When first thinking about the initial ideas for our music video we knew that we would have to research and discover what codes and conventions pop music generally follows. We did this by analysing a lot of existing music videos as well as posters and CD covers and booklets. From this research we could then begin to structure our music video around what we thought worked well within those videos. We could then also decide how we would like to challenge the conventions to work appropriately within our video.
We followed the basic conventions of a pop music video firstly by making performance shots more dominant than the narrative storyline. This allows the audience to connect with the character (Max Black). Also all of our performance shots are one on one with the camera with the use of many close up shots so the audience have a clear image of what emotions the artist is trying to show. The main emotions we tried to get across were; anger, obsession and hurt.
Our narrative storyline follows a male/female relationship showing how they have broken up because of the female cheating. This is very common within music videos, where the main artist is the one who is angry making the audience sympathise with them. However, this could be seen as a traditional view on mean because of how the woman is made to look dominant, showing the males emotional side and weakness. Despite this we feel that we followed the codes and conventions simply because the main artist was the good guy rather than the bad. The end of the music video storyline challenges the conventions of a typical pop video because of the main character running over his girlfriend. There is a huge build up, which is seen in a lot of pop videos, however the actually act is very rarely done, or shown. We thought this was a good challenge of conventions because it shocks the audience and makes them want to keep watching. We think the audience would sympathise with the character and probably agree with what he is doing.
Our performance shots follow the conventions of a typical pop video. We have used a variety of angles and distance to create different effects to the audience. The shots where the artist is stood still, just showing a pose, are very common within pop videos and we thought they create a very great effect to keep the audience interested. However we challenged this slightly by using quick shots of the still poses rather than a long still shot of just one… we have many different poses fitted together to create a kind of slide show of the artist before the song really kicks in.
The song ‘cry me a river’ has a slight R&B feel to it which we felt should be taken into account in the video. Most dance scenes within pop videos are a group of dances performing toward the camera or a band/artist performing on a stage. After looking at some r&b example videos we decided we would use their style of performance shot by having the artist alone performing to the camera. The style dancing is also an R&B style. Although this challenges the pop genre we feel that the song we chose could also fit within an R&B category, so this style works extremely well.
In the case of our ancillary tasks we feel that we challenged the typical conventions for pop advertising. Our original idea started with the title ‘Stop the world, I’m getting off’. When researching into existing material however we found that most titles were plain, simple and to the point. Both poster and Cd cover were going to use the same theme of a very artistic style photograph where something un realistic would be happening. To co-inside with the title we were sure that we wanted a picture of someone climbing out of or from the world. Very few examples we looked at were very extreme, they simply had the srtist and a background with a plain title being used. We used our research then to decide which colours and effects would work best with what we wanted to create. Most of the material we looked at used dark colours, costumes and props so we thought we would follow the conventions in that way.
A Typical Pop/R&B video that we analysed:
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