Introduction to our project..

The Brief
We were given a brief for the project that we have to work on this year. This was to create our own music video for an existing song that didn't already have one. Before creating a music video we had to research and analyse other music videos to get a general idea of particular forms and conventions.

To help us we were shown a few examples of previous years and different school's videos. By doing this we were able to see what they had created and what their ideas were for their videos. As well as looking at school videos, we also analysed music videos from different genre's. In doing so, this enabled us to view the particular forms and conventions in different genre styles of music and what each genre tended to include. When researching music videos we looked at a variety of artists including Madonna, Pink, The Script, Geri Halliwell, Beyonce and The Fray.


Group Organisation
When picking our groups we had to decide who would be partaking in each role within that group. Our group consists of Liberty Jeffery and Briony Crawford. We decided that Briony would be directing and filming the music video and I will be playing a part within the video. Having this information we then therefore had to pick a song we would like to do our music video to. The song that we both felt was appropriate and enjoyed was Karima Fancis- The Author. The reason we chose this song was because we both liked it from the moment we heard it. The song is about a story of a relationship between two people and the love that one women had for another.

After we had decided who would be doing each specific role, we then had to choose our other actress for our music video. We had to pick our actresses very carefully as they had to portray the genre of the song. The genre of our particular chosen song was acoustic soul/indie. The actresses we chose to play out the parts within the music video are Liberty Jeffery and Nicola Sands.


Target Audience
When planning my group production work i researched different types of music genres for different target audiences. By looking at various types of music genres this allowed me to get a general idea of lots of different styles and how each particular product addressed their aimed target audience. Addressing the target audience appropriately is important because the reader needs to relate to what their viewing, giving them that incentive to purchase that particular song or album.

With our music genre in mind we had to make sure that our video would address our chosen target audience. During the planning of our production work we researched many music videos with a variety of genres that were targeted at different audiences.

• Pop
• Rock
• Indie
• R'n'B
• Rap
• Dance
• Alternative

By looking at different videos and seeing the particular styles they portrayed allowed me to get a general idea of how each product aimed to attract and address their target audience. After doing some research on the music genre of our song choice we found that our particular target audience was mainly female, ranging from teens to young adults.


Conventions
Looking at music videos that fell under the acoustic soul/indie type of genre was definately able to help us with the planning stage of our media production product. I was able to look at the conventions of music videos with a very similar genre, which helped us to apply some ideas to our own product. Karima Francis is an upcoming artist that is not yet well known and also has no music videos of her own that we could use for background research. Because of this we looked at very similar artists like her to get some ideas, but it also gave us the freedom to be creative and choose whether or not we wanted to follow the genre's type of conventions.

For our music video we decided that we would portray the love story in a typical convention, by having male and female actors. In doing this we were initally following the conventions of a love story, even though the song was about two females. After a little planning and ideas from our focus group in our media class, we then thought it was appropriate to subvert the normal conventions associated with society by chosing to have two female actresses in the video instead. The reason as to why we chose to subvert conventions is because you very rarely see two women portraying their love in music videos, which allowed us to be different in a way.