Earlier in the media course I am studying, we looked at Andrew Goodwin’s principles he created with relation to music videos.
With the piece my partner and I have created we have followed and challenged his principles.
His first principle was that there is a relation between the music and the visuals: the editing may match the pace of music. This is one of the principles we have followed. We felt for our music changing the pace of editing would take from the piece, and it wouldn’t feel ‘right’ when watching.
- We used quick editing between slow paced shots, common of the genre of music, and as the song continued and developed the shots became longer, slowing down the quick paced editing. Music videos are conventionally edited with fast paced switches between shots but we stuck to the pace and feel of the song. See video for examples of transitions in the beginning and quick cuts with lengthier shots.
We also matched the visuals to the theme and feel of the song. Using abstract and extreme shots and content wouldn’t have made for a good final media piece. We didn’t want to subtract from the music by focusing attention on something unrelated and weird, which is also why we chose to use a narrative style video. A concept-based video wouldn’t fit with genre, feel and overall effect of the music, being peaceful and relaxed, but would clash by creating confusion. A performance-based music video could have worked, but we see more performance-based videos in different genres of music such as rock, hip-hop and pop which left us with the narrative based video, which is what we discussed, would work best anyway. Its common for narrative based videos to accompany the genre of music we could, being acoustic/soft pop. Choosing a narrative based video fitted with Goodwin's second principle: a particular music genre may have a particular style of music video and iconography.
Goodwin’s next principle was based on voyeurism. We didn’t take this too literally, but used the idea of black and white for past times and colour for present date in our music video. The idea of voyeurism and looking back in time, recalling and reliving the memories is what we wanted to achieve with the black and white in contrast to the colour shots. (See video for examples)
Another of his principles was that: there is a demand on the record company for lots of close ups of the main artist/group. We challenged this, as we chose not to have someone impersonating our artist and stuck to simple images to represent what she was all about, with regards to the digipack and poster. With our music video again we had no lip-syncing or anyone pretending to be our artist. However we did conform to this principle in a different ways. We did use a number of close ups of the girl in the video, to show her emotions, and relation to the song and lyrics. (See video) We used the same girl throughout the ancillary task products, not to replace our artists face, but to symbolise what we felt our artist believed in, stood for and be something she would be able to relate to her music.
This also helped us begin to create star image and iconography with her music and the other products. The artist may develop their own star iconography, both in and out of their videos, which, in time, becomes part of their star image was the next of good wins principles. The use of the same girl, similar locations for shooting the video, and the locations used in the ancillary task images has helped to bring this continuous feel and build an image related to the music – a natural, earthy and honest feel to all products relates to her honest lyrics and relaxing, simple music.
When it came to developing a visual style and brand identity we did this using the repetition of the style of images and colours, the themes and the fonts. The music video, visually, linked to the music which, in turn, all linked to the ancillary products where natural, simple, earthy styles where used, with the choice of colours and softer fonts, the simple layouts and the spacey layouts of the digipack and advert, where it wasn’t all cramped and gathered. Just simple, relaxed, almost relieving layout conjoined with the honest, natural colours and the choice of font helped create our brand identity. This all links through to the artist, hopefully supporting a strong base the style and identity was built on.
When it came to the ancillary tasks, we used common conventions of the products found in the real music industry.
Our advert had: the artist as the focal point (even being just her name), the digipack cover displayed and the information as to where to find it. Our digipack in the whole was based on the artist for the fans as it is in the real music industry. The use of similar colours and repeated images building the star image and visual style is very much following the conventions of real media products. The font face was the same throughout the products, the colour palate was limited and used in the same manner throughout the products and the idea behind how it was related to the music and artist herself was clear – the natural honesty of her, her lyrics and her style was something fundamental of the products we created. We felt it was important to keep to the point of the music being truthful and honest, and this needed to come across to the audience in all the products we created.
The final principle of Goodwin's theory was the reference to intertextuallity which we challenged. Why should any of the products for our artist have reference to other media texts. The simplistic design and identity behind our artist means that referencing other music or streams of media would just contradict by adding confusion and distraction. The only intertextuallity was self promotion, with the advert promoting the CD.
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