1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After choosing what song I would be making my music video for, the first thing I researched was the genres it fell into. To my surprise, "Teenage Fantasy" - Jorja Smith can be categorised as contemporary R&B, alternative R&B, dancehall, and pop music. This meant that I had a lot of options when it came to the conventions I wanted to research. However, I decided to stick mostly to the contemporary R&B genre as this was the style of music videos I enjoyed most. I then looked at different music videos from other artists from this genre. To find similar artists, I first looked at a few I already knew which includes Frank Ocean, Sabrina Claudio and Mura Masa. However, I then realised I don't listen to a lot of R&B so I looked at the "related artists" section on Spotify which helped my find other artists including Shy Girls and Willow. After knowing what the music videos typically consist of, I have deliberately chosen to use, develop and challenge the forms and conventions of real media products from this genre.
One of the ways in which I used conventions is through the colours of the music videos. I noticed that in these professional music videos from the same genre, there tends to be a large amount of highly saturated shots including the primary colours yellow, red, and blue. I specifically made sure that we were filming in locations with bright colours and told Lucy and Julia, who were the main characters throughout the narrative, to wear bright colours. However, I chose to contrast this slightly with some monochrome colours throughout too. Although bright colours are often used in R&B videos, it hugely contrasts with the colours of the original music video of Teenage Fantasy as it is all in black and white.
Another convention I noticed is that a lot of R&B videos are based on performance. For example, Oliver Baxxter - "So Slow", and Sabrina Claudio - "Unravel Me". I wanted to challenge this convention by having a video that's heavily concentrated on the narrative. However, I decided to develop it slightly by having the last shot be performance. During this shot, Lucy is also breaking the fourth wall which leads to her having more engagement with the audience even more. To create a narrative for our music video, we took most of our inspiration from the lyrics. After researching narrative videos, I found out that this is what videos tend to do from the indie music genre. For example Amber Run - "I Found". This research that I did out of my genre helped me expand my ideas and challenge the forms and conventions of real R&B media products meaning that I could combine the conventions from R&B videos as well as other genres.
A huge part of my music videos were the portrait shots I chose to include scattered throughout the video. This is often used in R&B videos as well as Indie videos. I did this so that the narrative can seem more "relatable" for the audience For example, Declan Mckenna - "The Kids Don't Want To Go Home", and Mura Masa - "What If I Go?"
Furthermore, after receiving class feedback, I found out that I had to include the song title and artist name. Originally, I didn't want to do this as I thought that not a lot of music videos did. However, it was part of the specification so I included it anyway and I thought I'd research and find some other music videos that also include it. I found that "So Slow" by Oliver Baxxter includes it at the beginning, as well as the original music video for teenage fantasy.
No comments:
Post a Comment