In what way does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions?

I will be exploring the codes and conventions of indie pop and how they relate to our music video. Firstly we will focus on our characters within our music video; there is the main male lead, the female lead and then the hostage. The codes and conventions of the normal female and male leads of an indie pop music video is for them both to be good looking, youthful and well dressed. When it comes down to the male alone he normally has dark hair and when it comes down to the female lead in the music video, they usually had lighter hair showing a light vs dark kind of scenario. Let’s focus on the male lead to start off with. Taylor Wooltorton plays this male lead character in our music video, I believe his appearance suited the role of the lead as he is a good-looking man and he fits the star image behind the music video. Thus Taylor fits the conventions of other indie pop videos and here is how.

In comparison to other indie genre characters, Taylor fits in with the normal conventions of indie pop singers just by exploring the features of his face and hair alone. To begin with, Taylor has the longish hair in which a majority of indie pop singers have as well, with the flopped to one side kind of style much like the lead singer from Scouting for Girls, Jack Penate and Mika’s new look.

But in all fairness we thought we could not copy their styles directly, so we challenged the convention in the slightest as the more backwards pulled look would be much better as it suited Taylor’s appearance more and also supported the independent feeling behind our music video.

We also thought it would be a good idea to keep Taylor close to clean shaven throughout the music video so that he can suit the indie pop genre even more and relate to other artists such as Mika and the lead singer from Scouting for Girls. The age of our main actor is rather important to, as Taylor is only 17 this shows that he is doing something even more independent and new for the pop system

Taylor in costume and in music video on the left and out of music video to the right

and is in a sense bringing something new to music by being so young. His age can also support the feeling behind a star image as the singer can be very relatable due to their young age as the singers audience would be the same age or near the same age of our 17 year old singer as the audience for the indie pop genre is people of the age of 14-20. Taylor’s clothing also supports the indie music genre as he wears an unusual mixture of formal and informal clothing to show his unique taste in clothes and how they suit his music by being different.

Taylor shown wearing his mixture of a casual and formal outfit much like the band members from Mumford and Sons, seen below in this image also wearing the waistcoat, formal/informal informal.

There are only about three main locations within our music video, a wooded area, a music room and a large hall.

We used these specific locations to also emphasise the indie pop feeling behind our music video, we used the music vroom to show his pure love for music and how it is a huge factor of his life thus being in a majority of the music video. We used the natural woods to show his natural love for music and the indie genre and the way in which he can be looked upon as a naturally good singer, making him a role model for aspiring singers to be as good as he is one day therefore supporting the star image behind our music video. Then there is the large hall in which the fight scene takes place, this was more to show the loneliness between the two main characters and how it will always be just

Top left woods, top right music room and bottom is the hall.

them, supporting the realistic independent feel behind this kind of music. Some of them are locations also used in other indie pop music videos.

Tom Odell in “I Know” on the left in the woods and Lawson in “Juliet” on the right demonstrating other indie pop genre artists using the same locations as us, both of which offer the same kind of context behind their songs as our song. For example Tom Odell’s I know was about a love in which the singer had lost, this links with the love theme in our own music video, making a solid link between the two. Then there is the Lawson video which context is based around a deceiving woman who is only after money, leaving men in heartache, thus linking once again to our own love filled music video.

Within our music video we successfully relate back to Goodwin’s theory by:

Giving links between the lyrics and the visual appearances within the music video.

When we were planning our main product, we knew that we had to include this within our music video to make it enjoyable and repeatable. So firstly we picked out the lyrics in which could easily be shown on screen and thus we decided one of the best would be the word kiss in the line “A kiss to regret falling every step”. We decided it best that we had our male lead and female lead kiss at this point and establish their loving relationship through us actually seeing it but also the way in which the kiss falls in time with the lyric actually saying kiss at the same time. This creates a relatable relationship between the audience and the characters as the audience may feel that the characters relationship interesting and relatable. We also used this in other points in our music video such as the line “I’d run away from myself too in a heartbeat” and at the point of the word “heartbeat” our main chracter symbolised a heart on his chest as a visual link. We also see it when the line “I want you” comes up and we have the lead singer show a sign saying “I (Heart) you” to visual symbolise as to what the singer meant through the lyics of “I want you”

We have been relating back to the genre of indie pop music

We knew that the best way in which we can relate to our potential audience is to understand what they already enjoy in indie pop music videos, so we decided it best to make sure our video could relate to some of the other indie pop music videos we knew by using some of their codes and conventions. So we had a look at some of the other music videos and we saw Tom Odell’s “I Know” video and we thought that their use of some of the woods shots very creative and wanted to use them ourselves as we knew that we were planning on using the woods at one point ourselves. So this was a good thing top include as we felt that it related well with the indie pop genre.

We also saw another idea from the music video “Goodbye Mr A” by The Hoosiers as within that music video there is a strong superhero feel and this is something we wanted to use in our own music video so we explored that music video and used their idea of a hostage in the video to implement into our own video. The reason we used this is because of two things, one is to make our video relatable to a fellow indie pop music video but also to show something different in our music video by not following the whole comedic feeling behind the “Goodbye Mr A” music video and instead

going for a more serious route.

Included solid references to other things in media.

Indie pop music videos often contains references to other pieces of media whether it is film or games, we thought it best to use some kind of media reference in our own music video. We see this

through the use of the “Joker” from “Batman” bag worn by our lead singer in the music video to show our audience a relatable media factor. Also this relates to the lead singers villainous behaviour throughout the video and thus is like the Joker. We also see this again through the partially similar to Batman’s mask worn by our Main character.

We are using a solid amount of star image:

Music videos in the indie pop genre often use star image to their advantage and upon creation of our

products we made sure that we also used star image to our advantage. Within our music video, we made sure that we always used a lot of star image from start to finish of the music video as it creates a solid establishment of who is the person singing and also creates a relationship between the audience and singer as they will begin to understand who the singer is through seeing him a lot. We see this in other indie pop music videos such as Maroon 5’s “Misery” and “If I Never See Your Face Again” videos. In both of these videos the lead singer is somewhat idolized by being in the music video a majority of the time, being the one character who has the centre of the screen practically all the time and is normally the best dressed. So after seeing these videos we knew that these aspects would help our video.

We also used the same ideas for our ancillary texts and we knew it would be best if we used star image once again much like other indie pop artists magazine adverts who also use star image effectively. An example of this is Ed Sheeran’s advertisement for his “+” album and Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” album. We were inspired by the way in which the adverts idolize the singers face and therefore we made sure that the singers face was important in both our advert and digipak, even if it is hidden or something, the singers face is still relatable to both the music video and the other products.