• How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
• How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
• How do your products represent social groups or issues?
• How do your products engage with the audience?

A brand is a particular company under a name who sells their products to whatever market they are in. They tend to focus on selling the lifestyle to someone who uses their product, to engage the audience. It needs to be easily recognisable and you want it to stick in peoples head.

Dyer argued that star image is manufactured and is artificial and that individual stars have their own unique selling point. As exclaimed in Angel Delight’s mission statement, she states that her goal is for her ‘style to be as memorable as possible’ and that she is ‘not afraid to push boundaries and stereotypes’. We focused on this idea when selling and conveying our brand (the star) to an audience by making her overall look, social media pages and identity as eyecatching and as welcoming as possible.

All of our products in the package work together to promote our bold, unique artist extremely well in my opinion. The ongoing colour scheme throughout all the products is something that we focused on selling and mentioned in our mission statement, which is one of the most stand out features in each product. It is extremely key to have a running theme throughout branding a product,  the childish pink colour scheme being ours. Hall suggested that audience decode ideology so when viewing our brand they will decode the message of the colour scheme.

On top of this, we had the idea to convey a doll-like effect throughout all features of the package too to further convey this childish and playful theme in our star. Some examples being the name of the digipak is ‘nursery rhymes’ which is a term associated with children playing. Also the running theme of teddy bears throughout the music video and shoots further evidences this playful theme. These features all tie together to create and promote our overall brand.

We watched many pop music videos on the theme of love in pop and gathered key conventions and ideas that we wanted to convey in our own video. 

One example of a music video we watched was the K-12 series of music videos by Melanie Martinez – our favourite being The Principal; she was our biggest inspiration MES wise as we love her whole brand, colour scheme, pantamomic bright graphic makeup, themes and everything she promotes so being inspired by her is where our ideas stemmed from. 

Some conventional features we followed when conveying our genre in our music video was an increase in the editing pace towards the end of the video, fast editing pace is what Barthes would argue to be a semic code, it would be communicated to the audience as a sense of urgency, a build up to something significant. We followed the typical conventions as we thought this was a sensible idea as suggested by Altman and his Blueprint theory of knowing what is popular and sells a genre to an audience. 

‘Hating love’ was the key theme in our video therefore we had longshots and aerial shots to show our star being happy about love and skipping around then also contrasting extreme close up shots of her being angry and fed up almost acting as flashbacks throughout the video. These worked well as you really notice the angry emotion in her face because of the close up angle. Having repetitive anger shots of her ripping up paper and tearing apart the teddy bears portrays her destructive nature and rebelliousness alongside the unconventional mise en scene. 

We had an amplified music video as we took the themes of the lyrics to make the story about hating love and used exaggerated acting to portray this. We challenged the conventions of a typical pop music video as we had a different narrative structure and wanted to portray a series of different emotions, whereas conventionally it’s traditional to have a new equilibrium of a ‘happy ending’ in a love themed video but we had binary oppositions of love vs hate. 

Lacey states that audience have certain expectations, they want ‘the same but different’ this is considered a ‘repertoire of elements’. We have fulfilled Lacey’s statement of the same but different by our conventional use of MES in the camera angles and lighting, yet used unconventional MES  features in the outfit, hair and makeup looks throughout. Another symbolic unconventional feature we challenged was the use of the pink filter and pink clothes throughout the video, we did this in a not so girly way to symolise her unsterotypical nature – this makes our video stand out from competition in the market.

Looking at a variety of famous artists  album covers’ gave us an understanding for what the conventions are and what looks iconic. We looked at artists with a genre similar to ours, eg Melanie Martinez, Clairo and SIA to gather ideas for our digipak shoot. From these, we were inspired to use pink and girly imagery to match the stereotype of pink being associated with girls and the power of the female gender.

To match this, we enjoyed the idea of our star being heavily made up of over the top mise en scene to match the look of the music video, so this is exactly what we did. To help us convey this idea, we dressed our star as an unconventional ballerina; we put her in a tutu with fishnet tights with excessive jewelry and black doc martens to represent her as rebellious. These features also represent her as playful and unafraid of criticism. 

Dyer states that a star is both ordinary and extraordinary; suggesting that every artist is similar yet has their own musical and visual identity; different from the stereotype. In our digipak, we followed this idea by putting a twist on a typical ballerina’s look.

We relied on our audience understanding what Barthes would call our cultural code of the ballerina and music box imagery and the demographic of our star. We were passionate about  representing a theatrical and playful theme, this being a ballerina in a  music box which we thought was quite a childish and unconventional route to go down and hopefully the audience understood this by the amount of MES we encouraged on our model. 

Our Instagram page is a very visually engaging site which encourages other Instagram users to follow. Blumler and Katz suggested that there were four reasons, collectively known as Uses and Gratification, this theory described consumers and an active audience. These four are information, personal identity, social interaction and entertainment and we have taken these all into consideration when creating our social media site. 

We have designed the site so it is a blue/purple theme to entice our active audience and attract new consumers. We are very passionate about the social interaction side of this theory as we believe this is most important for maintaining followers so they don’t lose interest. Fans have been commenting that they are liking the content and are asking questions about touring! The more we post, the more interaction they have with us as a brand. We post teasers using polls and stories to get something back from our fans. 

We have many forms of engagement on our social media page from big announcements, like releasing the tour dates -which followers can share to their own stories to reach more people.  We also frequently do competitions, one of them being the chance to win tour tickets, to increase the reactions on posts and to feel a connection and engagement with the fans.

Some examples are doing polls on our stories to increase social interaction, or releasing the Love Club music video by sharing a link and asking people to comment on the post what they think, or with a specific emoji to signify they’ve listened to it or like it which creates a sense of personal identity of those commenting on the post. 

Hall suggested that there are 2 processes of the reception theory. First, the producer encodes ideology into an idea and wishes it to be viewed in a particular way. In this case, we encoded a specific colour scheme and special filters, called ‘san francisco’, and the idea to have a pastel, over saturated theme running throughout the social media page. After this, the audience then decodes the message or demographic, but they also bring their own ideology to the product which can be considered as personal identity – the viewers own opinion. We wanted them to decode it as being very girly, different from the stereotypes, female empowerment message. 

The last few lessons working towards the deadline of our music video and our draft 4 being uploaded, we found a technique which worked perfectly for getting the colour correction shots identical throughout the whole video to portray the genre and our star perfectly. The method we used was saturation curves to eliminate colours we didn’t want in the shot, and to enhance the colours we wanted to exaggerate to portray the message of the narrative further.

In the document, i’ve included a screenshot of what our saturation curve looks like, to show the colour spectrum of colours we did and didn’t want. This is a really useful tool that I have learnt that I didn’t know how to use a few weeks ago.

Another skill I have learnt while browsing indesign is how to use an adjustment layer, which turns all the clips beneath the layer to identical. Examples of why you’d want to make everything under the adjustment layer the same being;

• If you wanted the same effect on lots of different clips eg. shadows
• If you turn the saturation and colours up on your clips, it helps to make them look symmetrical
• Cool graphics on the video, eg lyric fonts/drawings
• Frame borders

Figuring out how to use the adjustment layer was very helpful to mine and Millie’s video, especially with the pink theme to help convey the narrative and colour scheme of the star image, and this skill will be very beneficial to my knowledge when working in premiere pro in the future.

Here is my first in depth explanation of the skills I used in premiere pro whilst colour correcting and editing my music video (draft 1) I have put together a google document.

In the first image is the unedited clip, with the pink filter which we put over the lens so the clip is permanently pink; because this was quite blurry due to covering the lens with a sheet, so we sharpened the image, brought out the blacks of the image to enhance her makeup and facial expressions.

In the second image it shows the curves that we used and were trialing and testing which were a good experiment as they didn’t work as well as using the colour wheels which we eventually used for the final draft.

The final 2 images are the development of how far we’ve come using the saturation tool, as shown in the bottom image it is very overexposed and too saturated as her facial features are way too pink. The 3rd image is the final improved colour corrected image, with the perfect amount of saturation in certain areas.

It was one of our main themes portrayed throughout the video for Millie to be pink as this was her star image for her to look extremely girly, so we had to portray this some how in every shot. In our feedback from other media students, this shot was criticised for being over exposed, so it was very important that we nailed the colour correction.

Here is a tutorial showing how to use the lumetri colour effect on clips within premiere pro. The first half isn’t useful but towards the end when he uses the curves and the exposure tool is where we learnt how to use curves to eliminate the greens and yellows from the clip so we had a purely black and white background but the model herself was still the pink and purple colours to make her stand out.