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.
