Genre Essay - 1

In my A2 production, I along my three classmates created a music video branding a new artist.  The genre of our music was electro pop mixed with an urban twist.  We decided that our target audience was people ages 16-25 years old as this would be easier for us to relate with their taste of music.  We were inspired by other pop artists such as; Bebe Rexa and Dua Lipa.  By watching existing media products, this helped us to create a music video which we had planned.

The setting of our music video was based in Soho in London.  This area is known to attracting unique, urban, different people.  Therefore, it strongly fits the genre of our music video which is why we captured distinctive shots.  These shots included pan shots of the city landscape and our artist (Tori Lorente) herself in the same shot.  We also included (flip shot, two areas looking like one) which was effective after editing as it was noticed by others when we received feedback of the first draft.  Another area we specifically chose to incorporate was the theme across our cross media promotional package.  We wanted to maintain the colours of red, grey and black throughout each product; especially red as it is a bold, illuminating colour which stood out and continued the synergy through the website, digipak and music video.  From this idea, we noticed other pop artists like Ariana Grande kept to baby pink through all her albums and on her website.  We found this an intelligent way of creating a star image for our artist and emphasizing the genre.

Goodwin claims there are five aspects needed to complete a music video.  These include; thought beats, narrative performance, star image, relation of visuals and technical aspects of the video.  as the genre of our music video was pop/urban, it is known that thought beats are often used in videos with the pop genre.  One example is Calvin Harris' Bounce.  We used this as an inspiration for our video; when the chorus dropped, the camera shot shoots to the right and back again in time with the music which was shown from our audience feedback to be very effective.
Another theorist we took inspiration from was Vernallis' theory.  He believed there are four concepts that manufacture a video including; narrative, editing, camera movement and diegesis.  From this we decided to edit our music video completely subverting the usual effects and transitions a mainstream pop video would entail.  Therefore, we took more of a slow approach by editing many of our shots in slow motion in order to create a star image for our artist.  Therefore, we linked the editing effect with the camera movement, we decided to move the camera in a slow, flowing motion so we could end up with a fluent, smooth final product.  However, we did add flashing cuts and sharp transitions during the video to make it interesting to the audience yet we made sure it fitted.
From my A2 production, i learnt that to make sure our genre is obvious to the audience, it is important to research existing media artists to get a similar idea.  However, once we retrieved these ideas we managed to add a twist to the product in order to make it our own.