This blogpost contains my critical reflection essay for component 3.
For the component 3 project, my group and I created a music video package, including a music video, social media accounts, and a digipak. The song we chose for our music video is POV by Ariana Grande (2020). It’s part of the RnB genre, which also correlates to the artist we created, ‘Ellie Collins’. Ellie is portrayed as a powerful young woman, pursuing her dreams as an upcoming artist. Her work caters to all genders and targets couples, Indonesians, and young teenagers and adults aged 16 to 25. She’s confident, bold, and edgy, but also has a warm and friendly persona. Our intention was to show audiences a dominant reading that it’s okay to show vulnerability in love and relationships, whilst still being your most authentic self. This essay will be a critical reflection that explains how my team and I used genre conventions, technical elements and representations to create a brand identity, which also engaged with their audience.
Branding is the process of creating a distinct identity for audiences to recognize and connect with. It includes logos, color schemes, slogans, star images, etc. It gives a product meaning, which was very important in the creation of our artist because we had a specific idea that we wanted to represent through Ellie. In order for the representation to work, we needed the music video, social media and digipak to work together, because there are different genre conventions in each product that complete Ellie’s branding as a whole. Stuart Hall’s theory says that messages are not passively received, but are encoded by producers. We intentionally did this by following consistent genre conventions, like including the same color grading throughout all of our products. The use of warm tones, such as the color yellow and orange, connotes warmth, comfort, and intensity. Using a digicam gave Ellie’s work an authentic feel, while keeping it vintage and aesthetic. Her clothing mise-en-scene being based on streetwear also represents how youthful she still is and brings out the edgy and bold side of Ellie. This allows audiences to decode Ellie as an artist, accepting our intended message and dominant reading. Our social media is meant to show audiences Ellie’s authentic and confident self, whereas the music video is where she shows vulnerability, and the soft side of her that not many people usually get to see. The digipak is where Ellie’s on and off screen persona come together, as she’s seen in love, vulnerable, yet still follows the same color scheme and style.
Our digipak conforms to old R&B digipak conventions. Throughout the years, R&B has changed drastically. Old R&B conventions include close up shots of the artist, warm tones, muted color palettes, and it was mostly focused on star image. New R&B conventions include minimalist designs, brighter colors, and it’s less focused on the artist and more focused towards aesthetics. After research on different artists and digipaks, we chose to follow the conventions of old R&B, as it feels more intimate and authentic. There are two artists’ that we researched about in depth to further understand how we wanted to create our digipak, SZA and Jhene Aiko. They both have artist focused imagery and follow a consistent color scheme. SZA sticks to soft lighting, subtle text font, and is very often alone in the main image of her digipaks. Jhene Aiko also uses soft lighting, as well as natural hair and makeup, and uses warm colors. We incorporated these conventions into our product because not only does it help the audience recognize the genre clearly, but it also constructs Ellie’s persona. This helps recognizability and sticks to traditional R&B conventions.
Our target audience are people in relationships, aged 16-25, who enjoy emotionally fulfilled music in the R&B genre. Since Ellie is an upcoming artist, which means she’s still mostly unknown by a lot of people, we wanted her to have lots of engagement with her audience to show intimacy and appeal to more people. Ellie follows a visual aesthetic of warm tones on her social media. She’s always posting progress of her music and work, giving everyone an insight of her life as an artist, which makes her very authentic. The captions on her Instagram page include questions like “What’s your favorite track so far?”, so audiences can interact by commenting (Fig 1). She also comes across as relatable to audiences because her captions show realism and emotion, rather than trying to show superiority. Her posts include captions such as; “This has been my little secret for a while, so happy I can finally share it with everyoneee”, and “Things could noottt get any betterr, feeling beyonndd grateful”. The use of extra letters shows that she’s comfortable with her audience, and it makes her feel more human. Dyer’s theory says that the star's image is constructed as accessible rather than distant. We followed this by making Ellie feel like a friend, rather than celebrity, with the use of casual language and emojis. She also has a post showing an image of her on a big screen with the caption “wait…that's mee. My heart is racinnggg” (Fig 2). This shows that she is grounded and has genuine gratitude for her progress, making the audience want to continue encouraging and supporting her. We included hermeneutic codes into Ellie’s social media by giving audiences teasers of songs she had yet to release, allowing them to build anticipation and excitement. We aimed to include all four aspects of the uses & gratification theory, which is diversion, personal identity, social relationships, and surveillance. As Ellie’s products are considered calming and relaxing, audiences can use it to escape the real world for a while, which is a diversion. Ellie’s work is also very emotional and personal, most audiences can definitely relate to her, which includes personal identity. On Ellie’s Instagram, she’s always posting updates on her life and work, giving fans behind the scenes footage, which motivates them to keep up and use surveillance. Lastly, interaction between Ellie and the audience, as well as audiences interacting with each other about Ellie creates social relationships. We also followed the theory of stardom because although Ellie is seen as authentic and relatable, she shows talent by playing guitar and shows the progression of her music in the works.
In our music video and social media, we wanted to represent young couples, new to love or relationships. Our dominant reading is to show teenagers and young adults that it’s okay to show vulnerability and emotions, whilst still being authentic and true to yourself. In our music video, the use of handheld footage and shaky camera work helped make the audience feel the realism and genuine emotions in the characters, as professional, still footage would have made it feel like ‘acting’ or ‘forced’. All of our locations were also filmed in naturalistic settings to further show realism and authenticity. The mise-en-scene for our music video was very simple. We kept our actors' clothing in light colors, and dressed them how teenagers usually would on a day to day basis, basic and effortless. Our main character, Ellie, wore pink to connote love. We also used a mix of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, such as the music in general, and some sound effects to make some of the scenes feel natural and believable, like the sound of a bell ringing or a notification going through Ellie’s phone. Lastly, our transitions in our editing assured we kept continuity and showed the progress of our actors’ relationship throughout the song. Since our couple is heterosexual and is portrayed as ‘perfect’, we did reinforce typical stereotypes of young couples. This was okay with us because as Ellie’s off screen persona in her social media is more independent, we wanted to represent her vulnerable side in this music video.
In conclusion, all of our products worked together to create a sense of brand identity which shows a young, successful and powerful woman in love. Our consistent conventions and technical elements made sure that our message got across to our audience.
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