As our genre is a pop-alternative, we used similar conventions to real media texts. Our opening portrays a sense of voyeurism with the vintage television which is continued throughout our music video. Voyeurism is seen throughout many music videos in our genre, which is why we used this throughout our video. Usher uses a television to open his music video (seen to the right) and Cher Lloyd opens her music video with an MP3 introducing her song 'swagger jagger'.
We have two female artists in our product. We wanted to challenge the male gaze, so our female protagonsts are not objectified or portrayed in a sexual way. We have conformed to Laura Mulvey's 1975 Theory in which she challenges the sexualisation of women. Mulvey's theory is that because filmmakers are predominately male, the presence of women in film is often solely for the purposes of display (rather than for narrative purposes).
We did not want to use our music videos as a means of objectifying women to attract a male audience. Although we used a range of close up and extreme close up shots, we used these shot types to convey humour.
We created a band which had a unique style to most girl bands. Whilst we wanted to represent independent female artists, such as Lily Allen and Azalia Banks (pictured left and below), our style choices and also our use of location relates to youth rather than glamour. As girl bands aren't generally seen in this genre, we found that the girl bands that are, use style to enhance their image like the artists Allen and Banks.
Both of these artists use themes of youth culture. Throughout the majority of real media products in our genre, a brick wall is seen and usually a sunny day representing youth and life. Similarly, we used locations of brick walls and roads with a continuous colour theme. We also had a continuous theme of vintage clips, mainly abstract shots of random objects such as sun glasses and retro trainers in a slow strobe setting.
When designing products for our ancillary tasks (digipak and magazine advert), we used an image of our artist on both. Through doing this, we advertise our artist with a large fun image that is immediately recognisable to our audience. I also created a magazine advert that draws on key images from our digipak so there's a continued theme. I chose to use London buses to represent our 'Britishness'. London buses are instantly recognisable as icons of urban setting. This means our audience can also relate to our artist; similarly, Lily Allen uses her first digipak to show a quirky urban setting of London, with the black cab. The use of this relates the artist to their background and theme, which their audience can immediately relate to.
As most artists in real media texts use a big image of the artist to attract their audience, we used the same idea which covered the whole advert. Rihanna's magazine advert is a similar example, and on the advert is her digipak itself. Lily Allen also has the use of funky sneakers in her album cover, which relates to her close up shot of sneakers in her video for 'LDN' (picture right and above). We also used the idea of funky trainers, although we used it in an abstract, vintage feel in our Music Video. Cher Lloyd also uses this, which could show how young women are seen as 'funky' in the music industry. Lily Allen also uses a lot of red in her video for 'LDN', which relates to our ancillary tasks. Allen could be using these colours to connote to passion as her lyrics show her love for London, although it could also be reflecting the colours of red buses which suits the london theme. I also used the red theme in my ancillary tasks, connoting our artist was a London themed brand, which would also be quirky and youthful.
After our research and planning into real media texts in our genre, we found that quite a lot of the videos use relation to the lyrics for a visual (in accordance with Andrew Goodwin's music video theory which states that music videos have a strong correlation to their lyrics). One of our song lyrics is "Chase ya' boyfriend let's 'ave him". We wanted to use a split screen chase from two point of views (as in the print screen left).
We wanted to represent that we're not the average girl group. We watched Beyonce's "If I Were A Boy" video (black and white image to right) and liked the parallel editing she uses to mislead the audience into thinking that the girl is in control (yet by the end of the video, the girl submits and we see that the male character is empowered afterall. We decided to challenge what is usually seen in music videos - our female artists will have power throughout the video.
Similar to our chase shot, Lily Allen's video for 'LDN' uses a chase at the beginning of her video with 3 boys and a policeman. The use of this shows a sense of switch up of authority, because the policeman who should be in control is shown as slow and weak. Similarly, we used the man not having the authority and being the 'weaker' one through the split screen. We used a close up snorri shot of the male's face, allowing his emotions that could be perceived as 'scared, to be the main focus of the shot. although both chases were used for humour.
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