Music videos can range from four minute dance shows, to hour length theatrical mini movies (kanye West –Runaway). Every video’s form depends on the music genre it is for. As an overall rule, music videos tend to use a lot of cuts, and close ups of the artist along with some kind of performance; on average they are between three and four minutes (although some artist are known to make longer ones). The video also carries some relation to the songs lyric’s (Andrew Goodwin – ‘Dancing in the Distraction Factory’), videos are either artistic, band performance or narrative, normally they are a mixture of two (sometimes all) categories.
The genre of our video is RnB/Dubstep. The conventions are as follows; band/artist performance, (the performance isn’t always a dance routine, it can be a group dancing to the song), fast cuts, various background lighting; locations are typically clubs. Cars, bikes and female dancers are a major part of the mise-en-scene.
Within our video, we have followed and broken a few conventions from the genre. We broke a few by heavily emphasising on narrative, and basing it on James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein (intersexuality). We did this because we thought it would appeal more to our target audience because of itsoriginality. Typically, our target audience would not be interested in a 1930’s Frankenstein film, so to get around this, we changed some aspects of our video. These included; fast cuts, a dance performance, and a few comical scenes. In the end, we had a music video based on a classic film, but edited to fit a young, modern audience.
It was in our heads to keep the video as ‘out of the box’ as possible, and because that was our aim, there are not many genre conventions. The biggest genre convention of RnB/Dubstep videos are dancers; and because of that, we decided to add a dance sequence to our video. There was a risk that RnB/Dubstep fans wouldn’t like the video because of its difference against the genre conventions, but by fitting in the dance sequence throughout most of the video, and having comical scenes, I personally think we’ve kept them engaged. The second convention we kept to was the editing; we used fast cuts, and kept them in time with the music. The 4:3 ratio, vignette effect and colour correction signify the time period of the video, as audiences will associate this with early-mid nineties films. The dancers clothing consists of Converses, t-shirts and sport shorts, although it is in juxtaposition with the Doctor’s, the monster’s and the woman’s clothing; it acts as a signifier to modern dancers, and keeps the video from feeling alien to the audience and gives them something to identify with (audience theory).
The construction of our video was aimed at being original and different from the genre that it is in. We thought that a narrative would not only attract our audience, but also keep them engaged by offering something new. Our preferred audience reception would be; that they recognise the video as different, see a few modern conventions (e.g. fast cuts) and find it more enjoyable. Some might not like the mixture of modern conventions with a video that looks aged and take an oppositional position.The study of semiotics involves looking at signs in the world, everything, including body language; location, colour and even voice carry connotations. There are a few major connotations in our video; we used black and white, signifying the time period of the video’s contents (as mentioned previously), we move from a misty, old, webbed dungeon to open fields and trees, a complete juxtaposition which portrays nature as freedom. The woman in the video wears a white dress, and is usually seen around plants and fields, this has the effect of making her appear innocent, almost mystical due to the fact we never hear her talk, and are in an objective position when looking at her.Semiotics have a big effect concerning the monster, the first location we see him in (dungeon) encourages his escape from the audience. His attempt and failure to woo the woman could signal to the audience of their own failures and connect with him. His clothing could have gone one of two ways; one, the audience could see him as a scruff and look down on him, or two, feel pity for him.A non-lyrical song like the one we’re using allows for various styles of videos; the effects we’ve used might class it as ‘film noir’, but the fast cuts and comical scenes do not fit into the category.
No comments:
Post a Comment