Question One – In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
During the research, creation and production stages of our music video we made sure we looked at, and kept in the style of Maroon Five’s ‘pop-rock’ genre making sure we adhered to any conventions we saw within this genre. We found in the original Misery Video that typical male and female conventions are reversed with the female being in a position of power and effectively torturing the male lead. Misery is demonstrated in both the original video and our own and is shown to be a emotion caused by the actions of a ‘female character’. It is this use of role reversal (which we used) that allowed us to show and convey feelings of ‘Misery’, as the cause of this misery is undoubtedly from a female. Another convention we used in our music video is continuous cross cuts between a diegetic story and recording shots in a studio, or some other sort of set. Our video intermitted between stop motion narratives of two male characters separately, and both roles performing the song in a studio.
The use of a female who is ‘stronger’ than a male in our music video goes against typical feminist theory, which usually states that in media women are shown as an inferior gender and are completely subjective to the type of male they are around. However in our video our female actor is shown to actually hit the male actor and he continues on his way crying. This shows a sort of dominance and is a type of gender reversal. The use of females in pop music is usually important as more of a ‘scene setter’ than an actual character or important role, usually females are seen as love interests, or they are dancing (if the band is predominantly male). However in our video rather than being a love interest or actually making a positive impact our female role is more of a bully, or a negative character to the male lead than anything else, inverting female stereotyping once again.
The use of males in our video however is very stereotypical for a pop rock genre, they are simple performers and any sort of real in depth background into the character is favoured for a interesting performance and catchy lyrics. The use of clothing is meant to give colour to the set and represent the typical fashion of the period in which the music video was brought out. Typically in any sort of pop video the performers wear clothes that link in with the trend of the moment, but that can change completely within a few months, giving a rather diverse trend in clothes between music video’s in the last few years.
Inspiration for our video was varied, we got ideas of female dominance and gender conversion from the original music video to Misery, performed by Adam Levine and the band. However the idea of stop motion we took from Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’, and ‘Don’t Stop – Innerpartysystem’. These both managed to combine pictures to make a diegetic stop motion narrative. From ‘American Trash by Innerpartysystem’ we took ideas of the modern lifestyle and the repetitive and incorporated it into our music video, this is meant to give it a more significant meaning as seen in American Trash. The video states all these mundane tasks are ‘pointless’ and ‘trash’ but yet we continue to undertake them. Showing how import they are.
We then developed the concept of the mundane being turned upside down by interaction with the female type by making sure everything the male characters did after contact with a female was out of the norm, for example planking in a lecture theatre or spinning around in a table.
The idea of having stop motion feature so heavily in our music video was that; although stop motion is often done research on other videos showed that is less often done with such length, meaning by including so much stop motion in our product it made it stand out from the others, making it more unique and hopefully more enjoyable as a piece.
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