EVALUATION QUESTION ONE

SECTION ONE – MUSIC VIDEO

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products?

CONVENTIONS OF MUSIC VIDEOS

Our music video followed the general convention of having the visuals last as long as the chosen track(James Edge-Closed) around three minutes. Although for many folk videos, due to folk lyrics often representing a story or creating a strong narrative, music videos tend to be longer, ours follows the convention of a generic music video to ensure we could maintain an audience interest.

We also kept a link between the lyrics and visuals (Goodwin), the lyric "since we ran away" may be presented in the solitude of the main character, her isolation from the world could reflect someone who escaped daily life. This is often a convention for music videos, as usually artists aim to emphasise their lyrics and visualise the stories they present. The representation of the artist was difficult, although it is convention to present the artist in order to promote them (Goodwin) we could not film them and so found other ways to unconventionally approach this.

The target audience of our piece was females aged 16-24 and that held and interest in either folk music, the genre of independent films or an interest in the progressive representation of females in the media. The conventions our film followed aimed to maintain this audience and create a wide appeal.

TARGET AUDIENCE

ASPECTS OF MISE-EN-SCENEThroughout our music video we aimed to keep the conventions of a British independent folk/rock music video.

Typically for music video that follows the folk genre there is a heavy focus on both urban and natural realism. The folk genre tends to be seen as traditional, with a lack of manufactured sound and bands not heavily relying on technology to create pieces. The music videos of the genre reflect this, natural imagery is often used with reference to leading a 'simple life', e.g working in farming, and the minimal use of man-made surroundings maintains this image.Early folk music videos inspired by artists such as Bob Dylan or Nick Drake hold a focus on the artist, with aspects of the natural world appearing throughout. Although I could not film the artist of our track, I decided to study the music videos of the genre, making links between the natural imagery used in order to follow conventions and highlight the genre. Nick Drake’s ‘Cello Song’ presents this naturalistic focus, we decided to use the same location of Cambridge as this video, to present this folk convention and reflect the genre.

The locations we decided upon tended to reflect this; with our main location being Cromer, a small seaside town which references the simplistic lifestyle of the fishing community, and heavy focus on the natural world. The other locations, outdoor Cambridge and the small streets of Norwich again aimed to maintain this minimal naturalistic aesthetic in order to follow the conventions of the genre and to appeal to an audience that follows folk music. Our video reflected a naturalistic lifestyle, with a focus on simplicity in nature and but also aspects of Britishness. As our artist is a British musician, we decided to present this throughout our video. Although some of our locations are fairly ambiguous in terms of there geographical locations, such as the bookshop or the museum, locations such as the seaside or outdoor Cambridge were referenced to present this. Location often represents the artists locational inspiration, as it reflects the idea of living a simple life, almost reflecting moving back to basics. For example, this is prominent in the music video for Rusted Root’s ‘Send Me On My Way’, the video features aspects of Native American Culture reflecting that of some of the bands inspiration.

ASPECTS OF MISE-EN-SCENECOLOUR/INTERTEXTUALITY

Our film also took a more unconventional approach to mise-en-scene in using colour alteration, as although it follows the general convention of the focus on the natural world, we altered the colours of many of our shots in order to create a slightly surrealist atmosphere. The genre that typically uses bright colour alterations may be a more psychedelic rock type of music, such as the video for The Beatles ‘A Day in the Life' the use of alteration reflects the surreal nature of this video and the lyrics of the track. Whilst the use of colour in The Beatles’ video reflects the genre of the piece, ours reflects a movement away from the conventional natural colour used in folk music videos and towards a slightly alternative genre that may appeal to our audience demographic.

The use of colour alteration in our music video also reflected one of the conventions of independent film, as our target audience may have an interest in independent cinema, we decided to research some of the key aspects of these films and found that the use of colour alteration in many was prominent. Director Wes Anderson’s films often use colour alteration to present emotions of characters or to purely create something aesthetically pleasing, films such as ‘Pierrott le Fou’ also use colour alteration in a similar way and all reflect the independent film genre. With this in mind we decided to use both the editing software and the colours we could find without the need for alteration in order to re-create this style of work. The use of colours without alteration was used in order to follow the conventions of both the independent film genre but also reflecting again the focus on natural imagery so often presented in folk.

ASPECTS OF MISE-EN-SCENELIGHTING

The lighting for our music video however was kept natural throughout, whilst the psychedelic rock/folk genre videos move away from the use of natural lighting to a more artificial one, our music video kept the generic conventions of folk in maintaining this natural source of light. Folk music videos that follow this convention, such as Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Southern Cross’, tend to focus on the lighting throughout. Although our video keeps the natural lighting, we decided not to follow the convention of focusing on the light through lens flares, commonly seen in folk music videos such as this one, as we felt the simplicity of folk could be presented through the minimalism in our shots.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE The narrative structure of our film was based on the slightly unconventional character often used in

independent films of the solitary female, the video follows her finding new hobbies(reading/appreciating art) and presents a quiet existence through this. This narrative both follows the conventions of independent cinema, with films such as ‘Lost in Translation’ also reflecting this, and also the conventions of the folk genre. The solitude in folk music is often presented in music videos of the genre maintaining the basic nature of the music and reflecting the contentment with the world often presented in the lyrics.

The narrative also used split screen to highlight our characters time spent alone, the use of split screen in folk is not uncommon, with one of the very first split screen films produced being the official film of “Woodstock’ featuring all manner of music acts including the promotion of many folk artists.

The montage narrative of our music video was chosen to conform to the conventional narrative of folk/rock music videos. Often folk music tells a story in itself, with the lyrics holding an emotional narrative without the need for the music or a video.

Because of the heavy focus needed on the lyrics, the use of a montage sequence is therefore often the choice for folk musician's music videos, it serves to enhance the lyrics by keeping the visuals as minimal as possible and the focus of the audience on the emotion behind them. We wanted to maintain this convention of not over-complicating the visuals, in order to highlight the lyrics of the track and to successfully promote our artist. The Crosby, Stills and Nash video previously mentioned is a prime example of this, the use of the minimal amount of visuals allows for the audience to focus on the story within the lyrics and highlights the simplicity of folk. Bob Dylan often promoted his music through videos of him simply performing the tracks, the 1964 video for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ presents the minimalism of a music video highlighting the lyrics. As mentioned before, we could not film our artist however the closest thing to re-creating this minimalism was to have a lone character, possibly reflecting the life of the artist, to promote the track (Goodwin) and reflect the narrative of the music's lyrics.

We also followed a linear narrative, the story follows the character as she travels alone through various locations. This is conventional of a music video, in order to keep the narrative clear, although some music videos, such as David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, use backwards montage, we felt for the montage piece a continuous linear narrative would suit the genre and the minimalism of the track best.

“Traditional folk music often includes sung words, although folk instrumental music occurs commonly in dance music traditions. Narrative verse looms large in the traditional folk music of many cultures. This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure, repetitive elements, and their frequent in medias res plot developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of battles or describe tragedies or natural disasters.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_music#Subject_matter)

REPRESENTATION Our music video features a lone female character, this representation is not often seen in music videos, for instance the representation of females in most male artists videos is hyper-sexualised. A study conducted by the University of Buffalo found that in the 2000s 17% of men in the music industry were sexualised compared to 83% of women sexualised and 64% of them being hype-sexualised. Although this is uncommon within the folk genre, it still reveals that our video defies statistical conventions of the representation of women in having a non-sexualised female character defined by her own self. This representation, as mentioned before, however can be found in independent films such as Amelie or Lost in Translation. Both films feature a female protagonist creating their own paths similar to our video, through this we have endeavored to appeal to our audience demographic- with our audience being female, we have followed the convention of representing our target audience positively. Bulmer and Katz (1974) suggested that individuals choose a text for the following purposes; diversion(an escape from reality), personal relationships and personal identity. The idea of representing the personal identity of our target audience relates to this theory and creates a wider audience appeal.

Although I am the creator of the text, and the audience are the decoders (Strauss)I feel the representation is easily identifiable and difficult to misinterpret with reference to the independent films mentioned.

The representation in our video is minimal, as we only used one character throughout, and is fairly conventional for the folk genre. The use of the lone female character creates a minimal style to which the folk genre follows, often folk music videos will feature the artists or a solitude within a character, either to represent the story created in the lyrics or to visualise the minimalist style of the music, just as is in Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man.