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Evaluation Of My Coursework During the creation period in which we created our artist, we created a music video, Instagram page and a digipak to help advertise her. We called her ‘Nova Reign’ and her song was called ‘Golden Hour’. After studying into conventions and looking at numerous theorists, we constructed a campaign that would advertise our artist as sensual and refined. Contrary to some stereotypes yet keeping her in the eye of the ‘male gaze’ to keep accustomed to audiences. In our research into mainstream R&B videos, we chose to represent our female singer in a non-sexualised manner in order to engage our female audience. In all of our different scenes we decided to have different outfit changes, however we deliberately did not choose revealing clothes or showcase her body to the camera. After looking into the theory on the ‘male gaze’ by Laura Mulvey we chose to go against this theory to try and engage a male audience. We had our artist wore a male blazer for one of our scenes to try and contradict the stereotypical look of a female in the music industry at the moment. We wanted this to appeal to female listeners wanting a powerful female role model. This is very similar to Ella Mai as in her music video ‘Trip’ she wears an oversized tee-shirt. In our social media posts, we replicated this same visual effect that we had in the music video and digipak by including images of our artist in oversized items of clothing in a casual setting suggesting her more casual approach to social media and her appearance. We thought this would be a good way of establishing new listens that disagree with gender stereotypes. On the digipak we established a similar design and mood to keep all of our projects really cohesive with the artist. We did this as we want to make sure our audience is not disappointed with the outcome of the music video as the digipak would accurately display this. We thought that this more neutral appearance of the artist would appeal to the younger generation as gender specific clothing, accessories etc. has been discussed as ‘toxic and limiting’. In the media, younger people are often represented in quite anti-social and argumentative ways. However, we felt it was important to subvert this and therefore, on her social media page we included posts of her embracing her youth and displays pictures with her friends out laughing outside sitting on a bench.
It is very typical to create a brand for an artist of high energy, as this is often popular with a youthful demographic. Conversely, in our music video we constructed our branding by featuring lots of slow-motion clips of our artist turning her head or adjusting her body, we put these clips on her story. The regular costume changes to a variety of neutral-coloured items, as well as the low-key orange lighting additional to this branding by making her seem powerful yet relaxed, calm, and laidback. Throughout our research we understood that consistency of branding is important to create a clear and solid message for an audience. So, on the digipak we replicated the orange branding from the music video by using editing software to add an orange hue surrounding our artist, and a more candid image of her looking out towards the camera. This would create brand recognition between the music video and the digipak, which would hopefully increase sales. On our social media pages our artist posted about her everyday life, along with short videos of her during the music video process and her at photoshoot to help develop her social media page and digipak. Dyer believes that star personas are constructed by familiarising audiences with the visual image of the artists. We used repeated wide angels of our artist throughout our music video, as well as on her stories and throughout the feed on Instagram. These wide shots will familiarise her audience with her iconic and unique style and create a memorable image. Our music video offers realism in places for audiences, providing viewers with more casual and normal settings like a living room and dining setup, this helps our audience understand that this artist is no different to the viewers. However, we also used surreal setups such as have a wall of clocks and standing in front of a large pendulum, this helps engages our audience as it breaks but reality from imagination in the music video to keep the viewers’ attention which seems to be a very common technique. Audiences may watch this and take pleasure in the whimsical visuals and lyrics about how they ‘…caught me at the golden hour’. The social media pages continue the combination of realistic/imagined settings by posting things of similar aspects, which helps keep the same theme throughout all of her online presence. The digipak engages our target demographic of teenage girls or girls in their early 20’s through the use of an informal mode of address on the inside panes, where we featured a message from the artist to her fans, using colloquial language such as ‘Get excited darlings’. This would also give readers a feeling that the artist was directly communicating with them, making them feel as though they have a deeper relationship with her. The back cover of the digipak, as well as other posts on the social media pages, offer a more formal and
informative tone, giving audiences much needed essential information such as her website address, record label information, and how to download her music online. This factual information is significant as it helps to motivate audiences to access the right sites online, and therefore increases profit. After reading about multiple theories of people like Andrew Goodwin, we found that our music video genre (R&B) is typically displayed by including slower visuals and more emotive singing to the camera. We wanted our artist to seem lower key and urban, so we decided to conform to these conventions by using soft, dark lighting, little dancing, and a lot of close-up shots of her face to emphasise the importance of the lyrics in the song. We wanted to keep the same aesthetic of our music video in our digipak. However, our music video is based around a specific colour palette which is demonstrated throughout the music video and digipak. Artists like Ella Mai and SZA theme their music videos on colour palettes as well which we took inspiration from. We had yellow walls and low-key orange lighting which made the music video have a more serious and sultry setting. We chose to stick closely to the themes of the R&B genre as this seems to be an extremely popular stylistic choice at the moment. We chose to use Steve Neale’s theory of the audience watching something fairly familiar with element of individuality, such as our artist sitting at the table looking at herself. We believe that this was the best aesthetic for our song and would gage our audience the best Social media pages made by real artists such as Jorja Smith often post images of herself to help give the impression that they are fun and friendly, such as images with her and her friends or pictures of her at different award-winning events. We felt that it is important to establish a clear genre in the marketing materials to help set expectations with an audience, so on our social media page we posted a behind the scenes picture of our artist in more comfortable clothing, drinking water away from the set. We felt this communicated the realistic outcomes of being on a music video set, which helps our audience establish our artist more relaxed and unphased lifestyle. To sum up, we amde a well-defined brand for our artist, which we thoroughly thought out during our pre-production stage. Which encouraged us further to create a music video, digipak and social media page that would relate with our target audience. We combined multiple social issues discussing gender, ethnicity and age which let us to experiment with marketing but also challenge conventions.
