I researched into where I should shoot the video, how I would shoot it (with what equipment), who my target audience, but above all, the different conventions that I would develop or challenge in making my music video.
The first part of my research was about the different genres of music and their videos, I made notes, observed and discussed in class a series of YouTube videos and other student's work as well. My teacher pointed out that we should take note on whether the videos were narrative, performance or concept based. Although I really enjoyed watching the concept based, I thought that these would take the most time, money and people to complete this project and I knew that I would prefer making a video which involved more of a focus on different camera shots, angels, editing and acting from an artist. This meant that my music video would be mainly performance based however I decided quite early on that there would also be a lot of narrative base however it would be less obvious and would send quite a strong and deep message. This means that the audience would view the video more than once to fully understand what was going on and what the real message was, thus making more of a hype around the video, making the potential audience more likely to view and then buy the song and album.
After deciding that I wanted my video to include the song from the artist Jessie J, I then did a textual analysis of her song, "Who You Are." I took note of the different shots, emotions, intertextual references and the storyline. Later, I researched into the History of the Music Video and the Top 100 Greatest Music Videos, taking note of what to expect from these videos and their typical conventions. I believe that my music video challenges the conventions of a typical pop genre song, however I don't really think that much of Jessie J's music is that typical of "pop" or even "soulful pop". Therefore I can state that my music video does not challenge but instead develop the conventions that Jessie J has created and not neccessairily the labels that people have given to different genres. This video and Jessie J's videos are a branch from what pop music conventions really are as they have deep messages, great meanings and very artistic shots. Although not as extreme, artists similar to Jessie J would include people like Lady Gaga because her songs are very mainstream and catchy however are not purely performance based as the rooted messages are very visible yet not completely obvious.
After completing my music video, I continued to start my album cover with pictures that I had taken along the way, this was a lot easier than my video as most of the thinking and work was already done. I had a look at Pink's album - Funhouse: The Tour Edition, A Day To Remember's album - For Those Who Have Heart and Enter Shikari's album - A Flash Flood Of Colour. Each of these albums were actually digipaks because they also came with DVDs with the CDs. I liked a lot of Pink's photos and image ideas and colours however I prefered the style of Enter Shikari's digipak as it folds out and looks a lot more stylish. This style of digipak does challenge the conventions of Jessie J's digipack as most of hers are actually just Jewel Cases. Also, below is Jessie J's album covers which you can see are quite simple, and after much deliberation, I too went for more of a simple look than I had previously thought. I sketched out my initial ideas and just went from there; I started with lots of pinks and different collages using many effects on Photoshop, however if I am honest this was mainly to show off my skills that I had learnt. In fact what I think looks more effective was my final digipak which still uses complex skills in Photoshop however looks a lot more professional and crisper, focusing more on Jessie J than the skills that the editor has. Therefore my final digipak develops the conventions of Jessie J's digipak as I went for the more simpler option, although I believe that mine isn't quite as simple, however if I were to have stayed with the more pink options then I would have been challenging these conventions which, in this case, I don't think works as well.
Finally, for the advert I looked at other Magazine adverts, initially at Jessie J's own magazine advert and then Gwen Stefani's and Jay-Z's because they are also very big and influential stars in the music industry. I had learnt so much through the rest of the coursework that I felt that the advert was the easiest to make, however I had previously made the quite complicated pink version with collages to start with, but in the end decided to use a much simpler version for the final piece. I knew the images that I wanted to include (eventually!) and how I wanted the poster to look. I included a small picture of the album cover on the poster so that people could remember what the album looked like (I learnt this from other student's work and from Gwen Stefani's advert) and kept the font similar throughout all three pieces of coursework, which was shown in Jay-Z's advert and album cover. I did this because I wanted a familiarity between each piece so that the audience could easily piece the ideas together. I think that my advert does incorporate ideas and develop conventions of Jessie J's actual media products.
Without the research that I did, I don't feel that my work would have been as planned and as succesful as it was. Although I changed my mind many times, it would have been many more times if I had not researched beforehand. I think that I will always change my mind as I am a perfectionist and want each piece of work to be to the best of my ability however sometimes I take this too far and am at risk of over working some of the things I do. I don't feel that I did this with this coursework, as many of the ideas that I spoke about in previous blog posts, I have used. I wanted to show respect to Jessie J by creating a piece of work that developed and challenged the conventions that she created for herself, I did this by putting my own spin on the inspiration I got from her own work.
No comments:
Post a Comment