We chose Catch Me In the Air by Rina Sawayama, an Indie Pop song, as our song choice for this project. Our star actor starring in the music video goes by the name Vanya Viani. Her persona is similar to her real personality, we want to portray her as someone sweet, passionate, and wise given her journey that will be displayed in the music video. The dominant reading that we want for the audiences is that through watching the journey of our star actor, the audience should interpret the music video to be an inspiring and motivational message as the values that are resonated revolve around self-growth and maturity.
In order to create a distinguishable branding within our star actor and thus convey our intended dominant reading, we had to consistently align and create similarities within the star persona’s visuals and themes. One example would be how we implemented warm and natural color tones across the star actor’s media products such as pictures, album covers, as well as music videos.
The continuous application of this through the different media products may make the star actor’s branding distinguishable for the audience across different platforms. In addition to that, her star persona may be affected by this as well since the way she designs and structures her products can reflect how she is as a person. The warm tone may create a sense of comfort within the audiences, making the star actor seem more vulnerable and approachable. In addition to that, the natural tone is used to give the audiences the impression of realisticness within the star actor’s personality. Altogether, this is used to support the building of her persona as someone authentic and down-to-earth. Therefore, this shows how branding ties all the star actor’s features together and allows the audience to recognize the right image and type of person directed to them.
Before creating the music video, I had done research on Indie Pop genre conventions since that was the genre of the song we were using for the music video. I found several common elements across the different Indie Pop songs I went through such as how most of the songs had included storytelling elements, a play of costume and props for their mise-en-scene, and a low-budget quality product that resulted in a more dreamy or retro style themed look. My team and I chose to conform to conventions that would in the end work well together with the star actor’s brand identity as well as what could be doable with the resources we have as high school students with limited budget. My team and I chose to conform to the conventions of including a narrative in the music video as the lyrics had a deep meaning behind it and we would like to take the opportunity to build it based on our interpretation. Another feature we conformed to is the low budget quality where this can be seen through how we had the star actor used simple clothes and used props. On the other hand, the music video had subverted several other conventions such as how firstly, we did not use romantic connotations in our narrative and instead focused on family connotations between a mother and a daughter. This was shown through POV camera shots of the star actor through her mother’s camera, close up shots of photographs of only the star actor with her mother, as well as mise-en-scene where we used props such as the mother’s handwritten notes and dress, showing explicitly the mother’s role in the star actor’s journey. We subverted this convention as we wanted to appeal differently to the target audience in a way where not only can we reach a more niche psychographic audience, there can be an increase in the exposure of other types of relationships possible in a narrative amongst the many common Indie Pop narratives that revolve around romantic relationships.
Through this narrative that revolves around a mother and daughter relationship, we represented a social group and a social issue through it. Social groups we have represented are young women in which their traditional representation would be career oriented. However we chose to subvert to those stereotypes by showcasing the star actor to be more family oriented throughout her career journey. We did this by adding mise-en-scenes of prominent props especially in important stages of her career such as her first ever stage performance where we slipped in the star actor’s moms belongings for the star actor to use throughout that scene. Deciding to subvert this social group’s traditional representation was done to widen the audience’s exposure to the changes in the symbolic codes by Barthes revolving around gender stereotypes, where now traditional beliefs have come to evolve and take place in society.
A social issue we chose to represent as well is low-income class people that most of the time are stereotypically represented in a way where they are always leading a struggling and difficult life to evoke a sense of pity and sympathy towards the audience. We chose to subvert these traditional representations, emphasizing that people who are in the low-income class don't always stay that way as it doesn’t take away their ability to work hard, grow as a person, and reach success. We displayed this with the changes in the setting when comparing the present timeline to the past timeline where it can be seen that the star actor in the current timeline looks more well taken care of and is surrounded with higher quality products whereas during the past timeline, her childhood self did not have all that. This conforms to Stuart Hall’s representation theory that there is no real meaning in the media, the media companies create the meaning. The media portrays certain issues differently to how they actually are in reality in order to reinforce their own beliefs towards the audiences which in turn will lead to certain people being misrepresented and misunderstood.
After filming the music video, we moved on to creating our star actor’s social media page where through the posting of both personal and promotional content, we were able to invite audience engagement. Modern technology has made it possible for audiences to immediately connect towards artists through the usage of comment sections or direct messages where here, we took advantage of being able to use the comment section. In the star actor’s personal posts, I have included simple questions about the audience’s preferences in certain things so that because it is simple, the audiences can easily respond to it. This was the main boost in our audience engagement as since both the audience and the star actor had access to the comment section, both can communicate with each other continuously, and therefore boosting the audience engagement. We taught that adding questions asking about their daily life or their preferences would make them more willing to answer taking into account Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratification theory where people consume media for diversification.
A Digipak was also created after the creation of the music video as well where genre conventions played an important role in the creation. During the research, conventions that were most commonly used by Indie Pop artists in their Digipak would be their low-budget quality. This was easily conformed by us taking into account that we have been creating the entire music video with a low-budget as well, therefore the quality matches perfectly together. We showcased this by instead of purchasing high-quality props, we had used worn down props such as crayons and old music sheets. In addition to that, we chose to craft the image by drawing as well where this worked well for us in the end as it adds to the artistic, down-to-earth, persona we have created for the star actor.
In conclusion, all of our products, music video, social media, and digipak, came together well. Because of the continuous follow of theme and aesthetic, they successfully display the branding we want the star actor to revolve around.
This is the link to the Google Docs where I worked on my critical self-reflection: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fv4A9z4EdXRBmxnYTBtMD7WgRGQEW4OgWx8mdaMworI/edit?usp=sharing
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