“Analyse one of your coursework productions in the relation to genre”

The coursework production I have chosen to analyse is my A2 music video, my music video is in an indie rock performance video. The song choice is ‘last nite’ by The Strokes. The simple performance video is set in a dark empty room on a small stage.

The indie rock genre can be seen as a large genre and can be interpreted differently by different bands across a spectrum ranging from the rock end of the scale with bands such as Kasabian to the more indie pop end of the scale with bands like The Wombats. Genre is a huge part of any media text, whether it is a music video, magazine, television programme or even a full length film. Genre outlines what the media text will be like and who will enjoy it. People will always enjoy particular genres, the people that enjoy the desired genre therefore become your target audience, so in my case I was aiming my indie rock genre at an indie rock audience.

I chose to make my music video a performance video and this meant my whole video be filmed in one place on stage simply filming the band perform the song. Before filming however I had to plan how I would film it and edit it once filmed in relation the genre. Things I would have to take into consideration are the mise en scene, narratives, characters and representation. Along with these are the conventions of a video, the main convention I needed to follow were the convention of movement and fast paced edits. I achieved this well, not one shot was any longer than five seconds, and the achieve an added element of movement and speed in my video I used the ken burns cropping tool on the editing programme (iMovie) that I used. Back to my previous points of mise en scene, narratives, characters and representations these aspects are also equally important in attracting the target audience and creating something that fits in the intended genre. Firstly the mise en scene, The indie rock genre can be seen to challenge the conventions of  pop music, with high budget videos which is why my video, is in a shabby worn down practice room to show the band is about the music and not commercial value. Secondly the narrative, my video does not particularly have a narrative being a performance, the closest I could get to relating it to a narrative would be todorov’s theory that my video starts with an equilibrium as the singer walks on stage, disequilibrium when the performance gets faster and the microphone stand gets thrown on the floor, and then equilibrium is restored again as the singer walks off. Thirdly the characters are an important part in relation to genre; although they are real people as soon as they are on camera they become characters, it was important to get my character to look right for my genre. In the indie rock genre artists like to perceive themselves as ‘working class heroes’ and nothing out of the ordinary, despite the somewhat cocky attitudes, which is why the dress sense was very casual, I went for a britrock vintage look with brands such as Adidas originals and Fred Perry and Puma classics, which can be seen worn by bands such as the enemy and oasis. Finally is the representation part, within my video we see the male gaze (laura mulvey) represented along with star image theory (Andrew Goodwin) towards the lead singer, the use of extreme close ups and bright colored jacket to help him stand out on stage are all to help with the preferred reading of the video. This preferred reading is that the lead singer along with the band have made a success from doing something they love and that people now see him as a role model. This is evident when you look at any bands really, The Gallagher brothers from oasis are probably most famous for this but any artists are going to be promoting a star image.

I didn’t actually challenge any of the conventions of my genre, the benefit of genres is that it means that there is a preexisting audience out there that will be ready to consume to production, whereas if genre conventions begin to be challenged audiences differ and may not be as strong. My target audience was indie scensters and hipster, I came to this conclusion using UK tribes a website that shows what different groups of people like, so my aim was to feed the audience what they already like.

Overall as a music video for a specific genre I succeeded in fulfilling the required genre conventions. I had to follow the conventions to successfully achieve the preferred reading the target audience would enjoy watching. The lyrics to visuals and charismatic speed of the video helped concrete the genre conventions into this video.