Sunday, 8 January 2017

Intertextual references- EDITED AS OF 21/04/17

In our music video idea we have taken many different influences from a variety of music videos.
This extends to our choice of camerawork as well as our mise scene which includes the different characters costumes. For our choice of camera work we took influence from Tove lo's music video for habits. In our music video we plan on having a recurring pov of shot throughout the aforementioned to allow the audience to experience everything that our main character will experience but it also allows for them to have different perception of the events that happen in the music video as we plan to have different point of view shots from each character and then seeing whose point of view is most important and contains the most information about the events of the party setting. After filming and editing our music video we eventually chose to have one specific pov which is the protagonist's played by Emily Harvey.


In Tove Lo's music video for Habits throughout the video the most frequent shot was an eye level shot but this mostly exhibited the actual singer who was the subject of the video instead of what she was seeing but throughout the video it also exhibits her perception of her surroundings and allows for the audience to almost see what she is seeing and exhibit her experience of her life and the events that happen within it. Although this music video does not use the exact camera shots that we want to use it did give us the inspiration to use point of view shots in our video as we thought that this would be an efficient way to involve the audience with what is happening in our video whilst still distancing them from the events. By having some mid shots and high angle shots this shows a variety of camerawork instead of having a constant point of view shot as we want to be able to show that when we have a different characters point of view it has subtly changed but that the audience has noticed it isn't the same persons point of view it could be another bystander's view. With this in mind the video that showed us that point of view shots were capable within a music video was by The Prodigy called 'smack my b**** up' which was the only video that we could locate that uses point of view shots effectively whilst still keeping the audience interested and conveying the story. Although we didn't end up with as many point of view shots as we had originally planned for we did still have them quite frequently throughout the music video to make it obvious to the audience that the characters perspective has changed. We wanted to have Point of View shots as we thought that this would make the piece more individual and original compared to a previous music video for the song we picked. Tove lo's music video uses frequent eye level shots effectively which allow the audience to see the main character and her reaction to the party.
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Another inter-textual reference that we included in our music video was a reference to a the film Mean Girls. This reference was made in our character choice, Bella's character, who we decided to base off of the character Regina George. In our music video this character wasn't stereo-typically wearing pink, she is in fact wearing black as we felt that this was more appropriate to our initial grand narrative. But her characters body language and attitude towards the main character depicted that she wasn't necessarily the nicest of people towards any characters apart from her close friends. We decided to base one of our characters off of a mean Girls character as it allowed us to have variance in each of our characters that an audience would instantaneously recognize. As well as this it would also be a character that the audience could relate to which opposes our main character who is completely indifferent to the situation that happens around her as well as being completely pulled in by these characters who encourage her to take part in their activities. This is similar to the character Regina George's actions as in the film she has a way of persuading Cady and the others to become similar to her.  The character Regina George stands for people who are higher class and not as ambitious which helps for a wider audience to relate to her and the entire music video.

As well as our Mean Girls inter-textual reference being included in most of the scenes in our music video as well as being part of the catalyst of our music video. We included references to Miley Cyrus's We Can't stop music video. This is shown by our use of the red plastic cups which although are a typical stereotype of American house parties, they are also featured in Miley's music video for Can't stop. The red plastic cups generally have connotations of parties and people having fun they are  normally a recognizable sign for parties. We decided to use red plastic cups as they are instantaneously recognizable to teenagers. Although this is generally known as an American tendency for parties we thought that it would allow for us to broaden our target audience demographics and make it more relatable to a wider audience of teenagers. Although Miley Cyrus' music video isn't the most appropriate video and is aimed at a slightly older audience we took this element from it to make Red a significant colour in our music video as the majority of it is very monotone colours, the red stands out and makes it memorable to the audience.

Lastly, we used The Breakfast Club as an inter-textual reference due to us originally planning to have different stereotypes in our music video. This was to make it appear more interesting and to widen our target audience and the different types of teenagers that could relate to our music video. The Breakfast club is a great example as they use this effectively through the clothing choices which for the main character, John allows him to rebel against dominant ideologies of education and authority. The directors choice to portray stereotypes in the main characters allows for the film to easily develop the characters and to make them more identifiable. In the planning stages of our music video we had similar stereotypes as The Breakfast club as it made it easier for the audience to identify each character, but when filming these stereotypes ended up changing due to costume issues and our original ideas changing. There were a variety of different characters in which although we struggled to accumulate actors we managed to develop the characters and make them individual whilst still ticking to our genre conventions for our characters.

This shows that there are inter-textual references throughout our music video even if they aren't the most obvious or displayed how people would expect them to be. It also shows how the inter-textual references that we include, stick to our genre conventions.

1 comment:

  1. A detailed blog post, but it needs some work. Firstly, the Tove Lo video doesn't use POV shots - POV shots are when we feel like we're looking through the eyes of a character and seeing their world. Secondly, I'm not that convinced that your protagonist is making a reference to Mean Girls - we don't see much of your protagonist, but from what I remember, she's wearing black boots - no pink in sight!

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