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

We followed the conventions of the medium in having the visuals last as long as our chosen track. 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 the music video medium to ensure we could maintain an audience interest.

Music videos are either filmed performance, traditional visual narration or experimental visual narration (Goodwin). Our music video would be considered an experimental visual narration because of our use of split screen, our music video therefore is not performance based but based on the narrative of a young woman journeying through various locations alone.

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.

This was inspired mainly by Mark Rothko’s minimalist paintings, many of his works featured two or three shades of one colour creating vibrant pieces reflecting an abstract impressionism.

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.

Although unconventional for many folk videos, due to the emphasis being purely upon the natural world, Strauss suggests the use of “binary opposition” adds appeal, and the emphasis on the differences between our exterior locations such as Cambridge alongside the external locations of the museum adds variety and untimely a visual appeal.

The use of split screen in our video highlighted the narrative of our character as well as challenging the convention of the conventional fixed frame in music videos. The use of montage alongside split screen adds depth to the video, creating a narrative that gives the audience an awareness of time.

“Manovich has helped to trigger a more substantive examination of the expressive possibilities of the form. He grounds his analysis in the tradition of Eisenstein's "montage within the frame", and argues that the new digital technologies support a "spatial montage", where multiple cinematic frames offer narrative paths where "montage in time [editing] is no longer privileged over montage [in space]".This is a relatively bold position for Manovich to take. The essence of the filmmaking art is the plasticity and therefore the power inherent in cinema’s ability to present and juxtapose events that is to say, shots in time.”(http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Bizzocchi.pdf)

Split Screen: “The Fragmented Frame: The Poetics of the Split-Screen” by Jim Bizzocchi suggests that the use of split screen adds audience awareness of time that cannot be seen through only using montage editing.

In the article, Willis notes that contemporary filmmakers such as Greenway and Figgis use “digital capabilities to break the ‘tyranny of the frame’ and make expressive use of a multi-windowed cinematic environment”, the use of breaking the conventions of the fixed frame allow for the audience to see many pieces of one narrative in a short time, and, because our music video only lasted as long as the track, this was important. The use of the split screen also allowed us to present the similarities in location our character visited, the use of almost identical shots side by side gave coherence between locations and presented the entirety of her day/journey.

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. We used the convention of focusing on the story of one girl. The use of a solitary female performer can also be seen in Ed Sheeran’s ‘The A Team’, Sheeran’s video features a young girl struggling to live, her tragic journey is presented as she walks alone. Although our video has different reasoning for using a lone girl (Sheeran’s is to highlight the young girls desperate position, whereas ours is to emphasise a happiness in solitude) the use of one performer creates a strong narrative and maintains a focus on something fairly minimal, much like the use of nature in conventional folk videos.

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 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.

GENRE AS AN INTERTEXTUAL CONCEPT

Although the genre of our piece is slightly ambiguous, it has been suggested the bands sound is similar to that of Nick Drake, suggesting a folk/rock genre to the music. The track is also very similar to the work of 60s artist Donovan, and, although Donovan has a varying amount of music videos they tend to be performance based due to the fact music videos had not really been used before. Goodwin and Katie Wales suggest a link between lyrics and visuals is key in engaging an audience, the lyrics are not referenced often in early music videos however the video for The Beatles ‘Penny Lane’ (1967) was one of the first music videos to be released of this genre and presents aspects of the visuals. The montage clips of the streets of Liverpool are recalled in the lyrics, whilst the band are presented throughout (following conventions of early music videos) the use of montage clips to present the lyrics was a new concept. Although the reference of lyrics is prominent throughout, the videos are more to do with the sound of the tracks than the visuals, due to the music videos being very early makings and the lack of reference or conventions to follow.

Our video doesn’t follow the convention of performance, the lack of visuals of the artist allow for our focus to be on the narrative rather than the promotion of the artist and creates something slightly abstract to pair with the ambiguous genre of the piece.