MUSIC VIDEO EVALUATION

Our brief was to make a music video for a target audience of our choice. We decided that we would have a female target and chose to do the song ’22’ by Taylor Swift.   My part in the production process was to contribute to develop who are target audience was going to be, find a theory to our narrative, do a lot of research into other music videos and link it to intertextuality with other media texts, why we had chosen the genre we did, come up with a questionnaire and write up an artist biography.  We had done a lot of work in lessons to contribute to our research. We looked at other music videos and wrote up what we liked about them and disliked about them so when choosing our genre and song we had a clear idea of what we wanted to consist in the music video. I also researched movies to which I could link our music video to and inspire our music video.

We chose pop as our genre because we know that stereotypically, this is a female subjugated genre and we were a group of two girls so it worked. We kept to the conventions of the actors in the video being young as this will help appeal to the target audience as they will be the in the same age range. Another convention that we decided to include was the link between lyric and visual. At one point when she sings ‘it feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters’ one of the girls in the video has a hat on her head and is looking at other ones. This is not exactly her full dressing like a ‘hipster’ but linking lyric to the narrative.

 One music video that inspired ours was ‘We are Young’ by Tulisa and we used the idea of going around with your friends and having fun because our music video was supposed to be light and airy. To plan our video we came up with the narrative together and we made a story board and planned what locations we would go and film at. When we went to film it, it was okay but not the best. We managed to get some footage and some nice shots during the night. 

One thing we could have improved on is communicating more and going out to film more. We only went out one day so the footage was in the same clothes and there was no lip-synching on the video because we left all the filming too late. One problem we faced during editing was that we were new to iMovie and there were only two of us, but we got the hang of it quickly by asking our teacher and peers for help. Another problem we faced was some of the footage that we had filmed was on an iPhone so when flipped around there were black edges. We realised there was nothing we could do about this as we didn’t have enough footage so we just had to use what we had.

We decided that the video can be shown on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, etc. We also thought that our video can be shown on YouTube, as many teenagers watch videos on there and they find new music and videos on there. In some pop videos, not all, women are seen as sexual objects and we wanted to challenge that, as most of our targeted audience is young females, we didn't want to put anything like that in the video, but instead how good friends teenage girls can be and how they can have fun together. Overall I don’t think our music video was very good. There wasn't enough footage and there was no lip-synching, which was necessary. I think we left everything too late and we didn't put in enough effort. 

One of my favourite shots is when Tasnim and Amira are laughing and it fit with the lyrics because she was singing, ‘were happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time’ and it’s a nice shot of how both of them are happy and laughing and having fun. I think we did try to break pop conventions, as in the music industry there is very much a sexualisation of females by having them wearing very little clothing and I think we attempted to break the conventions by having two friends who get along very well and enjoy each other’s company and are going out together and having fun.

 I think we presented the social groups of teenage girls well because the video consists of them going shopping and that’s what ‘stereotypically’ teenage girls ‘love’ to do. I think we sort of reached our target audience as people in our class could see the clear femininity in the video but I don’t think we were that successful in reaching them. However some of the feedback was on how bad it looked because there was no clear narrative and we didn’t include the things we wanted to, like at the beginning of the video we were going to have girls in school looking bored sitting in class and then when they leave school they forgot about all the stress of school but instead go out to have fun. Whereas the video just starts with the two actors going shopping straight away so that’s another thing i think we could have improved, by adding more footage.

If I were ever to do this again I would put a lot of time and effort into it. I would focus on having a schedule and filming more and having clear instructions and narrative. Also I would have everything down in order and know what was happening at all times and planning effectively. 

Farhana Kadir