Today, I began putting together my response to Question 3 via Padlet:

Created with Padlet

Final Advert

After receiving the feedback on my ancillary texts, I found that my first advert didn't make sense to people as the artist was lost in the static. I initially did this to separate her from everything that was happening like I did with my video, but I agreed that she lost her identity as an artist in the advert and this shouldn't happen if I was going for the star image idea. Therefore, I reversed the image to still include the static (linking across my three products) and have my artist being the central image. This still separates her from everything else, showing my concept, but in a different way that makes her identifiable. 

Question 1 draft

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When choosing my song, I identified it to fit the alternative genre, but more precisely the dream pop sub-genre. This is arguably an alternative genre because of the link to pop, which is the most mainstream type of music within the media world. I wanted to initially try to follow the conventions of this genre because this would make my product more successful in terms of similar videos. As my artist is a female solo artist, I knew that I would need to look at similar artists also to make my video even more relatable to what I was aiming for.

Extensive research led to me finding many similar artists with a range

of styles of music video. I was influenced mostly by Zella Day, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey in terms of female artists. As a whole, their videos exhibit feelings of freedom and use a range of settings and effects to make their videos really stand out. I hadn’t viewed certain videos of theirs prior to beginning with my concept; one theme was to have static running throughout the video to link to the theme of corruption I had created to relate the lyrics to the visuals. Zella Day’s ‘Sweet Ophelia’, directed by Gianennio Salucci, shows static running through video ever so slightly, a theme which I can only assume is similar to my own. Her videos visually are experimental; ‘No Sleep to Dream’ shows somewhat of a narrative but there are parts where she’s alone dancing in front of a green screen with a psychedelic effect is cast behind her. With the green screen, I felt that it would separate my actor from the ideas vocalised in the lyrics and exclude her from my themes rather than indulging her into them, however.

I knew that for my own production I wanted something similar to this,

the use of videos projected on to or around my artist. I soon decided to use a projector to send videos of places and conditions relating to the lyrics onto my actor rather than simply putting the video behind her. I was somewhat inspired for this by Sky Ferreira’s ‘You’re Not the One’, directed by Grant Singer, which uses a range of projected and lighting scenes. The projection idea is something I wanted to develop as similar artists to my own use it but don’t necessarily relate the image to the lyrics. Personally, I tried to make my projections illustrate the lyrics whilst most of the rest of the video wouldn’t – a convention of the dream pop genre. For example, I used wind/hurricane and New York footage to relate to the lyrics:

“I'm the violence in the pouring rain, I'm a hurricane

I went down to a place in Brooklyn”

Something I noticed in terms of filming is that many of these videos

include close up shots of the artist within it, most likely performing. Obviously I would be using lip sync but the amount of shots of the artist themselves helped me to develop ideas of how many to include in my own personal project. For example, Ellie Goulding’s ‘Anything Could Happen’ directed by Floria Sigismondi features many shots of Ellie herself from a range of different angles. Sigismondi has an impressive back catalogue, creating music videos for artists such as David Bowie and Sigur Rós, as well as directing The Runaways (2010). Her style is clear through her other projects; the videos are quite dark and have a gothic feeling to them, usually distorting and using a particular type of lighting. Muse’s ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ particularly uses dark lighting and shows distortion through the editing effects.

Although that particular song isn’t of the dream pop genre, distortion is

a convention of it. Simon Reynolds, a music critic, said that the sub-genre “celebrates rapturous and transcendent experiences, often using druggy and mystical imagery”. This relates directly to the lyrics, and therefore was my goal when creating the video. For example, some of my scenes were made slo-mo and with added overlays to fit the mystical element of the genre.