In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products?
Two conventions we used.
The image we constructed for our artist was directly inspired by that of Duffy in the video for Mercy. We took the ideas from her vintage inspired dress, long, blonde styled hair and high heeled black shoes. By using this as the image for our artist, it has helped to create a look that directly links to female artists of the indie and acoustic genres, making it obvious to the audience where our artist fits in terms of music style. This retro, 1960’s era, inspired look also reflects the individuality of the artist and her music, which appeals to the audience. The styles of this era are popular with modern musicians as it was a time when music in Britain was at its prime and popular culture was taking off, with bands such as The Beatles, and influences from the fashion industry including models like Twiggy. You can compare these models, and stresses, specifically those such as Brigitte Bardot, with the style of Duffy, and similarities in their appearance and styling become obvious.
Dyer’s star theory suggests that an artist’s image is constructed for the purpose of audience appeal, in this case, Duffy’s image in created to appeal to the older generation who would remember when that sort of styling was popular first time round, as well as a younger generation who take interest in their parent’s background and inspiration from vintage fashions and music. By creating our artist’s image in this way, we have made her appeal to a wider audience, as her image is put into a context that would make her seem more individual and creative.
Duffy
Brigitte Bardot
Dyer’s star theory suggests that an artist’s image is constructed for the purpose of audience appeal, in this case, Duffy’s image in created to appeal to the older generation who would remember when that sort of styling was popular first time round, as well as a younger generation who take interest in their parent’s background and inspiration from vintage fashions and music. By creating our artist’s image in this way, we have made her appeal to a wider audience, as her image is put into a context that would make her seem more individual and creative.
We took inspiration and copied some of the shots from the video for Black Horse And The Cherry Tree by KT Tunstall. These featured close up views of the artist playing a guitar. Our artist listed one of her major influences as being KT Tunstall, so it was an obvious choice for us to look to this artist for ideas when producing our video. We felt these shots worked particularly well as they show the skill of the artist as a musician, which would be appreciated by the members of her audience who are interested in the technical side of the music.
Two conventions we developed.
In this video, the artist is seen to be almost forming a band by herself. She takes on different images throughout the video as she plays different instruments. We developed this convention of a changing image by drastically changing the image of our artist for our performance-based part of the video and the narrative story line. We felt by developing this convention in this way allowed us to link our narrative and performance to the lyrics of the song, such as when she states that she ‘can’t handle your excuses’ anymore, it sounds as if she is letting go of someone, and as she does this, her image changes to reflect her change of mind. This connects with the KT Tunstall video as the changing image is used to suggest a change in the artist’s personality and state of mind. The physical change in the image from our performance to the narrative was the haircut, from long, blonde hair to short, and a more brownish colour. The connotations of the long blonde hair are almost stereotypical of a feminine, girly style. This is contrasted to the more edgy and fashion forward connotations of the short, 'pixie' style haircut. It is becoming a more and more popular choice of hairstyle nowadays, with celebrities pushing the boundaries, such as Victoria Beckham, and Frankie Sandford from girl band The Saturdays and acting as style role models to young girls.
This shorter hairstyle is often associated with strong minded, independent women who are taking a stand against the stereotypical views of what women should look like and are proving that they can still be successful and desirable with an unconventional image.
Victoria Beckham
Frankie Sandford
We had already thought of using a Star motif throughout our video when we came across this video by Ellie Goulding. Superimposing as well as props were used to portray a star motif. We developed this convention of using a motif further, in the choices we made for costume- using a star print dress, green screening- with stars in the background and make up- by painting a fake tattoo onto the arm of the artist. This star motif was effective in our video because like in the Ellie Goulding video, it linked the performance on screen to the lyrics of the song such as ‘the stars are just scars that you burnt and you hurt’. By picking out the stars in the lyrics, we were enabled to use them in the styling and editing stages of our video to link the song to the video which helped put the video into context, and would make more sense to the audience about why the video was made for that particular song. The connotations of the stars link to feminine, glamourous, sparkly themes, which we felt were good traits to be picked up on in our artist's image.
Two conventions we challenged.
Our green screening idea came from wanting to develop our star motif, even though we hadn’t viewed it in any videos by artists in this genre. In this Katy Perry video which we studied previously, all of the locations are actual settings. By challenging this convention, we were able to develop our star motif further, and introduce a new type of editing into videos of this genre. We feel that the green screening we used in our video was effective as it gave another obvious link to the lyrics of the song. This is an unusual technique to use in a video of the indie genre, as emphasis is normally put on narrative storylines and performance based scenes in natural looking settings. However, we felt that with our star motif, we could challenge this convention and it helped to create an exciting and creative video.
A convention we observed in videos from similar artists to ours was the use of muted colour schemes. In this video by One Night Only, we see the use of limited colour palettes throughout. We decided to challenge this convention further, by putting our entire narrative storyline into black and white. We felt that the use of limited colour schemes worked well in our performance based part of the video, but the clothing and setting choices we made for our narrative seemed to clash quite a lot. By putting all of this footage into black and white we were also enabled to distinguish the different parts of the video easily, which helped to reflect the drastic change in the image of the artist. The colour connotations of black and white normally represent being drained of colour or emotion, this links with the lyrics and storyline of our video, in which the artist is seen waiting for someone, and getting stood up. She appears to be fed up, and therefore the draining of colour could represent the lack of feeling she now has for this person, and her anger at them.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The main things to take away from this are that the effectiveness of the combination of our products was due to the consistency of images and icons between all three texts.
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