In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Script
In my Research i have noticed that music videos commonly contain diegetic intros and outros. One example of this is Bring Me To Life, by Evanescence. I noticed that this featured the intro of flying through a city scene and to the lead singer's bedroom and the outro, the reverse. And also I noticed in the chemical brothers electrobank had a diegetic intro and something of a diegetic outro, the intro being the main character in the narrative getting ready to perform and the outro being a zoom out from a trophy cabinet. We also featured a partially diegetic intro, with the music that would be in the normal intro playing as if it were through Lady Gaga's Headphones, and you can hear the sound of the city/town going on in the background and also the footsteps both of which were added in post production, as opposed to being actual sound effects which meant that we could control our diegetic intro better.
I have also noticed that often the closing shot fades out, I noticed this in 7 out of 10 of my general research videos. However, this was one convention that we decided to challenge, we felt our video looked much better with the door slam and the snap to black.
I have also noticed that in music videos where the narrative and the performance are linked or music videos that are concept and performance that the focus is very much on the singer or the artist who made the song the video is about. That's why we made it so that the focus all throughout our video is always on Lady Gaga. This links to Richard Dyer's Star Theory, which states the the viewers enjoyment of a film is heavily influenced by the perception of it's stars.
Frequently the video cuts to the beat of the music. And so similarly there are parts in our video where we cut to the beat or an effect happens on the beat, particularly noticable in the Andy Warhol section, where the center Gagas change with each new bar and the outside Gagas pass along a colour with each beat. I have also noticed that often a change in the music would mean a change in the editing style. This links with what Carol Vernallis says in such that a music video derives from the song. The music comes first, the song is produced before the video, and the video follows the song. Also linked to vernallis' point when the music videos feature a narrative, the music has come first and so the director finds it hard to follow Narrative theory, like todorov's narrative structure. it's rare that you will see an equilibrium, disequilibrium and reenstatement of the equilibrium, often we might join or leave in a dis equilibrium. However, one example where this is not the case is evanescence's Bring Me To Life, we join in something of an equilibrium, where she is dreaming and we leave her in somewhat the same state, it becomes slightly cyclical in how the video is set up. An example of not following the narrative theory, is in I Don't Want to Miss A Thing, Areosmith, we leave in Disequilibrium, with the video feed of the lead singer being cut off.
In our product, we followed many of these conventions, our narrative was slightly different to how Todorov layed out his narrative structure, in the fact that although there is somewhat of equlibrium set at the end, it is a bit ambiguous as to whether the boyfriend character is walking into the house with his girlfriend or with Gaga.
Whole looking at some more general video conventions for female solo pop artist, we noticed that frequently the lead singers, the female pop artist, was objectified, in the videos.
One increadably notable example of the ojectification of women in music videos would be Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea's Booty video, easily half, if not more, of the video is made up of Iggy and Jennifer's booties shaking! This is what Laura Mulvey describes as Male Gaze, a woman is included in a video or media text for the enjoyment of male viewers. We also see this in Bang Bang, where Nikki Minaj's leg and booty are featured more than her face. However, this video was directed by female director, Hannah Lux Davies, perhaps an example of post feminism, which would state that the involvement of such classical objectification shots would simply be the artist owning their image, and their sexuality. In our project and video, we decided not to objectify our lead performer, the objectification we did use was in the very start of our project, where Gaga is coming off the train and walking through the town we have a lot of focus upon her legs and some on her bottom but again, because we were consious of the Tween audience we didn't want to overdo it. However, we did incorporate some male gaze, in the shots where gaga looks at the camera, direct address. because we were aware of this tween audience we decided to feature male gaze only in such as we had direct address.
In love you so, by Delilah, she is seenin her performance shots singing against a plain background, we also noticed this in jennifer lopez and Iggy Azalea's Booty where Iggy performs in front of a plain background. While this wasn't a convention we saw constantly, we did think it was of note and it was easy for us to achieve verisimilar looking shots in our product. And so we did, during the dancing sequence, gaga is performing against a relatively plain black background. This was easy to achieve verisimilatude, which is something we were consious of while we were filming it, the studio we were filmning in featured a lightling rig, which meant we could achive the same high key lighting that we also seen in these videos. Another somewhat plain background is during the Andy Warhol section, the background it constant and unchanging, even if the performance and the effects that are happening are not.
as part of our research, we also researched some of Lady Gaga's videos, we wanted to pay attention to what in our audience research had come up as one of the most important aspects of a Gaga video, the costumes! we noticed that within the videos lady gaga often wore numerous costumes, our average was 9 costumes and so in our music video, we featured exactly 9 costumes. some times in her music videos, Lady Gaga went as low as 6, this is why we chose to hit the average bang on, because that meant that we provided as verisimilar product as we can, without going overboard.
We also noticed that within lady gaga's videos there is almost certainly a dancing section, this is why in our video we included dancing as a whole chorus of it, the secind chorus, and also the third chorus features dancing, but this time with the andy warhol effects on top of it. this was incrreadbly important for us to involve as it added in an element of audience interaction. If the dance was easy and simple to learn, the audience, Lady Gaga's fans, could go away and perform the dance themselves and share it with their friends in a video online, thus furthering the reach of Lady Gaga. this links into Web 2.0, where people aren't just consumers but they are also producing their own content and so, if we managed to make a dance that is easily replicated and fun to perform, it would incourage people to do that and get involved with this web 2.0 notion of also producing as well as consuming. and it would spread Lady Gaga as a brand.
While researching for ideas and conventions from digipaks, we made a list of various conventions we spotted within these digipaks, we noticed photos, which often have a link to the band, we also noticed that frequently there are lyric booklets included. on the back of the digipak, we saw that there was frequently a track listing, track lengtha nd the number of the track in the playing sequence. We decided to feature all three of these within our digipak. We placed photos on every panel in our digipak, the lyric booklet also included photos between each song's lyric and the track song length and number on the CD are all feautred on the back.
We also included copyright information as this was what we felt was a very important convention within the digipak and was increadably important to include this in order to achieve a verisimilar product.
Speaking of versimilatude, also to achieve a verisimilar product, we needed to include the record company logo. We noticed that this was often on the bottom, close to the billing block and also on the spine. On the spine there would also be the name of the album and the artists name and as well as the record companies catalouge number, theres also a barcode on the back as well as a billing block, which we needed to include for verisimilitude.
We also noticed that theres frequently a link between the front and the back covers. in terms of our digipak, we wanted in include a bonus DVD, often music videos are sold separately on a DVD to maximise revenue. But where the DVD were included with the digipak, they often include the word exclusive footage, this was normally put on a sticker to highlight and emphasis the fact this is a special edition and the DVD logo features on the back.
From Gaga specifically, we noticed that there is an increadably clear colour scheme that features across her three albums, aside from Cheek to Cheek and ARTPOP, this was a very big colour scheme of black, white and Red. And so, for our cover, we decided to follow this colour scheme.
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