The music video challenges media portrayals of drug use by teenagers by showing the harsh realities and consequences rather than glamorizing it like some TV shows. It was inspired by the music videos for "You Know I'm No Good" by Amy Winehouse and "How Deep Is Your Love" by Calvin Harris in its narrative, camera techniques, and use of color. The video matches the fast pace of the instrumental parts of the song "Milk" by The 1975 by using quick cuts and a dramatic drug use scene, and includes another 1975 song to develop the narrative over the video's full length.

1. The music video of ‘milk’ by The 1975 challenges existing media products as it follows a plot
about a teenage girl who gets involved with drugs after she has her heart broken. The ending
is left very open and this allows the audience to interpret it how they would like.
We worked as a duo to create a music video, a digipak and an advert for the song “Milk” by
The 1975. Our Music Video uses a range of conventions from real media products as well as
developing and challenging them to create controversy. We wanted to do this because drug
use is a sensitive subject and is stereotypically seen amongst most teens as cool because of
TV shows like Skins portraying it as a glamorous, wantable lifestyle and we wanted to show
the reality to its harsh consequences and the impact it can have.
As we had quite a hard-hitting concept which needed to be portrayed in the most realistic way
possible we had to thoroughly research cocaine addiction and the many risks which come
along with it. We used the website ‘Talk to Frank’ and took inspiration from existing music
videos including ‘You Know I’m No Good’ by Amy Winehouse and ‘How Deep is Your Love’
by Calvin Harris. The inspiration taken from existing music videos conforms to Goodwin’s
theory of intertextuality.
The Amy Winehouse music video follows a very similar narrative to our video and the main
inspiration was the isolated feeling that the video creates for the audience. The isolation is
sensed during a shot of Amy lying in the bath and this shot in particular is what inspired us to
end our music video how we did.
‘How Deep is Your Love’ gave us camera inspiration as the video follows a female
protagonist and the most used clips are close-ups and mid shots. We embodied the videos
techniques into our music video, one technique included overlaying the colours purple and
blue to certain clips which symbolises the protagonist being under the influence. We applied
these bright colours by changing the videos colour tone during post-production using the
programme ‘final cut pro’.
The genre of the song used in our video is ‘alternative’ and although The 1975 are a very
mainstream band, the song is not well known as it acts as a hidden song to ‘You’ taken from
their ‘IV’ EP. The song is quite different to other songs the band have as ‘Milk’ has very fast
guitar instrumental parts with barely any lyrics. This affected the video as we had to link up
the amount of shots for the song with the beats; the chorus is ultimately fast paced which
gave us room to make a dramatic scene of drug-use.As the song is only just about two
minutes long we decided to include another song from The 1975 (HNSCC) as this allowed us
more time to develop the narrative and also show off our skills. This was paired with scenic
shots, lip syncing which are additions to the storyline for the verses which are relatively slow
in comparison. This contrast works well as the video starts off very slow and almost seems
dragged out but once the instrumental kicks in the video speeds up and very quick paced
shots are shown which reflects the protagonist’s brain and reflects the influence which the
drug has on her. During the filming process, we had an idea to show the protagonists state of
mind without showing herself or any other props. For this, we looked at youtube videos of ink
dropping into water and we thought that it was very reflective of a mind that is under the
influence.
At the ‘Research and Planning’ stage of the project we researched many media texts to
influence the creation of our Music Video, Advert and Digipak on top of the other contributing
factors. As we’re working as a group we researched different media texts to each other as
this opened many more doors for us. These included the music videos; Girls by The 1975,
Royals by Lorde, Settle Down by The 1975, Moaning Lisa Smile by Wolf Alice, R U Mine by
Arctic Monkeys and Follow Baby by PEACE. We wrote separate analysis’ of these music
videos and closely analysed factors such as camera and editing techniques, narrative and
also applying the theory of Andrew Goodwin to these music videos.
On top of this we also looked at the number of shots music videos of the indie rock genre
have. This saw us watch various music videos and count every time the clip changed to
another which allowed us to see the average shot counts for certain genres and faster
paced/slower paced songs. For this we counted the shots of; ‘Cocoon’ by Catfish and the

2. Bottlemen, ‘Team’ by Lorde, ‘You’re a Germ’ by Wolf Alice and ‘Gen Strange’ by PEACE.
This helped us with our final product as ‘Cocoon’ and ‘You’re a Germ’ have similar speedy
instrumental parts and counting the shots for their music videos gave us an idea of how many
shots our video should have for the instrumental parts.
We then looked at album adverts and looked at the advert for ‘Born to Die’ by Lana Del Rey,
The Stone Roses ‘20th Anniversary’ release, ‘AM’ by Arctic Monkeys and ‘In Love’ by
PEACE. Looking at these helped with our final advert as closely analysing the real media
texts allowed us to explore the range of conventions which are frequently used these
included; release dates, platforms, artists websites and also how the size of the text used
plays an important contribution as bigger and bolder pieces of information are usually the
most important whereas smaller texts are usually only things like the artist’s website and
copyright information. We couldn’t find existing adverts from The 1975 to help us creating our
own with the brand identity so we decided to include the bands rectangle alongside the logo
and a minimalistic image that captures what the band is about.
We found that many of the music videos we watched followed thought beats so we used them
in our music video as the song has very fast instrumental parts throughout. Therefore our
music videos conforms to the theory of Andrew Goodwin of illustrating sounds.
To help us form ideas for our digipak and also explore real media texts to look at
conventions we would need to use for our own digipak, we both analysed the
digipaks of; ‘The 1975’, ‘The Family Jewels’ by Marina and the Diamonds and ‘AM’
by Arctic Monkeys. We closely looked at imagery used, font used, disk design,
tracklists and also the inside panels and information included. The biggest help for us
for our own digipak was obviously The 1975’s existing release. We closely looked at
this not to recreate it but to keep the brand identity within our own. This included the
decision to keep the band's’ iconic ‘rectangle’ which can be seen on our advert and
digipak.