Conventions

I made a collage to represent the convention of the electro house genre in music videos.

Main conventions: 

• High Key Lighting - It is and element that refers to happiness.
• Close ups - Helps the audience identify with the character and its emotions.
• Party location - Keeps the audience entertained E.g.: Male-Gaze
• Attractive women - Pays attention (Male-Gaze theory) 
• Low angle - Mostly used in calm and partying scenes
• Focus on something with a blurry background - Highlight a key element and drive the viewer's eye to the right spot.
• Spectacular locations - To impress the audience.
• Beach - Show the audience the place they would rather be.
• Fish Eye Angle - Helps to focus on the right character and make them look "cooler"
• Slow Emotion - Make the feeling of a dream.
• Night Life - Refers to having fun in a high level.
• Bright Colours - Make the Mise-En-Scene refer to a comfortable atmosphere.
• Point of view - Help the audience identify with the character as they "see through their eyes"
• Cutting to the beat - Build up tension and makes the viewer want to dance.

Music Video Theories

Andrew Goodwin

Andrew Goodwin has a theory about the demonstration of characteristics in typical genres of music videos. For example rock songs are influenced by horror stories and uses low key lighting.

Electro house music videos includes high key lighting, bright colours, attractive women and comfortable atmosphere.

The representation of male and female are very different. For example women are likely to be represented through sexuality (less clothes, more body showing, sexual moves and actions), while man more likely to be represented as a dominant character.

There is a relationship between the song and the video. The video has to fit to the song and refer to the lyrics.


The representation of different characters are also interesting for example Adele and Lady Gaga. Adele is a low-key character, she is wearing elegant clothes and jewelry while Lady Gaga is a extreme character, wearing extreme clothes, make up and accessories.

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey has a male gaze theory. This theory investigate the answer for three questions:

• How man look at women
• How women look at themselves
• How women look at other women.

The camera focuses on the women body, curves, and build for the reactions of the viewer. The focus is on the male characters reactions and how are they looking at women, but it also appeals to the women audience as well and study their thought about how are they seeing themselves and other women.

The accessories are very important to so they can drive the attention to the right places for example a belt highlights the waist or a long necklace can lead the viewer eye to the breast. A high heel makes the legs longer and more attractive, but natural circumstances also important for example eye colour or hair style.

Audience

Target Audience

I made a Prezi document to detail who my target audience is exactly.
We are going to collect qualitative and quantitative information from our audience to find out how is the perfect music video looks like for them, and make it come alive. We are going to make a questionnaire to find out some information about what our target audience likes, it is going to be quantitative date that shows what the majority of people like. We also going to make a video to find out more information about the individual's favourite techniques and personal ideas. This is going to be qualitative data.

Questionnaire

This is the questionnaire we made to find out what our target audience prefer to see in a music video.

 


Here are the results of our questionnaire that has been given out to 30 people to get a realistic result of their favorite genre, actions and locaions.

Results



One of our promising idea was to include scenes of extreme sports, but our audience didn't like it. Majority of them said we shouldn't include it. It made us a bit upset because we really liked the idea, but the video we are making is for our audience, so we are going to include those actions that they like. We decided to drop the idea of extreme sports.

As location they preferred lake or seaside, which is appeal to our ideas. As it is hard to find a location like this in London, we recorded some scenes on our summer holiday as Spain. There is some beautiful shots at the sea side.  

The most people would like to see dance and attractive men and women. This result verified our idea to include some scenes of a party. I have been on a festival this summer and made some shot for my media work, that will be perfect for this entry.

Focus Group

We also interviewed some people from our target group who also do media to get some professional qualitative ideas.  



The interviews went very well. We gave them few minutes to think about the questions and the recorded their answers.

Their first idea of what to include was pretty much the same as the results of our questionnaire. They prefer to see some party scenes, and attractive women. And they also highlighted the idea of having a couple as main character. It refers to that they want to a narrative based video.

They don't like to see over sexualised female which is something we hate to see in a music video too. We are planing to use Male-Gaze, but we will make sure we aren't include anything inappropriate.

We also got a good idea of using binomial opposites of as including two different environments changing after each other which are: a very live party and a calm atmosphere of a field.

They have inspired us with good ideas for the editing such us using slow emotion, montage or fish eye lens and cutting to the beat. These are good techniques that would help us keep the audience entertained through the whole video. We are going to use some of these. Most likely the slow emotion and cutting to he beat.

Their ideas for locations were parties or house parties, seaside and a field.