M3

 M3- media 

The song I have chosen is Life in the Fast Lane, a classic country rock song from the 1970s. This means that the conventions of the music videos at the time were purely performance based in order to show the artist and the band for marketing reasons. Because of this, I included some performance to conform to the genre conventions.

The typical conventions of the performance aspect of the video are closeups of the lip-syncing actor to include iconography.  This described the use of close ups for marketing reasons; often in music videos the label will request for close ups of the singer to be plentiful in order to promote the song due to their high status. Because of this, I included eye level shots of the actor where he was alone in the room with warm lighting as opposed to harsh lighting, this lighting portrays the actor in a positive light therefore abiding to the genre conventions and providing the iconography. However, I purposefully subverted the conventions of the genre for most of the video and included a narrative in order to appeal to a younger audience. The narrative I used is more so a story than a narrative with no underlying meaning to avoid complication, the fun nature of having a storyline once again appeals to the younger audience as well as captivating the attention of older people who will hopefully enjoy the subversion of the genre conventions. The conventions of videos of this genre often include dark lighting to create a more edgy mood to the video especially if it is a rock song. To conform to these conventions, when recording the actor for the lip syncing, I set up a warm light rig on one side of the actor to create a shadow on one side of his face. This conforms to the conventions by creating the dark and edgy feel to the video while also displaying the actor positively. I decided on this dark tone to the music video in order to conform to the male gaze. I chose to use dark colours in the music video since these appeals to the male audience that I am aiming for my video to appeal to.

For the shots of the car, I filmed in daylight while there was no rain and I aimed for it to be in as similar conditions as possible. The reason for this was that it allowed me to keep the continuity as well as making the video easy to watch instead of having harsh lighting which would annoy the viewers and make the video hard to watch. This way my video appeals to a wide audience and is easy to watch. I used Stuart Halls representation theory as a way to avoid stereotypes in my music video. One way I did this was by not including violence in my video not only to keep to the 12A rating but also to avoid the traditional stereotypes of violence in robbery storylines. 

Talk about narrative