Pop artists are typically portrayed as mainstream, happy, young adults and teenagers to appeal to their target demographic. However, this music video challenges conventions by portraying a negative storyline of a girl experiencing a mental breakdown from a lost love through symbolic scenes like taking pills and sitting in a bath of water fully clothed. While conforming to technical aspects of editing and filming used in other pop videos, the video's dark tone and exploration of mental health issues differs from the typically positive narratives and party atmospheres shown in other genres.

3. Artists in pop are seen to be dressed
to the latest trends and are
normally mainstream outfits, as we
the audience associate better with
styles that are mainstream as most
people know about them and they
become very popular.
The artists are portrayed as very happy people
As pop is known for its feel good music it is important to
perform this with a happy performer.
The music videos and artists themselves are often
young adults and teenagers, the main target audience
for pop is young people.

4. The whole image around pop is displayed in these ways:
• They are mainly dance orientated
• Stereotypically associate with teens in the music videos
• A lot of the image around pop is sexualized by the male and female artists
• It is sexualized as stereotypically that is what all young people enjoy
• Young people are the main audience as they perform to grab their attention

6. From our music video was established around one
character who was the main singer performing the song.
Effectively this exhibited her in great depth in the
interest of performing the tragic love story.
Previously this has been displayed in pop genre music videos
as one of the main conventions that surround the whole
video on the performer.
Pop music videos are famously known for promoting the narrative party
atmosphere and showing a variety of funky looking people dancing or the singer
having a large crowd of backing dancers, furthermore showing minority of pop
videos in a positive light with lots of people.

7. For example Katy Perry – Last Friday Night is
about the singer dressed up as a nerd looking
very comical going to a party full of wild
teens, which is a whole different narrative to
our episodic narrative structure of broken up
scenes displaying just one girl.
Despite this we still challenged one other
aspect of form involving pop genre, with
our music video challenging the positive
productions as our video is a negative
portrayal of a pop music video.
We displayed the harsh reality of love
that is lost by filming raw emotions acted
out by a young girl in various scenes such
as taking pills and ending up in a bath
fully clothed, showing a possible mental
breakdown.

8. This is the utter opposite to the leading convention of positive pop music videos
like Taylor Swift- Love Story as her music video narrative was based on a fairy
tale love story between a princess and a prince, that many people would know in
the real world in not the case in everyday normal relationships at any age.
The intertextuality of the fairy tale
narrative was borrowed from
previous media from Disney Films
like “Sleeping Beauty”

9. Our music video had the intertextuality of the symbolic scene
of a girl taking pills and then getting into the bath seen in
many films and TV programmes an example of this type media
is in an episode of Hollyoaks, Where we see the same
situation. However by incorporating this into our pop video
we challenge the codes and conventions of pop videos by not
performing just positive things.

11. Through the technical aspects of our video
we have conformed by using various
techniques in our editing and filming. An
example of this is our “black room” scenes
where we see the main singer lip singing.
We edited the lip sing in time with the
song to make the singer look like she is
singing within perfect timing. We also
decided to use the style of this as many
other pop videos use this as they show
different scenes and always come back to
the on scene focusing on the
singer, engaging the viewers to the
performer.
An example of an artist using this technique
is Kelly Clarkson in her music video
“Because of you”

12. Another way we conformed to pop codes
and conventions is through the symbolic
scenes we portrayed in our video such as
the two main ones of the bath scene and
pill scene. The pills instantly portray the
singer to be in a mental breakdown
showing a lost mind and body.
The world famous pop singer “Rihanna” has similar
scenes in her music video by showing her sat in a bath
reminiscing on her lost relationship, like our singer.

13. We also filmed shots of the singer’s hands
gripping onto things like the side of the
bath and the bench as she was sat on her
own. This was to symbolise to the viewers
she is gripping onto these as we wanted to
show she was missing someone. This also
conforms to the convention of pop videos
being surrounded by love stories.
The other big symbolic scene in our music video was the pill scene that is
iconic in all kinds of different media. It is the main enigma code in our
music video as it raises viewer’s questions instantly as everyone knows it’s
a dangerous thing to do.

14. In the past there has been pop videos that portray drug abuse in
a slightly different ways such as “P!nk – Just like a pill” where
she sat in a room full of white rabbits singing about her tripping
from pills to hide the pain of her broken heart, on the other
hand we went straight to the source and showed the pills and
the girl taking them directly.
This also conforms to pop music people gripping people as
they often perform unexpected scenes in the videos that grab
audiences attentions and that is exactly what we wanted to
achieve.

15. However in P!nks video it is dark and very
negative performance throughout but in
our music video we have binary
oppositions. We conformed to Levi-
Strauss theory of “we understand the
world through a system of power
weighted oppositions” this was shown in
our video through the blissful scene of the
girl in the park to her in the bath and pill
scene showing complete binary
oppositions to the viewers.
We also thought about the opposition in
the visual aspect such as the girl wearing
white clothing in the bath that relates to
peace and tranquillity however she was
in the bath being depressed and looking
unhappy. These binary oppositions
showed we conformed to it that made
many scenes throughout our music video a
lot more entertaining and symbolic.

16. One other way we conformed to conventions of pop music videos was through the
genre of pop. We knew from researching many pop music videos that the genre
consisted of spontaneous videos with wild party scenes and interesting story
lines.
We then wanted to show some of this through the music video without copying
the style completely but still conforming to it. Our music video structure is very
episodic which was important for us to create an interesting video like the other
pop genre videos.
In our video we had four different scenes, the pill scene, bath scene, park scene
and the black room scene. It was also important to not add too many as it can
become confusing for viewers to watch.

18. Finally to present our ancillary texts and music video the
software we used was ‘Weebly’ It is a fantastic blog site
where we created our own blog as a group and presented
all of our work online post by post. It looks professional as
it is laid out clearly for everyone to see and our video is
the last and final post to be shown.