Codes and Conventions

After looking at several music video's within our group, of other artists similar to Katy Perry we have come to some conclusions about the codes and conventions of our genre.
All of the music video's we analysed gave the impression of a suppressed woman coming into power and control over the situation. Generally these women were in bad relationships and have 'got their own back' on their previous partner, or have completely disregarded men at all. This is a reverse to the traditional view of women as the weaker sex, but sees them as stronger and independent. In Lily Allen's video for the song Smile, she pays a gang to beat up her partner. Even though the viewer can clearly see Lily Allen is doing wrong, there is a feeling of justice and justification. In our music video we will bend this convention slightly, by showing our artist as weak in the beginning, however getting stronger and becoming happier with herself.

Genre

Our project is focusing alot on the genre of music that we have chosen to use. A major part will be looking at the codes and conventions of existing media texts, and to not only use them, but to challenge them, twist them and change them to fit how we like.
There are a few theories that relate to genre that can be used in the pre-production stages of our video.
-Rick Altman said that genre is a set type and a group in which any medium can be classified within. When applying this to music, examples of which are reggae, jazz and drum 'n' bass etc. In each case the acknowledgement of genre depends on the acceptance of the generic conventions. Genre can change over time, and become to mean something completely different, it's open to manipulation, it's not set hard. Altman also said that viewers pre-read media texts, and they become passive viewers which ultimately restricts genre.
-Richard Maltby said that the success of Hollywood is dependent on the combination of predictable elements with slight variations. This suggests that as producers we should follow the codes and conventions of our chosen genre, but also add some variation within our piece so that the audience does not become bored, and so that the media text is not predictable every time.
-Jon Fiske said that any one type of media will display main characteristics of it's genre, but it is likely to include some characteristics from other genre's. Categorizing a media text into one genre would mean deciding which characteristics are more important. This theory can be applied to our project. Our genre of music is pop, but because pop music is such a wide spread genre there are alot of characteristics from different genre's such as R&B and soft rock. When looking at existing music videos and media packs we will have to consider focusing our research on artists that are very similar.

Existing album covers moodboard

In order to create an idea of the type of album covers our artist and similar artists use to inspire our own creation we created a moodboard of existing album covers. This allowed us to easily compare similarities and differences between the album covers.

Choosing a song & style

The first step in deciding which song we were going to use, was deciding which style of music would be the most interesting to produce a music video for. We decided that 'pop' music would be the best as it has many examples to look at and draw ideas from. We also made the decision to use a song with a female artist/artists as all of us in the group are female it would be easier to produce a video with female participants. We mind mapped artists that fitted this criteria.

After looking at several examples of video's we decided it would be the best idea to use a single female artist. We decided this because of the limited resources we have at our disposal.