QUESTION 1: In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our narrative potentially subverts the typical heterosexual relationship between a man and woman because it leaves a negotiated reading for the audience. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Same Love present a homosexual relationship and show that is ‘the norm’ and portray the idea that homophobia nowadays shouldn’t be a thing. We allow and leave the interpretation of our characters to the audience making it an open decision for them. This shows that we are having an inclusive audience and therefore setting a greater target audience rather than keeping it niche, so our music video can be exposed to a greater amount of audience since the genre of pop music targets a mainstream audience.

Pop music video is something commercial to promote the artist; it's meant to provide entertainment for our targeted audience where the visuals and lyrics come together through the given narrative. We used effects like, split screen, also used in Beyoncé's video to illustrate a consecutive role of events that are at the same time in a different environment then they were sitting back towards the end of our music video.

We decided to use the male gaze in order to capture the passive audience who absorb the ideology that we want to portray; portraying a dominant audience view where we present the idea/message we want our audience to take in. During the performance of the artist our setting is meant to represent "real life" encouraging a personal relationship with the characters and being able to relate with their actions. This is a western view amongst women where they are portrayed as sexual beings exposing their sexuality.

We have visually striking editing effects like slow motion to express the ‘moment’ the friends have between each other bringing great attention to the non-verbal communication they have between each other. This is a scene where the friends are positioned in a long shot with a black and white filter placed on top to not only represent the past but show the audience how their relationship used to look like before they had an argument between each other. The reverse of film is meant to capture the 'moment'.

Black and white expresses the past and something that the friends lost, the slow motion acknowledges the great moments in life and expresses the idea that you should enjoy the moment in life while it lasts.

Our video subverts to the 'correct' order of ‘Todorov's theory' because we don't have equilibrium to open our scene but rather go into the disruption where the friends are shown to be arguing and then the music comes into the video. The recognition is when we have a contrast between the flashback and reality. We don’t have an attempt to repair the 'problem' they are dealing with because it's 'over' but the new equilibrium is the two friends beginning 'new lives' without each other. There needs to be an order of things 'going wrong' in order to keep the audience entertained for them to be eager as to how the 'issue' will become fixed. In the same way that in the Ariana Grande Into You video we can see that she is happy because she has gotten herself out of a relationship that she wasn't happy in.

Klaudia Gil

Gender is a socially constructed idea of what is expected from you, that doesn't mean you have to comply with the ‘label’, considering that there are many ways to portray your sexuality, the idea comes from what people "know" and portray it to be what they think it is. It’s not like a sex where there are obvious biological differences between a male and female. In music videos like Ariana Grande's Into You or Taylor Swifts Wildest Dreams, their gender is portrayed through 'obvious' mise-en-scene like heavy make-up, very little covering clothing and once again portraying them to be sexual.

We chose an effective track that is catchy and easy to pick up to that would act as escapism for our targeted audience. The lyrics are very simple and easy to pick up; we wanted to create a narrative that is of, of that in order to show the correlation between the two. It meant that the lyrics had to represent the visuals with the same ideology of how the music video is presented.

We included binary oppositions to portray the differences in personalities of our characters. One character was seen to be more neutral in the way that she approached her friend by not showing emotions as such and not showing how their ‘split’ has affected her as much. The other, who has single scenes all throughout the video, is portrayed to be more caring and seen to be showing, that that has had an effect on her in a negative way. Portraying characters with two different personalities reflects on them being two different people with their own attributers as well as it being more entertaining for the exclusive audience and almost like escapism for them considering that there are no two people who are the same.

We had many different cutaways, like dissolves, between the scenes to express smooth transitions, which acted as continuity editing. An example could be the flowers where they expressed the passing of time and the transitions were close enough that you could see the difference as in how the flowers have managed to change over time. Our ‘motif’ represented the dying of the friend’s friendship very well - in the same way that the flowers died over time, it was significant of the use of symbolism.

Klaudia Gil