Welcome to my blog!

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In This Post:

• Welcome to my blog!

WELCOME TO MY BLOG:

Hello everyone! My name is Christian Zmuda and my production/distribution company is called Chris Sounds. This year I wanted to put forth my best effort, as I feel a personal desire to live up to the standard I set last year after I got an A grade for media. This year we researched a wide variety of conventions that we could apply to our coursework package, these include music video conventions, Social media/website conventions and Digipack conventions. We briefer looked at centering our coursework around Dua Lipa (Hallucinate), however we took issue with how her brand largely relies on sexualisation, opting instead to go for Bjork (Army of Me) whos lack of sexualisation not only offers 4 quadrant appeal, but allows us to play with conventions and explore a unique and quirky visual style.

Throughout the year we created an Instagram, Twitter and website to have a more refined and developed promotional package and to add further verisimilitude. We decided our music video was going to focus more on VFX which meant all of our narrative and performance shoots were done with a greenscreen. This posed a unique set of challenges which we eventually overcame despite neither of us having ever worked with greenscreen this intensely. 

This year I learnt alot about not only the process of creating a music video and promotional package for the artist, but consequentially I learnt alot about the music industry. I also had the opportunity to learn about multiple different editing softwares and website development.

I am very excited to present my blog to you! 

REFLECTIONS FROM LAST YEAR:

What we did wrong:

• Organization
• Bad timing for shoots (losing light)
• 6 months before we had our first rough cut, slow to start
• Didn't work clearly as a partnership for editing 
• Didn't use the same editing software
• Better communication, clearer denotation to each other 
• Lack of clarity on the idea
• 
  

What we did right:

+ Showed resilience 

    + determination to re-shoot and improve the footage

    + changing casting

+ Improved Costume 

+ Improved Font

+ Learnt how to use the camera and experimentation

+ Making use of elements like manual focus

+ Some good location selection

+ Was more receptive to advice

+ Experience with working with others 

Key Goals:

1. Quicker start, final cut by Christmas 
2.  Thorough research.../more detailed blog
3. Clearly linked to genre and... 
4. A clear and specific target audience 
5. Clear denotation when communicating with each other and DB
6. Communicating with each other, cast, etc... at the earliest possible point

Reflective Essay

 

We looked at a range of electropop artists, eg  Dua Lipa, but rejected their sexualized imagery. Bjork’s non-sexualisation has four-quadrant appeal. Our chosen primary audience is youth (both genders 14 - 24); secondary both younger t(w)eens (8-13) and older (24 - 44+).  

  

Through research we found 56% of her audience was male, the other half being female. Although we featured male gnome characters we aren't relying on male personal identification (uses and gratifications, McQuail), which is made clear with the lack of a prince character which often features in fairy tales. However, our female protagonist (countertypical to Proppian archetypes) behaves in a stereo-typically masculine way. When she climbs through the window this subverts the trope of teen boys/husbands sneaking out of a window to avoid parents/spouses, seen in the show Stranger Things (popular with both our target audiences), and her agency. This queers the gender binary (Judith butler) and further pushes for male identification and furthering narrative enigma (gender of protagonist climbing is left ambiguous as it is shot form the back).

Bjork has significant “sex appeal” for a heterosexual male audience, evidenced by comments found under her posts. Our digipack features a close up

of Bjork with her mouth open, and the actor is slim, these are aspects of male gaze we then promoted this on the Instagram we featured it on multiple texts, this was highlighted by the tiling effect (9 consecutive posts make up a single post on Instagram) which is an intellectual puzzle (Altman), however post-feminists argue that this type of sexualisation is empowering. However we consciously reject male gaze; unnaturally coloured lipstick, body fitting clothes (much like the gen z icon Billie Eilish) and a lack of objectifying framing.  

Our polysemic ending validates Vernalis theory that music video is too elliptical to feature a narrative. This was inspired by ‘Wrong’ by Depeche mode and ‘Silver Snail’ by the pixies. This encourages multiple viewings further promoting the package. This is also a conscious rejection of Todorovs 5 stage narrative structure. 

  

We found that a lot of female artists tend to exploit male gaze in their branding (as mentioned, Dua Lipa), but Bjorks brand image largley relies on the queering of the gender binary (eg we feature coloured lipstick on. Although Bjork may sexualize herself in some social media posts we get a sense she has agency over these decisions, this and our clear support for the LGBT+ community across our branding, with rainbow text on the digipack, multiple social media posts promoting LGBT and women's rights, the queering of gender roles in the music video encourages appeal to a Gen z audience who is more woke. We dedicated Instagram posts to promoting the LGBT movement which contained informative captions (uses and gratifications). Young artists see Bjork as a positive icon, eg Lido Pimetina covering ‘Declare Independence’ for sportifies pride event. We also encoded stereotypically feminine attributes with the archetypal queen character (long hair, dress), she is a secondary character in the narrative. The queen character isnt featured on the digipack and only features briefly on a teaser on the social medias showing that we didn’t rely on stereotypical femininity to create a sense of branding.

Our simulacrum of Bjork prioritizes a younger actor to appeal to our primary audience (Uses and gratifications, personal identification), a strategy seen in the Pixies video for bagboy (a younger boy was cast while the band is older). The fairy tale intertextuality encourages intellectual puzzles with our younger audience. The use of teen-speak (hashtags, emojis and abbreviations) helps us create personal identification with our younger primary audience.  

To create niche older audience appeal we intertextualized Rammsteins ‘Sonne’ which presents a darker, post modern take on Snow White (also featuring countertypical representations of Proppian archetypes). Bjork is now an older artist (member of her previous band The Sugarcubes, who was active in the 80s and most of her discography is from the 90s), a large bulk of her audience is likely more mature. More mature audience tend to be more conservative, Bjorks countertypical branding has remained consistent throughout her career so this is likely not an issue.

Because the visuals are drawn we avoided anchorage of any specific location, appeal is widened to a globalised market. Looking at Bjork’s discography we see her music hit charts in multiple different continents. We created audience engagement by simulating a tiktok trend (multiple people lip-syncing army of me) and reposting them on our social media. Tiktok has become a good way to distribute music (seen by the comeback of Fleetwood Mac whos song went "viral" introducing a brand-new young audience to their music). Currently most content and distribution is reliant on fans becoming producers (Keen, Web 3.0).

Convergence (web 2.0) allowed us to film with iPhones at 4k quality, which wasnt possible in the web 1.0 era. This allowed us to engage audiences through direct address, which is now conventional for artists to use (eg our post captioned “loved seeing all your #makeup looks!”). Arguably this allows us to compete with big 3 distributors (Jenkins, convergence culture).

Masque look was kept consistent across our promotional package, costume for the chorus was used in digipack and profile pictures for social media. Having observed bjorks use of non-normative makeup and quirky face coverings, we created a masque and used it in the music video and digipack. We observed conventionally pop/electropop artists (Bjork included) use a lot of colour making this a convention of this sub-culture (Hebdige). We took influence from Bjorks utopia and The Pixies bagboy(scene with balloons) in our use of colour. This use of colour adds verisimilitude to our package and allows us to effectively target a tween audience. Bjork rejects this as she takes influences from many different genres and has created her own brand image. We attempted to simulate this by avoiding anchorage of any genre.

 

We followed the conventions goodwin set out, mainly the reflection of lyrics in the video (multiple Bjorks when at “army of me lyric”, illustrative) and his notion of voyeurism (queen looks at protagonist in the mirror). 

Music Video Final Cut and alt vids

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FINAL CUT:

This is the final music video. We chose to do for Bjorks "Army of Me" for our coursework (see genre and chosen artist posts to find out why). This took alot of work and determination to complete, as it went through a some serious re-drafts, mainly we had to change the Bjork actress to add verisimilitude to our simulacrum of Bjorks brand image (see drafts and itterations of our music video on my video sample/rough cuts post). You can also see the behind the scenes process on my shoots post.

ALTERNATIVE VIDEOS:

Teaser:

In order to promote our music video we created a short teaser. Conventionally these are uploaded on social medias to create anticipation for the music video.

Visualizer: 

This is a short 5-9 second gif file that loops. Used on Spotify instead of an album cover, usually for promotional purposes.

Lyric Video:

This is a video that conventionally was created by audiences, however like most UGC (user generated content) artists are now using it for promotional reasons, mainly to create hype.

TikTok "Viral" Trend:

We a simulacrum of a tiktok trend where audiences lip-sync a part of a song (often the chorus). This kind of UGC is conventionally encouraged by the artist, as it helps promote the music video and their social medias.

Reaction Video:

Here we got our friend to play a fan of Bjork. This is a common type of UGC seen after the release of a music video which further promotes the music video.

Digipak: drafts and final text

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In This Post

• Final Text
• Drafts
• Resources used

FINAL TEXT:

For the final text we followed and replicated the conventions of the digipack that we observed (to see more digipack research see my Digipack conventions post). We made the "Army of" part rainbow in order to add verisimilitude as this shows support for the gay rights movement (the pride flag is a rainbow), it also signifies 

DRAFTS: (Alex)

Version 3:

This version was created as a draft so we could have our actress Sophie re create the pictures of Bjork. This way we had a clear visual guide for her to follow.

Version 2:

By using feedback given to us by our teacher and by looking closer at industry/past student examples we created these new drafts.

DIGI PACK FIRST DRAFT:

Website and social media: drafts and final text

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In This Post:

• Summary
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Website
• Drafts

SUMMARY:

INSTAGRAM: (Chris)

Below is a vodcast I made detaling how we used conventions to create a simulacrum of an artists social media, and how we made an effort to engage with audiences and encourage UGC (user generated content). Above you can click the "Instagram" to see the Instagram.

TWITTER: (Alex)

For the twitter we followed similar social media conventions (teenspeak, emojis, hashtags, direct address) We took similar steps to encourage UGC on that platform through the use of retweets (allows you to re-post others posts on your timeline), specifically retweeting fan art. You can click on the Twitter title above to go to the "twitter" page we made.

WEBSITE: (Alex)

In order to add further verisimilitude to our package we developed a website using the online tool wix (see uses of technology post for more info on wix). The main goal being to serve as promotion for merch, which reflects the music industries shift away from physical sales and downloads as a primary stream of revenue (see more on my industry post) and the Digipack. You can click the "Website" title to go to the website.

DRAFTS:

Initially we blacked out the profile pictures on the twitter and instagram as Bjork did this on her social medias in order to signify her support for a movement to show people what the world would be like without women. Though ultimately we found it was conventional for artists to feature a close up of themselves as their profile picture so we did the same to add verisimilitude.  

We also rehearsed what the kind of language/teenspeak we would use when posting on social media on teams and we received feedback from our media teacher.

We also created initial drafts of the Instagram and Twitter pages. The main points we took to the final texts were that our drafts lacked verisimilitude due the lack of teenspeak and emojis, we also found we didnt have enough audience engagement, mainly due to the fact we didn't encourage UGC or any forms of viral content like tiktok trends and hosting contests. There was also a lack of posts engaging with LGBT and womens rights which we found Bjork is really invested in. 

Here are the draft accounts which we then repurposed into fan accounts to show further audience engagement.

Draft Instagram

Draft Twitter