Seth Ballard's A2 Media Blog

1B) HOW DID YOU USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE GENRE CONVENTIONS IN YOUR MUSIC VIDEO?

The genre for my music video is Indie-Pop-Rock, similar to that of ‘Two Door Cinema Club’. One of the main conventions of my genre is the performance aspect. This includes, playing of instruments and lip-syncing, and in my video I have both of these. I had solo guitar playing for the main character as well as the three all playing as the band as it was what I found was common for other performance based videos, furthermore I also used lip-sync with the character directly addressing and therefore breaking the fourth wall to make it seem more personal and engage the audience. Another way in which my music video conforms is through the cinematography; lens flares and slow motion are big parts of my music video, they are what convey the emotion throughout. When the music gets slower and goes through the disequilibrium there is a lot of slow-motion to show time slowing down for the character, it represents the confusion in his head. The lens flares however shows the alternative to this, it represents clarity and happiness he is feeling at the time, and that’s why there a no lens flares later on in the video, to show that that happiness has disappeared. This links nicely to another common conventions for music videos within my genre – aesthetics, specifically the locations that appear in the videos. An example of this is the video for ‘Left Hand Free’ by Alt-J, filmed in and around a state in America by a big lake and stream, simple easy locations that are aesthetically pleasing. That’s why I chose to film at the UEA and the local park, because of their aesthetical appeal, particularly the UEA due to its impressive contemporary architecture. Furthermore, it was important that when filming it was a bright blue sky to help represent the happiness and upbeat style of the genre, also for aesthetic and continuity reasons because as I found out, grey skies don’t make for nice shots but also it looks slightly weird when the colour of the sky keeps changing throughout the video because there is only so much you can edit and change using filters.

Another video that has a similar youthfulness to mine is ‘The Suburbs’ by Arcade Fire; it features young boys riding around on bikes, the bikes being the Proairetic code, similar to mine. This shows how my video overall is supportive of the common conventions within its genre as I thought it would lose the feel of the video to challenge them.

1C) HOW DID YOUR PRINT PRODUCTIONS USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE CONVENTIONS OF MEDIA LANGUAGE AND GENRE?

To start with I used a site called DaFont.com to search for fonts that I would like to use on my print productions, I settles on a sans serif font called ‘Bebas’ because it was a strong, bold font and fitted with the contemporary image that the band give off. I chose to have the font colour as white because I felt it represented the freshness and purity of the genre but also conforms to the minimalist approach of some big name bands within the genre such as Kodaline. Another way in which Kodaline express themselves through the use of media language is through the use of photography on their album covers (as seen on the right). The imagery nearly always is environmental due the calm aurora it exudes to the audience.

In addition to this the brutalist architecture that the UEA has helps convey the youthfulness of the genre and makes for a more aesthetically pleasing image. As you can see from my print production on the left, I tried to re create the naturist point of view with the picture and then also have the purity and crispness of the white text because it really stands out to the audience. In addition to this, you can see the way that the architecture in my cover really attracts the gaze of an audience because of its uniqueness. Furthermore, I decided that I was going to make a logo out of the name of the band as I feel it adds authenticity to the cover but also, similarly to bands like Kodaline it makes them more unique in comparison to competitors within the genre.

1D) NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF YOUR VIDEO

For my genre, the narrative isn't as important as most, the genre largely relies upon cinematography of the scenic shots. However, my music video has a liner narrative, I decided upon this type of structure due to the clarity of it and also to comply within the conventions of my genre. Furthermore, Todorov’s 3-act structure is a useful tool to analyse my video with, at the start it sets the tone of the character happy cycling in the sun but quickly the disequilibrium stage arrives and the character goes through the break up over the phone and then finally at the very end the new equilibrium is set of the character becoming single. The closure of my video acts as an oxymoron to the audience because whilst it does bring satisfaction with the disequilibrium being solved, the denouement brings sadness because he is now alone.

Another way in which you can analyse my video is through the use of codes. Roland Barthes codes act as narrative devices to videos. Symbolic, Proairetic and Enigma are the three codes. Symbolic, obviously means something that represents something else. Proairetic code is something that drives a story onwards and an Enigma code is something that asks a question to the audience, creates mystery. For example, in my music video, the bike acts a Proairetic device because it is what connects each part of the locations to each other, at the start he is biking to start the story, in the middle he bikes to new location where he experiences the disequilibrium and then finally bikes just before the resolution stage, this nareme serves the function of moving the narrative on.

Q4 - WHAT TECHNOLOGIES DID I USE IN MY PROJECT?

Technology brings about empowerment for young people such as myself and it gives us creative agency over our own projects. The wider availability of the technologies meant that I was able to experiment around with my video in all stages; post-production, production and pre-production.

For example, websites such as DaFont.com allowed me to get a certain visual effect to my video by having thousands of unique fonts to choose from rather than be limited to the defaults of a standard PC. Furthermore, I used the editing software Premier Pro to edit my video which meant I was able to add effects to my footage that I wouldn't’t have been able to achieve with a camera. For example, I was able to change the colour and saturation of some of my shots using the RBG Curve tool which meant I was able to make it fit in with the rest of the video better. Another thing it allowed me to do was use slow-motion on my footage which was vital as I viewed it as a common convention for a music video in my genre.

Adobe Photoshop was another software that brought about empowerment, especially when creating my digipack. It gave me the ability to produce a front cover that looks aesthetically pleasing and added authenticity to my project by creating my own band logo. Furthermore using the clone and pattern stamp tool I was able to remove certain things from my images to make them look better, an example of this is on my front cover, in front of the building, on the grass there were a few rabbit holes and a manhole cover and it effect the look of the image so I used the clone stamp tool to copy and area of grass that looked better and was able to cover up the holes so it looked like one smooth patch of grass.

I used a GoPro Hero 6 to film my music video as it was easily accessible to me, along with it I used the Karma Grip which acts a stabilizer to make all the shots nice and smooth, combined with the crisp high resolution this allowed for a very high quality product by the end. This is an example of how the availability of technologies is democratising the production of media. Furthermore, for my digipack I was able to use a DSLR camera for extremely high quality shots.