Our main product (the music video) has conformed to the forms and conventions of real media products in several ways. According to media theorist Goodwin, there are seven key features that a music video must try to achieve (which I have outlined in my earlier post: Music Video Theory). I feel we have successfully included nearly all of the features outlined by Goodwin.
I feel that the majority of the visuals successfully amplify the mood of the song and the lyrics. Since the music is about his heartbreak and lost love, we decided to put a higher emphasis on the break up and her freedom rather than his feelings. Also, instead of blatantly showing the narrative side, we preferred to focus on symbolism. This reflects other media products produced from a similar genre and is stereotypically found in R’n’B and mainstream style. By way of contrast mainstream rock uses a more artistic style to portray the meaning of the song. The horse is an example of symbolism in our music video; the horse symbolises the woman and how she has gained a sense of freedom from breaking the ties in the relationship.
We have also followed Goodwin’s theory by producing a style that we feel is suitable for our music video. The song is quite slow and therefore cutting for editing isn’t as fast as it would traditionally be in the majority of music videos. In this sense it defies the stereotypical music video convention, but we did this deliberately to create a style that could then be associated with the band (Goodwin outlined this to be important). Not only that, but the use of artistic footage helped to develop a style similar to other bands in their genre such as The Fray- How to save a life. As with our video, their footage incorporates both performance and concept. We developed the idea of incorporating multiple styles of music video and to some extent have managed to incorporate all three types; we have Ben singing (performance), the horse (concept) and the burning of the letters (narrative). This is designed to keep the audience engaged at all times. By having a lot of things going on at the same time, this will help prevent the audience from getting bored. If we did not include variation within our music video, it would not be suitable for its purpose (which is to advertise the song and promote the band).
By incorporating a large number of close-ups we followed one of the major conventions in real media products. The majority of our close ups were on artistic shots of Ben's performance. The dancing shots mainly consist of medium shots, with a few high angle shots and the horse shots were mainly establishing shots: this was to establish clear differences within each of the sections.
As a group we deliberately tried to incorporate intertexutal references to other iconic media texts. Examples of this are the throwing of the ring into a pond, mirroring the film Titanic, where Rose disposes of the Heart of the Ocean; burning of the letters – The Notebook which is based around the burning of letters. Since our target audience is relatively old they should be able to pick up on these references.
The only part of Goodwin’s theory we deliberately challenged was voyeurism and females being seen as sex objects. We thought that if we portrayed women in a sexual manner it would detract from the meaning of the song. Even though, as Laura Mulving clearly states in her ‘Male Gaze Theory’, the sexualization of women is seen across the board in the music and film industry, we felt it would be inappropriate for our video. Not only that, we wanted to use symbolism for representing the woman (the horse) so that the audience can relate to the story and input their own experiences, rather than associating the woman in the video with this song.
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