Media Music Video Coursework Essay - Jake Morosini

1. Jake Morosini For my coursework, I created a music promotional campaign for an artist to the music video Like A Flame.’ Our artist’s name is Gia, and we also created a digipak and social media page for her. Throughout our research into mainstream pop videos, we represented our artist as a strong, powerful woman to inspire younger girls. In the music video, our artist has the men under her control. The men try to please her, and she is portrayed as the authority figure. This challenges convention as in many pop music videos, the woman are seen as sweet and innocent, whereas in ours, she is an authority figure. Our artist sits on a stool in an influential position in the digipak. The lines her body makes are symbols of her dominance, and she is sitting on a chair with her hand on her leg as if she is the boss. We felt that this would present a strong message to those who would like to buy the album. This music video is a form of radical feminism, a perspective in feminisms that calls for radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated. Another radical feminist idea is separatism, which signifies the importance of men and women living apart. In our music video, our artist is constantly pushing away the men. For example, the low angle shot of our artist grabbing a man in the audience tie and throwing him out of the performance. This further amplifies the advocacy of female separation from men. Another prominent form of representation in our music video is Portuguese representation. Our artist is a Portuguese woman, and the women of Portugal are often seen as fiery. For example, the words “I want, I want I want” are aggressively said throughout our music video. Again, this was to show our artists impassion. Another example of this is when our artist is surrounded by fire. She is seen to be very emotional and vigorous. The final form of representation in our music video represents a lesbian relationship. Lesbians in the media are often portrayed as butch and masculine. We decided to represent lesbians as more feminine to show that not every lesbian has to be masculine. We felt that it was essential to include this representation to indicate that all feminine women can be lesbians. It also represents the LGBTQIA+ community as they are underrepresented in the media.

2. It is widespread to create a brand for an artist in the pop genre that is sensual and uplifting for those watching. In our music video, we created this branding by sexualising our artist, making her appear voluptuaries. In addition, her costumes are sexual, and she is portrayed as nude in some scenes, which adds to this branding by making her desirable to audiences. We found that consistent branding is essential for keeping the audience focused and engaged with our artists through research. On the digipak, we kept her venereal by taking pictures of her that would appeal to her audience. Her body is positioned in ways that create a sense of dominance and desirability, such as the v-shaped lines. This would increase sales by building brand recognition between the music video and digipak. We also incorporated the colour red into our branding. We constructed this branding by using a red colour palate. We used red because it represents love, fire, and desire. Our artists’ hair was red, and most of her costumes were red. This makes her seem desirable, as red appeals to audiences and can amplify their emotions. On the digipak, each image is red. We shot our artist in a red jumpsuit that she wore in the music video and had her wear red lipstick. Her playing cards are also flipped over to show only the red cards. The red colour palate would hopefully draw in audiences, and her target audience, which would consist of young girls, would want to replicate what she wears as they aspire to be like her. Her social media is not as sexualised as the digipak and music video is. This is because we wanted her to have a more global reach to be more marketable. Like Taylor Swift, our artist is the type of artist to have many different eras with each new album, and so this era would be about her being a strong, powerful sexual woman who is comfortable in her own body. We decided to keep the red colour palate on her social media as it creates a more aesthetically pleasing theme and grabs audiences’ attention more. According to Dyer, star personas are created by familiarising audiences with visual images of an artist. My group did this by having the same colour palate through the music video, social media, and digipak. Audiences would be able to familiarise themselves with her by looking at her hair and what colour clothes she is wearing.

3. Our music video empowers audiences so that the audiences can vicariously live through the artist. The rich, powerful, feminine, extravagant lifestyle in the music video is something young girls/women long for. For example, our music video consists of our artists glammed up and going out to expensive places, like a cocktail bar. ‘Like A Flame’ encourages audiences to imagine themselves surrounded by luxury, love, and power. Our artist is a role model for young girls and women because they can imagine themselves as her when ‘they get older.’ ‘When I get older, I want to be like…’ is a phrase used by many children still in school, and our artist would be the person these young girls would look up to. Young gay men may look up to our artist because gay men tend to idolise female pop stars. Gay men use women as avatars for themselves, as female popstars are often vital in their femininity. In addition, female pop stars tend to be voices for the gay community. They help gay men feel more comfortable in their femininity, as featuring LGBTQIA+ relationships in the video makes her an ally to the community. The digipak engages audiences because there are reviews from popular reviewers on the inside left cover. This makes her seem successful, and young women and gay men who see these reviews and read reviews of albums would want to purchase the digipak to immerse themselves into our artist’s world. Our social media page contains tour dates, a TikTok, and a link to a merchandise website. Our artist is directly talking to her fans in her tour dates Instagram post. The caption is ‘Pre-Order your tickets now, ladies and gents. She also does this on the merchandise website. This creates a personal relationship with the audience and artist, as it helps the artist engage her audience. Our products engage with our audience by providing a sense of immersion and relatability.

4. We analysed different pop music videos to look at the conventions throughout creating our music video. As a result, our music video included the pop conventions of bright colours, dance routines, performances, fast editing, and narratives. We decided to comply with these conventions as we want our artist to become a superstar, and to do so, she must have some of the same pop conventions as her fellow artists, as this creates familiarity for fans. Inspired by Madonna’s ‘Material Girl,’ we too had a wide-angle long shot of two men and our artist’s love interest watching our artists performances. We decided to do this because we wanted our artist to seem desirable and sexualised. Another form of inspiration is from the Burlesque performance scene. We decided to have dancers doing a similar dance to the one in Burlesque because we wanted our performance to be more extravagant. Our music video also includes voyeuristic images. This is a convention used in female pop videos due to their sexualisation. An example of this is the tracking shot of our artist crossing her legs. Again, this is a sexual movement popular amongst women in the media because it makes them more desirable to men. We also challenged conventions in our music video. Music videos tend to have a heterosexual relationship, but we challenged this and had a homosexual relationship instead. Audiences like to be kept on their toes and engaged in a video not to get bored of it. We invoked investment by first introducing the lesbian relationship in a medium shot of them behind the curtains, where you can see the silhouettes of the two women. We also did this at the end of our music video, where both women are lying in bed. We wanted to keep it familiar to other artists’ digipaks in our digipak to promote a sense of familiarity. If audiences, see our digipak and know that it is like other female pop artists’ they will be more likely to take a chance on our digipak and buy it. In conclusion, I feel like my music promotion campaign was successful. It was successful because our final products were what we imagined. Our key strengths were the setups and scenes. I feel like I did a great job working together with my team and creating the digipak as I was in charge of making it. I learned that in productions, our group needs better time management, as we had a limited amount of time that we ended up pushing past due to our poor time management on the day of the shoot. Overall, the music video was a success, and I am thrilled with how it turned out.