Category: Component 3

• How do your products represent social groups or issues? 

• How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions? 

• How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

• How do your products engage with the audience? 

Branding is the way a company makes an ideology that a consumer is able to buy into. For music bands or artists, rather than the company holding the brand image, the star acts as their own brand. Our goal for our brand is to show anarchy and resistance which is fueled by rebelion and difference which can make people feel feelings of mistrust of power, resentment and resistance to authority in order to aid the common people and issues that the government rejects. Within our music video we hold a clear narrative of the student holding resentment towards the authority seen in the video, the teacher, who abuses him verbally and punishes him relentlessly until the student stands up to him, which shifts the power dynamic between the two, showing how the common masses need to rise up against those in power that oppose their progress. Our digipak uses hellish imagery throughout the 4 pages to describe the school and to an extent society as a kind of nihilistic prison that traps us within it to a lifetime of sorrow and misery. Finally our social media page holds a different side of our band as we show a strong charged campaign for change through our announcement regarding our charity collaboration, where our band aims to help save the habitats of animals on the brink of extinction, signifying how our band hopes to enact social change for a better society throughout our entire metanarrative.

I researched the Grunge rock genre and analysed the conventions of music videos within the genre. One particular one I took inspiration from was Note to Self by From First to Last as it contained many of the conventional fast paced cuts and overlays on the screen to make it appear quite glitchy and disrupted. I also took note from various other music videos to come up with ideas in regard to how different members of both the band and the narrative act, such as how the bassists will typically move around a lot in beat with the music for the band whilst the main character is extremely anti-authoritarian and anarchic in the narrative leading to the message of rejecting authority and embracing recidivist values.. This repertoire of elements (Nick Lacey) all come together and form the genre of grunge rock. In our music video we have a costume change from the student who goes from someone who is trapped in a place they wish to escape from (in this case detention) to someone who has broken free from the shackles that bound them to it (the teacher). Narratively we took inspiration from many 80s and 90s American teenage coming of age films. This is signified in the quick fade from the narrative being in monochrome to being in full colour. Another part of our music video that we took inspiration from was the overlay on the band when they’re in the studio. We first found this as one of the stand out aspects of MES in the song ‘Letter from a Thief’ by Chevelle. We took this blueprint and expanded upon it by making the overlay occur throughout the vast majority of the performance rather than just small scattered segments as it is a deliberately disruptive, anarchic, artsy convention.

Our goal for our brand is to show anarchy and resistance which can make people feel feelings of mistrust and resistance to power in order to reject the stereotypical authority figure. Presenting our stars as being genuine in their beliefs and believing the message they’re putting out helps to avoid any mismatching representation that could appear from the star image. For our star we seek for them to appear as being, what Dyer would call, extraordinary people among the ordinary masses as they are these freedom fighter types of people that have their own personal, social and political beliefs that are quite radical, being born out of anger at the faulty norms of society. These stars have the power and influence to spread that message through their music to other like-minded people. Within our digipak we represent the gym as a hellish prison, which also links back to the 

whole school and in turn, society. This is a key message throughout our media package however in the digipak the metaphor is shown more as we include a person’s eye being possessed with a pentagram through a crack in the door on the front cover with this same person’s hand trying to escape the gym on the back cover. To add to the MES of the main hallway, I added some symbols and figures on the walls to further drive the symbolic code of the gym being hell. On both the back cover and the inside cover on the left, the Semic code inside shows it as very red and demonic, which acts as the main signifiers to present the inside as a type of hell with the outside, although not pretty, being better than where they’re at now in a similar sense to ‘The Wall’ by Pink Floyd.

A social media page is a tool used by different artists in order to further advertise and broadcast their messages. Social media pages will typically be made to look visually appealing, which promotes the AIDA process within the audience. Social media pages also appeal to the audience’s Uses and Gratifications as they allow for social interaction between fans, reinforcement of personal values and identity as well as being a hub for entertainment and information for the audience to go to at any time. Due to the influence of the modern, digitalised era, the audience have a much larger impact on the star outside of sales and artists need to play into this dynamic in order to survive, so artists will encourage an active audience to engage with their products, decode and then spread their messages to those that may not have heard of them before. Throughout our advertising campaign we have encouraged interaction with our audience. The most direct means was the Q&A we held in the build up to the release of willows, where we got questions from the audience that we answered on our story. This type of marketing allows for the audience to get information regarding our next release, as well as creating a level of social interaction between the audience and the band according to their uses and gratifications. One other post that encourages engagement is our tour poster, which helps us to engage with our audience as concerts allow for audiences to feel a sense of belonging among the community of fans which helps reinforce their own social identity and encourage interaction. Another key post is the announcement of the name and release date of the album. In this post we reveal that there’ll be several other announcements before the release of the album which’ll help build up interest over time and encourage the audience to come back for updates according to the AIDA theory where we build a level of interest until it turns into desire, which leads to the audience taking action and buying the album.