Consent Forms-Year 10/11

We formed a letter of consent for parent to give us permission to allow them on our blogs/the internet.

Challenging stereotypes

Before we came up with an initial idea, as a group we decided we wanted to challenge stereotypes and conventions to make the music video unique to appeal to the audience. Therefore we have included a male protagonist in our initial idea that is chasing a female because in new R&B is using women being portrayed as the sexual object, where as in our music video we want to portray them as being beauty. This will make our music video unique to new music videos and create a differ with the music video that already exists from the song.

Here are some stereotypes that typically portrayed within music videos:

The first stereotype is the empowerment of women, Here Beyonce is shown to be the dominant character of the music video of "Bow Down" and all the male characters obey her, this has recently become a popular front that women put on in their music videos as feminism has become more and more popular,they often create this appearance to target the younger and older audience to see them as role models. Beyonce has used her popular title as "Queen Bee" to target this audience and can taken this to her advantage by create a look that many people will remember.

Here,Chris Brown is sticking the typical stereotype which is where men flaunt their money and wealth and see them selves as the dominant. They see them selves as higher than women and often portray them as sexual objects and nothing more. this means that male artists often create their music videos to attract a dominant male audience of teens-30 year olds who like explicit views of women. This is something that never appeals to women, however with Chris brown often being seen as an attractive artist, women audiences are still attracted to see him.

Within Beyonce's "Why don't you love me" music video she is portrayed as being a domestic housewife who obeys her husband and is crying as she is appreciated enough. At the start of the video she is seen doing chores and blowing up a car engine which shows women in a light of being unable to do male tasks. Whilst she is doing this, she is wearing very revealing clothing/lingerie which shows her sexual appeal. This music video attracts both men and women with both  the sexual reference as well as the empowerment of the lyrics.

Here Rihanna has portrayed her self as the sexual character rather than a male doing it. It is clear she wanted to attract a male audience which is what she did. 

Research Roles

Eboni

• Editing
• costume

Beth

• Location
• Lighting

Adam

• Camera Shots
• props

Costume Ideas

I've looked on Tavonga's Instagram with his permission to seek out what kind of fashion that he is into, this will help my group and I decide on a specific outfit that he can wear during the filming process, I want to use an outfit that suits his style but also follows conventions and popular fashion trends so that he is seen as a typical artist. I have researched what Chris brown and Ne-yo wear on their music videos to see if I could match their styles to Tavonga's style. After looking upon his Instagram, I noticed his style followed certain fashion trends of teenagers and he is often seen wearing the fashionable tracksuit bottoms and often known for his nice shoe sense.

In two of Chris Browns music videos, he is seen wearing a white shirt with a chequered shirt wrapped around his waist, wearing Timberland shoes. This has become one of Chris Brown's statement looks and we aim to do the same with Tavonga's characters.

In Neyo's music videos his outfits are often more gentleman like and seen as classy as he is usually wearing a suit and his statement hats. Where as in some as shown in the second picture he's seen wearing the typical R&B clothing and revealing his wealth and higher class.

Symbolic Link

For the digipak and music video to link, each product needs a symbolic link so that the audience know that that two relate and the understand that the digipak is for a specific artist.I will need consider different ways in for this to happen, I will consider using colour themes, a specific stance that the artist uses or a setting that is from the music video so that when it comes to purchasing the cd, the audience automatically know what artist is it. However, instead of basing the whole digipak on the one music video, I have to consider changing the digipak so that it links to all the songs with in the album.

 This is Neyo's digipak for his ' Years Of The Gentleman' he has stuck to one specific colour theme which is black and white, which also links to the name of the album as it shows class which a gentlemen does. He ha stuck to his appearance being in suits and being on the streets which can relate to all his songs without images being used from one of songs.

 This is part of the F.A.M.E digipak that Chris Brown, i found this to be a successful digipak as he has stuck to a specific 'graffiti' typed digipak that runs through each page so that it can have images from different places but still link to  one album.

Song Choice

After watching over our focus group, we decided to finally choose our song for our music video. After asking the focus group questions based on what artist they would like to see Tavonga to sing, they chose Justin Timberlake, however, after showing them song choices of multiple other artists including Neyo, Trey Songz, Usher,Drake and Chris brown, they said they liked the song Miss Independent by Neyo and found that this song would suit Tavonga style of appearance.

After discussing with my group, we decided to focus on Neyo and Chris Brown and choose between 'Miss Independent' and 'So Sick' by Neyo and 'With You' by Chris Brown. We feel that with these two songs based on love, we'd be able to create a original and inventive narrative due to them being so many narratives and although we will discuss these options with Tavonga to check he's comfortable with this song choice, we feel that these songs will be successful to use.
I feel that with this music video based on special effects in the snow etc. and with us not being able to use that sort of equipment, we would be able to create a music video that would be a unique/original creation of this song. We would analyse the lyrics to produce a narrative that linked in with the song. This would ensure that the audience shared some relation to the music video and because we want to use the uses and gratifications theory,we want to create a music video that an ending that is decided by the audience so that they can create their own opinion. As well as this, because we are basing our music videos on the old R&B, we will be able to create a music video that is like a new R&B video to challenge their conventions.   I feel that this music video is a very successful music video because the producers have used the lyrics of the music video to create a matching music video with some narrative, however, to change this music, we would create a narrative based video with different settings and not creating an image of men being all about woman and sex. With this video having a mixture of choreography and narrative, we'd change this so that it isn't to similar to the original video.

With this music video, the producers have used special effects to create a music video that back in 2009 would have been unique.With the music video being on the chasing of a woman, this challenges conventions with modern day R&B as they see women more as beauty rather than a sexual object, which is what we aim to do as we found in our focus group that women watching a music video with women portrayed as sexual objects feel like a music video is based more on a male audience rather than a mixed audience.

Audience Theories

As a group, we will be concentrating on trying to achieve the Uses and Gratifications Theory in our music video. Uses and Gratifications theory is the theory that places more focus on the consumer, or audiences, instead of the actual message itself by asking “what people do with media” rather than “what media does to people”. It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. Our music video will fulfil my audiences needs by creating a music video that links in to the artists meaning, we will create a video that conforms to R&B conventions however, stick to the old forms of R&B music videos to give a different feel to modernised music. We aim to create a music video that appeals to all audiences so will ensure that no women are as objectified to fit a dominant male audience as much as they would be, neither will we perceive men to be particularly strong or powerful, this will ensure each side of our audience is satisfied.

By concentrating on this audience theory, we have plans to create more of a narrative based music video so that the audience can decide the story an feeling for themselves.

By using iconography of an R&B music video, we can draw the audience to their expectations yet create new and inventive ways to tell the same story; we can position the audience and create a certain amount of what the texts codes actually mean. The text will be encoded by my group and the audience will decode the information. For our audience to take the preferred reading, and enjoy the music video, we must ensure the iconography is accurate whilst challenging the conventions as much as we can without taking the meaning away from the song.

1. Identity-being able to recognise the product or person in front of you ,role models that reflect similar values to yours, aspiration to be someone else.
2. Educate- being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding.
3. Entertain- What you are consuming should give you enjoyment and also some form of ‘escapism’ enabling us to forget our worries temporarily.
4. Social interaction- the ability for media products to produce a topic of convocation between other people, sparks debates.