3. What are the genre conventions?
While researching and watching indie/ pop artists like Ellie Goulding, Birdy,
Florence and Machine, Christina Perri. We’ve discovered that most of the
settings tend to be more in nature and outside, which creates mysterious
atmospheres however they are still kept simple. Pop music video like Taylor
Swift’s Blank Space shows that mise-en-scen, costume, props are key
important things which helps convey the narrative to its audience. Whilst,
my website and digipak consist of photos that are edited and influenced
through different real products e.g. My website’s is influenced by Birdy’s
artist webiste and looking at Ellie Goulding’s digipak for her ‘Light’ album
and imitating the colour and style they create.
4. How have you conformed to the forms
and conventions?
Most of the artist’s song performances were filmed consisting a lot of close
up shots, seeing that most indie/pop videos tend to highlight the face of
the artist to emphasis the ‘star’ aura. Whilst our narrative and story plot
are influenced through watching ‘Never let me go’ by Florence of the
machine and ‘Blank Space’ by Taylor Swift, which portrays a woman who
is overly obsessed in love mixing with dark, evil magic.
5. Did you make a conscious decision to
challenge any forms and conventions?
We try to challenge one typical stereotype of women portrayed in our society.
Most of the time women are shown weak and fragile in relationships. They are
the ones who are abused by their partners and the one who always get hurt. In
this music video, we tried to show that women can be equal as men. They can
be over controlling, aggressive and dominant like men. We demonstrated this
in our music video by highlighting the strong contrast of different
conventions. The shots that are edited in black and white represents the
typical ‘innocent women in love’, while the edited in darker colours showed
the other side of love where it be controlling. This relates back to Levi
Strauss’s theory of binary opposites, of which are used to help the audience
understand conventions more easily.
