QUESTION ONE

The codes and conventions

of pop genre…

Artists in pop are seen to be dressed to the latest trends and are normally mainstream outfits, as we the audience associate better with styles that are mainstream as most people know about them and they become very popular.

The artists are portrayed as very happy peopleAs pop is known for its feel good music it is important to perform this with a happy performer.

The music videos and artists themselves are often young adults and teenagers, the main target audience for pop is young people.

The whole image around pop is displayed in these ways:

• They are mainly dance orientated

• Stereotypically associate with teens in the music videos

• A lot of the image around pop is sexualized by the male and female artists

• It is sexualized as stereotypically that is what all young people enjoy

• Young people are the main audience as they perform to grab their attention

Conscious decisions to challenge

forms and conventions…

From our music video was established around one character who was the main singer performing the song.

Effectively this exhibited her in great depth in the interest of performing the tragic love story.

Previously this has been displayed in pop genre music videos as one of the main conventions that surround the whole video on the performer.

Pop music videos are famously known for promoting the narrative party atmosphere and showing a variety of funky looking people dancing or the singer having a large crowd of backing dancers, furthermore showing minority of pop videos in a positive light with lots of people.

For example Katy Perry – Last Friday Night is about the singer dressed up as a nerd looking very comical going to a party full of wild teens, which is a whole different narrative to our episodic narrative structure of broken up scenes displaying just one girl.

Despite this we still challenged one other aspect of form involving pop genre, with our music video challenging the positive productions as our video is a negative portrayal of a pop music video.

We displayed the harsh reality of love that is lost by filming raw emotions acted out by a young girl in various scenes such as taking pills and ending up in a bath fully clothed, showing a possible mental breakdown.

This is the utter opposite to the leading convention of positive pop music videos like Taylor Swift- Love Story as her music video narrative was based on a fairy tale love story between a princess and a prince, that many people would know in the real world in not the case in everyday normal relationships at any age.

The intertextuality of the fairy tale narrative was borrowed from previous media from Disney Films like “Sleeping Beauty”

Our music video had the intertextuality of the symbolic scene of a girl taking pills and then getting into the bath seen in many films and TV programmes an example of this type media is in an episode of Hollyoaks, Where we see the same situation. However by incorporating this into our pop video we challenge the codes and conventions of pop videos by not performing just positive things.

Conscious decisions to conform to the codes

and conventions…

Through the technical aspects of our video we have conformed by using various techniques in our editing and filming. An example of this is our “black room” scenes where we see the main singer lip singing. We edited the lip sing in time with the song to make the singer look like she is singing within perfect timing. We also decided to use the style of this as many other pop videos use this as they show different scenes and always come back to the on scene focusing on the singer, engaging the viewers to the performer.

An example of an artist using this technique is Kelly Clarkson in her music video “Because of you”

Another way we conformed to pop codes and conventions is through the symbolic scenes we portrayed in our video such as the two main ones of the bath scene and pill scene. The pills instantly portray the singer to be in a mental breakdown showing a lost mind and body.

The world famous pop singer “Rihanna” has similar scenes in her music video by showing her sat in a bath reminiscing on her lost relationship, like our singer.

We also filmed shots of the singer’s hands gripping onto things like the side of the bath and the bench as she was sat on her own. This was to symbolise to the viewers she is gripping onto these as we wanted to show she was missing someone. This also conforms to the convention of pop videos being surrounded by love stories.

The other big symbolic scene in our music video was the pill scene that is iconic in all kinds of different media. It is the main enigma code in our music video as it raises viewer’s questions instantly as everyone knows it’s a dangerous thing to do.

In the past there has been pop videos that portray drug abuse in a slightly different ways such as “P!nk – Just like a pill” where she sat in a room full of white rabbits singing about her tripping from pills to hide the pain of her broken heart, on the other hand we went straight to the source and showed the pills and the girl taking them directly.

This also conforms to pop music people gripping people as they often perform unexpected scenes in the videos that grab audiences attentions and that is exactly what we wanted to achieve.

However in P!nks video it is dark and very negative performance throughout but in our music video we have binary oppositions. We conformed to Levi- Strauss theory of “we understand the world through a system of power weighted oppositions” this was shown in our video through the blissful scene of the girl in the park to her in the bath and pill scene showing complete binary oppositions to the viewers.We also thought about the opposition in the visual aspect such as the girl wearing white clothing in the bath that relates to peace and tranquillity however she was in the bath being depressed and looking unhappy. These binary oppositions showed we conformed to it that made many scenes throughout our music video a lot more entertaining and symbolic.

One other way we conformed to conventions of pop music videos was through the genre of pop. We knew from researching many pop music videos that the genre consisted of spontaneous videos with wild party scenes and interesting story lines.

We then wanted to show some of this through the music video without copying the style completely but still conforming to it. Our music video structure is very episodic which was important for us to create an interesting video like the other pop genre videos.

In our video we had four different scenes, the pill scene, bath scene, park scene and the black room scene. It was also important to not add too many as it can become confusing for viewers to watch.

Media platforms we

used to present our video and ancillary texts…

Finally to present our ancillary texts and music video the software we used was ‘Weebly’ It is a fantastic blog site where we created our own blog as a group and presented all of our work online post by post. It looks professional as it is laid out clearly for everyone to see and our video is the last and final post to be shown.