Genre Essay

'Media texts rely on audience knowledge of generic codes and conventions in order for them to create meaning.' Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre.

Laura Barsby

                Considering Andrew Goodwin’s method of categorising products my music video would be a mixture of performance and illustrative. This means that as well as having a ‘live’ band set up I also used a narrative. My idea was always to have these parts meet in the middle; giving a reason for the performance shots therefore we used the same character for the singer and the protagonist. This format of performance and illustrative as well as using the lead singer within the narrative is a convention of many music videos, especially within the rock genre.

This leads me to that the genre of our song was rock/pop, with an alternative acoustic sound and narrative lyrics. Knowing this then lead to research of rock/pop music videos in order to find conventions that we could recreate within our own product. The main convention that we used was using both the performance and illustrative categories that I previously mentioned which can also be seen in Flyleaf’s ‘Sorrow’ and Evanescence’s ’My Immortal’. We also used the black and white effect for the flashback scenes (which in itself is sometimes used within film). This added to the slightly ‘gothic’ and dark aesthetic and also made it easy to differentiate between scenes within the video. The video for both ‘My Immortal’ and Automatic Loveletter’s ‘Hush’ use black and white too but in a different way as the whole of each video is shot using that effect. This gloomy aesthetic convention was also met by the lighting we used which was mainly ambient (making sure that we shot the outside shots on an overcast day). As well as the setting other mise en scene was important in terms of convention such as costume. Within a lot of the music videos we researched the look was pretty similar and therefore easy to recreate. We used a feminine grunge style, pairing Doc Martens with a black lacy dress, a leather jacket and heavy eyeliner.

The lyrics of the song meant that we had a strong basis for a storyline as well as an idea about the emotion we wanted to portray. Theorist Tom Ryall suggested that the types of conventions found in genres might be grouped within certain categories. The first of these is narrative. My video has a clear narrative structure because there is a beginning, middle and end with a resolution. Also, my video is closed because the narrative does not carry on to a sequel. Another category is representations and my video adheres to this idea because there is one main character who carries the main narrative and there are two band members but that is all. I have used some conventions which could be seen as stereotypical for a female in this genre such as costume and make up. Also, the emotion portrayed fits with the genre and may be seen as stereotypical. The ideology within my video is that there is a sense throughout my music video that music can be a kind of 'salvation' because my protagonist character finds hope and overcomes her problem by singing.

Rick Altman argued that genre offers audience a 'set of pleasures' and emotionally I think my music video may adhere to this too.  The video is supposed to have a clear and relatable amount of emotion portrayed from the main character for the audience and this is depicted through camera angles such as close ups, location and the special effects as well as the actual acting.