Audience: When researching our audience we looked at the age group of the audience supporting "Paramore" and "The Ting Tings".
From looking at these bands who we felt were similar to Fire Drive Tiger, we decided to aim our video at a teenage audience. We challenged this with futher research and questionnaires. We discovered the main age group who liked this genre were aged 15-18. We then had a firm base line to start with when creating our project. With this in mind we then carried on to research music videos that fell into our audience group.Genre: When researching our music video we researched several examples of “Teen Film” and “Pop/Rock”. We felt these were our focus points due to the audience age and the style of the band and music. We used the conventions of "Teen Film", for example, the stereotypical characters of the bully/popular girl and the less popular/geeky girls with a boy to create the love triangle. These characters are the main centre point of our video but we also challenged this convention by having the band itself directly involved in the action. This makes the video more about the band with the story added in rather than the opposite. We also looked at the image of Britney Speares who is a known pop singer.
From researching this we learnt that we would need an element of sex appeal, colour and individuality. We developed this theory by using a single main colour of orange and having the main character adding the sex appeal and the lead singer adding it in a different way. The singer adds to this with attitude apposed to the main character's clothing.
Ideology: The ideology of our piece is based on the music video for "Misery Business" by Paramore. We liked how the band are in the video along with the slutty girl but challenged this by having the singer directly involved with the action. This gives a new effect to the video, the audience start to want to be like the singer instead of the popular girl as the video progresses. We also wanted to set it in a school to suit our audience but developed this by not using the obvious classroom situation and corridor with lockers in. This meant that the audience who were not so familiar with school were excluded from relating to the video. It meant that anyone can watch it. The idea of having the band in the video and involved with the action was something we directly challenged to. The effect is the band recieve a lot more air time and become the focal point.
Institution:
We looked at several varied institutoins when creating our video. We looked at the teen magazine "Cosmopolitan" we felt this was good to research because of the age group it attarcts.
From reading the magazine we could clearly see the main issues involved were sex, men, bullying, self confidence and dress sense. These are the things we try to bring into our video. Sex is particuarly prominent along with bullying. These things will draw in the interest of the viewer because we now know they are interested in these things. Another institution we looked at was Taylor Swift's "Love Story" music video. The title of the song obviously shows the content of the video, the video is fairytale like and is about a man and a woman breaking through their troubles so they can be together. Our video uses this idea of overcoming a bad situation or the 'bullies'. From watching this video we were able to add this idea of sticking up for yourself no matter what into our video which would particuarly appeal to a teenage female audience at school as that is where bullying most occurs.
Narrative: We chose to have the band acting as the narrator in our video from watching how Paramore do a similar thing in their video for "Misery Business". The lead singer has direct contact with the main character, this adds a sense of dramatic irony as the way the singer acts and looks at the character shows, that she knows whats in store for her. This grabs the attention of the viewer. From looking at the film "Mean Girls" we recognised that "Teen Films" centre around 'the greater good' and end with the underdog coming out on top.
We used this convention in our own video to create a sense of happy ending and feministic views. We chose to have shots of the end of the video at the beginning, even though we had not seen this done before, because we felt it would add a sense of originality to our project. Also it would draw in the audience, the shots act as a kind of teaser trailor and makes the audience want to know how this girl can go from getting ready in her bedroom to beaten up on the floor.Representation: The representation of our main character was the hardest thing to get right. We wanted her to appear scantally clad and seductive without losing the interest of our audience. We chose to dress her in a short red dress so that her character was completely symbolic of all of the bad thing she would be doing. For example red is known to be about passion and love, this shows the seduction in the video. The fact you can see alot of uncovered flesh shows she is a confident woman and her heels bring her off the floor and above everyone else. Another thing is she is relatively normal looking apart from her dress and shoes, so the audience knows she can, and most probably will be brought down.
The representation of the lead singer was harder than the main character however. We had to consider the fact she had to appeal to the male audience members but also contrast with the main character to show the difference in view points. We chose to dress her in jeans, heels and a corset top after looking at a mix of Katy Perry's music video for "I Kissed A Girl" and the following image. Although in the video Katy Perry is wearing a lot less than this we liked the idea of the heart shaped corset at the beginning of the video.
We felt it was feminine yet seductive. And with the following image, we felt this look would bring out the rock side of the character and show although she is covering up more than the main character, she can still perform and be sexy.
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