this sense we have upheld the conventional attitudes of a 50s housewife. This led us to find Anne Taintors work in which as you can see from the bottom left picture, is a playful mockery of a 50s housewife image. We have recreated it with a modern twist.

Narrative Theory-the continues story shown throughout a piece of media-including a beginning and end

Our video follows this theory as it has a clear continues story telling structure from the beginning to the end. The beginning show s a young couple who seem quite distant from one another mirroring the lyrics “romance is dead”. Throughout these lyrics there is a clear story of a failing relationship ; ‘I ask you for a letter so you emailed, have we failed?’ and we have shown this in our plot. The ending is clear as we see that she is pregnant so we had upheld the narrative theory .

Propp’s theory, -throughout the narrative there are 8 distinctive characters:- The Hero-The Villain -The Princess-Her Father-The Donor-The Dispatcher-The

False Hero-The Helper As soon as the audience relates to which character takes up which role its likely

they will be able to know what the character will do next. In our video we put these characters as such

The Hero:- Vintage/Fantasy Male The Villain:- Modern/Real Male The Princess:- Female Protagonist Her Father:- Modern/ Real Male The Donor:- Female Protagonist The Dispatcher:- Modern/Real Male The False Hero:- Vintage/Fantasy Male The Helper:- Female Protagonist From these roles we manage to uphold Propps theory.

Levi- Strauss’ theory is on binary opposites – Good EvilOld New

Our video incorporate the use of binary opposites. Its seen as old verses new. We have the 1950s women vs the modern women. A 1950s relationship vs a modern relationship. These show conflicts between different eras. We've also used the good vs bad; the 50s scenes being the good compared to the modern scenes which where the complete opposite. So in this sense we upheld Levi- Strauss’ theory of Binary opposites.

Todrov’s theory -starts with the equilibrium to disequilibrium back to the equilibrium, or disequilibrium to equilibrium back to disequilibrium.

We have upheld Todrovs theory. We start with the disequilibrium of the couples distaste for one another. This is followed by the equilibrium of the 50s characters happiness. But soon followed by disequilibrium of the modern couples dysfunctional relationship and we find out she is pregnant which neither seem to happy about.

Our main product is all about the representation of roles of genders especially women in the 50s compared to now. With this in mind I feel out ancillary text is ideal for what we are trying to portray.

The album cover of the modern day shots next to the vintage equivalent shows how roles have changed in modern day society. This relates back to the theme of the video itself making the imagery of the album effective. The poster is also showing this.

Glowing 50s side, portraying the dream state

We put Faith on this side as it symbolises the characters hopes, which we see in her 50s dream

50s sides body structure is strong showing more confidence; her head is held high. This contrasts dramatically with the slant of the modern women's head, its subtle but it shows her distaste for her life

Modern women is in shadow and the colours we dulled down to emphasise this, as its showing how miserable she is

“Is” is in red and black to portray her battle with her 2 worlds.

This is our album cover

We chose this title as she is sceptical about her boyfriend changingthat's why she intended to leave. She's also sceptical about her life, now she's found out she is pregnant in the video.

This pictures shows the 50s character breathing deepIts a tranquil shot and i think it brings out the dream state brilliantly. On the flip side is her reality and she's ironically wishing on a dandelion. We purposely made the 50s character look like she was breathing in, she's absorbing life and the modern woman to look puffed out and tired.

Clearly advertising the artist.

Audience research is vital to gain a good understand of the potential buyers of your product. It helps to get an insight into possible audience opinions and preferences. With this in mind we decided to hand out questionnaires before we had come up with any ideas for our video. We wanted to know how old they where, what they listened to normally, what artists they prefer, just to get a feel for the different potential target audiences we could aim for.

The clear favourite genre was RnB. Having asked the ages of 14-20 this is perhaps unsurprising as it is a hugely popular genre. Soul, however, came second which we found highly interesting as stereotypically, 14-20 year olds would not be listening to such a genre. We decided that we wanted to delve deeper into this and so from there we started looking at modern artists which incorporate soul into there music. This lead us to look into Paloma Faith who we had read mixed soul into Pop.

Our feedback post the finishing of our music video allowed us to see what went well and what perhaps did not go so well. We got positive feedback when we asked ‘Was it clear whether or not it was reality or a dream?’ The vast majority said it was clear which informed us of the success those scenes had been. The lighting however we where told was ‘too dark’ and too ‘yellow’ which we where aware of when we were editing the video. We did try and edit the lighting but because the actual footages lighting was so bad there was limited amount of editing we could do.

Music genresR'n'B75%

Soul17%

Rock andPop

4%

Other4%

Was the lighting effective?

Yes

No

Other

Here are examples of the information we collected. All of these questions came out with a clear majority which was helpful.

Was the Genre Represented

02468

Yes No Other

We used blogspotter to promote and document our creative process through making the video. The chose of using the website blogspotter came about because its an easy well known program and it allowed us to blog pictures and videos.

It is our blogs that helped us keep track on what each of us in the group were doing and also helped us to reflect back on what we had studied for example the study of music videos which helped us in our process to completing our own music video.

SCREEN shot of blog

We used youtube to study various music videos to get the feel for genres and forms and conventions of music videos. We used it also to research our chosen artist and watch live performances and interviews she has done to get the feel for her personality. We also used you tube to promote our own music video when it was eventually completed. By doing this we were then able to get feedback from audience members on what they liked about it and what they thought could be improved. Crucially we got feedback from audience members who did not necessarily know us well and so therefore where able to give us an honest none bias opinion on our video.

Screen shot of media youtube channel

We also used photoshop in our preliminary task. It’s a very difficult program to use without direct directions in how to do so. So after many youtube tutorials we got the hang of the basics of photoshop and where able to make our album cover and poster. http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=ZVXkmDzy8og

Working on Photoshop

We used a Fujee s1730 to take our promotional shots used for the album cover and the advert. We used this camera because its mega pixels where good and it was able to take satisfactory pictures for what we where using it for.

For the filming we used the Sony DCR-SR35 as the school provided. It’s a good little camcorder with 30 gbs of memory so it was enough for our filming. It also fitted onto my tripod which was a bonus.

We also used a samsungL730 to take pictures of our test run with our first actress. This was because it was a smaller camera to the fujee s1730 so easier just to whip out and use.

Editing the video required us to use the Macs at the Edmonton CLC Delta centre

On the IMacs we used IMovie to edit and produce our music video. It is this program that allowed us to make the 50s dream theme shine through with the editing software available on I movies. Having used this software last year for the thriller, we got to grips with it quickly. However, IMacs I found difficult to use as I am used to windows.