Our inspiration

Our inspiration

 

Our inspiration (Explain how far your understanding of the conventions of existing media influenced the way you treated your own media products. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how this understanding developed over time.)

For our advanced portfolio we carried out similar research however, this time we watched various music videos. While watching the music videos, we made notes on what codes and conventions were used and what ones we wanted to try and implement within our own music video. From the beginning, our group decided to create a music video for the pop song ‘we are never getting back together’ by Taylor Swift. Because of this, we only researched in depth the codes and conventions pop music videos. The first we looked at was ‘Born to die’ by Lana Del Rey. We loved how the video showed the main star (Lana) alongside the narrative while also cross-cutting to the main star singing. We felt like this made the music video much more entertaining and understood that it was a professional technique used to enhance the singer’s star identity. In the effort to make our music video just as professional, we decided to add cross-cuts featuring the singer while having them in the main narrative footage. This can be seen throughout our project as there are scenes where the singer is lip syncing to the camera which cross cuts to her arguing with her boyfriend etc.

 

Another key code and convention of pop music videos that we noticed was how the visuals always tend to relate to the visuals. This became apparent to us as we watched the music video for ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry, in the scene where the lyrics “you’re gonna hear me roar” are accompanied by visuals of Katy Perry and a tiger growling towards the camera. We made sure to frequently have the visuals of our music video link into the lyrics such as when the lyrics are “when you said you needed space” and the singer receives a text message saying ‘I think I need some space’ etc.