Breaking Popular Conventions

Group Task: Deanna Hammond-Blackburn 9164
                     Emma Hall 9162
                     Alex Major 9190

For our music video, it was very important to set the right tone, and distinguish ourselves from the more pop-style videos, in order to firmly place our artist in the acoustic, easy-listening genre. To do this, we made a number of decisions that defy conventions of the more popular videos, but are appropriate for an indie video. This includes our artist’s representation. According to our target audience feedback, there was a mixed feeling about how important attractiveness was, whilst our similar product research showed that there was a severe lack of voyeurism in this genre, as the focus in pushed more onto the music than the stars. We were therefore careful not to over-produce our artist, keeping his appearance quite natural, especially in the narrative elements on the farm, where his character was supposed to have loneliness about him. The ‘star image’ was enforced more in the performative shots instead, with a smart silver waistcoat and smooth hair, with low key lighting that reflected around our artist’s face.

Other unusual aspects include our slow, gentle opening comprising of abstract shots of rusty and natural objects. These we chose to use to help set the tone of the song, as well as inform about the state of our character in the narrative – surrounded by life that is tarnished by the memories of a girl he has lost. The slow opening shot is also something we used to relate to what one target audience member said about our song: that it reminded her of a winter’s morning or a dream. However, when looking at our opening out of context, we found that it was missing something else that our target audience were particularly keen on – the performative aspects, especially the use of guitar. This is a key iconography for any acoustic media, and adding more guitar shots, often super-imposed on top of other images, helped to enforce our genre even more.

The super-imposing and dissolve transitions used are also slightly unusual for music videos, which often cut quickly to the beat. However, the slowness of the song’s tempo and with the idea that the opening of the video is like early morning when you are just waking up, dissolves seemed more appropriate, and made the video seem smoother and more ‘dreamlike’.  They were also used often in some of the music videos we looked at for this genre, in particular Sea Wolf’s ‘Old Friend’.  Placing them at the start and end also helped to loop the video and make it feel complete.