Once as a group we had chosen the song, 'Ellie Goulding- You my Everything' we began creating and brainstorming the image that we wanted for our artist.
As our song of choice is from the teenage programme skins we decided that we wanted our music video to be based around this idea, which includes grunge clothes. But we also wanted our artist to have some glamour shots, with nice makeup and more feminine clothes so we decided to combine the two.
We mainly drew inspiration from the character Effy from skins in some shots she looks grunge and her makeup is messy, in others she looks glamorous. As you can see by the left image from a photo shoot that we did for our tour poster, we used grunge makeup to promote our new video 'You my everything' as this is the look throughout the video but used a feminine outfit and setting with the pink and white umbrella. We feel that this challenges typical media conventions as most women in the media industry portray themselves as very feminine and are afraid to break into new looks which is why we wanted Grace to challenge this stereotype conventions of our target audience we decided to make our digipak very pink and girly to attract our target audience. We conformed to the conventions of an electronic pop video in several ways, in this video by Tiesto, which is the same genre of our video, there is no particular narrative (the same as ours) and this seems to be the case for most videos of this genre. This is no narrative it is either performance based throughout or shots of people having a good time not doing a lot, for example the Tiesto one just follows two girls in a car. We also conformed by making the main focus of our video performance and included lip syncing as a strong theme throughout, this is a key aspect in many videos of the same genre as shown in the video below:
We decided to use our video to challenge the forms and conventions of over sexualisation of women in music videos of this genre. By
doing this we didn't stick to the stereotypical outfits. For example in the Calvin Harris video above the first image that we really see is of a woman behind you, you cant see her face and this represents as more of an object to look at rather than a person. Throughout our video Grace was seen in non suggestive outfits, although the genre of the music is Electro pop we decided to make Grace's look more grunge, as music videos of this genre women are not represented as sexually as they are in pop videos.
Grace's Colour Scheme
Did we conform to conventions in our Digipak?
By Looking at the Eliza Doolittle Digipak you can see several similarities between hers and ours. She is also an artist of the same genre as ours it is fair to say that we pretty much stuck to the typical conventions of an electro pop artist when it came to our digipak. The digipak includes a song lyric sheet like ours, the CD does not include a picture of the star on it like ours. Although Eliza Doolittle's CD cover is slightly more interesting than ours with the fun colours, this may be the brand that she is trying to portray. At the bottom of Eliza Doolittle's there is small text which includes her record label and the rest, just like ours.
Looking at Katy B's album cover who is another artist similar to ours (in the electro pop genre) hers is a mirror image to ours. We conformed to conventions her also, as many electro pop albums that we found had a simple picture of the artist as the front cover, like Kay's and Eliza's which makes the cover all about them.
Finally Ellie Goulding's digipak is very similar to ours, it includes a picture page just of Ellie, like ours, it also includes a lyrics page and the CD is very plain.
The challenge forms and conventions of electro pop digipaks we decided to have the album name as the main focus and Grace's name in smaller writing. This is to make the album less about Grace and more about the actual album its self, to make Grace appear less obsessed and so people remember the album name and are talking about the album rather than Grace as she has already been established as an artist and it is the album that needs the publicity. The only difference between ours and other Electro pop artists digipak's is that our barcode is at the bottom where as others are at the top and side, this may be so the barcode does not distract from the names of the record label etc that are featured at the bottom.
Andrew Goodwin Theory & Our Video
Did we use or challenge conventions when making our website?
