F.L - Question 1, Forms and Conventions

Question 1 - Forms and Conventions

The brief was to create a promotional campaign for our chosen artist; which consisted of a music video, a digipak and a magazine advertisement.

Goodwin

• Goodwin’s theory of the relationship between the visuals and lyrics is shown through amplification in our piece.


• We build on the concept of a ‘liquid lunch’ which originally had the meaning of alcohol consumption, but we furthered this by creating a new narrative of vampires, and her liquid lunch is blood.


• We also showed an illustrative meaning, for example the line “my bed’s an ocean liner” shows her in bed, similarly the line “I must have paid the tab” shows footage of her counting money.

• We made clear connections between the lyrics and music, and the overall narrative is a generally amplified through our elaborated exploration of the title, 'Liquid Lunch'.


• We built upon Goodwin's theory of imagery through our repetitive use of voyeuristic shots, which was essential to build up her metanarrative; showing her as consistently glamorous and present and connected to the audience.

Conforming to a Music Video

• One of the clearest forms of a music video in our piece is our use of a fast cutting rate.


• When planning we ensured we changed shot every other line/every two seconds, this ensured we were keeping with the fast beat and also kept the audience interested.



You can see from one of our call sheets that our shot lists shows how we
changed shot (normally) every two seconds.

• Furthermore, our use of narrative fuzz is a generic convention in some music videos, as it leaves the audience wanting more, leading to repeatability and thereby increases the popularity and awareness of the artist.


• Our intercutting between narrative and performance is a highly popular structure for a music video, and I took creative inspiration from this from my research of Caro Emerald’s video 'A Night Like This'.

 

 

Electro-Swing Conventions

• Our overall campaign conforms to the conventions of the Electro-Swing genre largely due to our use of colour. 


• A reoccurring convention within our chosen genre is the use of three statement colours, normally black, white and a third colour (we chose red). 


• More specifically, our chosen artist frequently uses the colour red, which made our choice of our third colour a lot easier. 


• Furthermore, our images of 1920s style-props and costumes are a feature of our campaign that clearly follows generic conventions of the Electro-Swing genre, whereby large emphasis is put on the period of 1920s through mies-en-scene. 


• Use of a clear reading path and voyeurism is apparent in both our video and print campaign (conforming to Goodwin) as well as the generic connotations of both the artist and genre. 


• We also used iconography to connote her genre of music, and symbolism to represent the Vampire narrative, as shown in our digipak still. 

• The overall text is closed and has the base meaning of vampires and 1920s stylistic features. 


• However, some aspects of the narrative could be poylsemic due to the ambiguity created through vague narrative.

 

Challenging Conventions

• However, we do challenge the genre through our use of dark, gothic motifs and vampire narrative. 


• We place a large amount of emphasis, especially AL3, on the presentation of 'vampire chic'.


• We explored how the popularisation of vampires as a sexually provocative and fashionable figure can be shown in new media to embody female power and strength. 

• A generic feature of our chosen genre (as shown below) is light, airy lighting and relatively ‘realistic’ narratives. 

• Therefore we have clearly challenged the generic conventions and used a mixture of both dark and light mise-en-scene and colouring. 


• However, our overall costume and props still conform to the generic conventions. 

Narrative

• The narrative is structured by three intercutting lines of action. 


• The video closes with a final ‘attack’ however the narrative ends mid-sequence which could create a sense of ambiguity for the audience as they don’t know what will happen to the leader singer (of whom they’ve built a relationship with) and what will happen to the rest of the audience etc. 


• The three lines of actions could have created some confusion or narrative fuzz so we tried to separate the three lines of action through colour grading, with each line of action having different shading.

Binary Oppositions

The victims are negatively portrayed - shown as naïve,
powerless and weak, with no control over their future,
and are simply there as 'food' for the vampires. 

• We also show use of Binary oppositions, a theory suggested by Derrida. 


• The most apparent use of binary oppositions within our work is vampires and non-vampires.


• In our piece the vampires are portrayed most positively, shown as strong, powerful and attractive. Contrasted by our portrayal of non-vampires as weak and powerless.  
  

In contrast, the vampires are portrayed positively,
shown to be in control, strong and powerful. Fully in
charge of humans who are shown to be on a lower level
of power and importance than them. 

• We also showed use of binary oppositions through two of our lines of action. 


• Our scenes in the Pantiles are colour graded with dark blue and heavy shadows, which strictly contrast our scenes at Caro's house, which have increased light levels and red levels. 


• This created a strict opposition of mood and atmosphere and contrasts the different emotions/feelings of the lead singer. 

Narrative Elements

One of our main narrative elements is the focus on vampires, we purposefully hinted at the idea of vampires throughout, such as neck biting and blood, which are all iconic signs of vampires. 

• The iconic symbol of vampire teeth, which were revealed purposefully near the end of the video, clearly connotes the fact that the band was vampires. 


• Furthermore, the use of 1920s props such as the headband and red gloves are clear iconic signs of 1920s period, and help support our period aesthetic. 


• I gathered inspiration and support from this from the use of mise-en-scene in Alice Francis’ and Caro Emerald’s music videos that I studied. 



In Alice Francis' video you can clearly see how we took inspiration for the dark lighting with strong light spotlights, which we attempted to incorporate into our performance scene. Also, the use of period style clothing is apparent here, even shown through the band members too,



Similarly, in Caro Emerald's video we took costume inspiration, where we chose to use a statement piece of red clothing (we used a dress) and used this to represent the era and also create a contrast compared to white and black colouring.

Postmodernism 

• Our video in some aspects is postmodern in its style, for example the use of narrative fuzz throughout the video by the use of intercutting lines of action and a cut-mid shot ending. 
• Furthermore, the general concept of vampires is very hyper real and exaggerates any sense of reality, which is a very modern approach in media. 
• Furthermore, our colour grading, especially in the Pantiles scenes, adds to the dream-like, unrealistic concept of our production and therefore supports ideas of postmodernism style. 

Gender Discourse