CIE critical reflection 2022

The most prominent social group in my music campaign is gender which plays into our music video. Our girl band immediately sets audience expectations given the gender. The music video begins as they are demonstrated dressed in long pink dresses set in a pink barbie room, this creates a archetype where our girl band completely follows gender stereotypes, only to then break them by destroying the set and their girly girl costumes. By adhering to the typical girl band stereotype, it helps the audience gain a greater understanding of the new social group and main message of going against societies expectations to be yourself.

The band’s rebellious acts of ripping dresses, kicking over boxes and spray painting over walls creates an attitude which is appealing to the young teenage girl age group. Although the anti authority tone of the band, we adhere to the gender stereotypes during the barbie pink opening, this music video objectifies women as we focus on close up shots of her legs, face and the way they are dressed in provocative, dark clothing as they reveal their true selves to the audience. ‘The Male Gaze’ theory also applies to our digipak as we reflect an idea of patriarchal views as a powerful female band tries to rebel and challenge the girl band stereotypes as they subvert to dressing in unfeminine, unique outfits. We objectify Lottie on the back cover as she is presented with her legs revealing from her long slit dress, this makes her attractive to the male eye. 

During the opening as the band adhere fully to the stereotypes, however the facial expressions are seen as dismal, unhappy as they don’t look comfortable In their long pink dresses. However as they begin to challenge this stereotype and begin to subvert, we see them change clothes and look happier as they can be themselves, this reinforces the patriarchal idea as they go against the objectifying women views.

Laura Mulvey’s ‘The Male Gaze’ theory is the idea of overly objectifying women to make men appear more superior, we applied this to our music video to create a strong subverting theme, however the way that the women’s makeup and revealing clothes are shot through the lens of the camera, this makes the band attractive to the audience and follows male objectifying views which challenges out powerful, feminist values.

We represented gender in our digipak by positioning the girls on the front cover altogether which indicates they are a band and not a solo artist. The similar themes and colours as seen in the digipak correspond to the rebellious, edgy, anti authors idea as seen in the music video. The album artwork adheres to the music video and creates a correlation, this plays into the audience expectations of gender and target audience by making their album cover seem appealing for the young teenage girls to want to buy. The bright pinks and edgy writing automatically creates a attraction to the target audience and can listen to a relatable band. Guessing from the digipak, you can gain an idea of the genre, the bright, bold colours indicate a sense of pop, however the black and white all girl band with graffiti style fonting portrays an edgy, slightly rock band idea.

We also portray a clear social class of status in our music video. The composition of the band is represented in order of hierarchy. The drummer and guitarists are positioned behind the lead singer, who is front and centred. The close up, long shot durations focus on the lead singer as her place in the band is greater importance than the other members. By positioning her on the bed, above the others in the music video immediately shows her status is of higher importance than the drummers and guitarists below. We also show clear hierarchy in the digipak as she is the only one who’s face is in full view on the front cover, while the other members are covered by the graffiti fonting, we did this in order to make it clear to the audience who the lead singer is. On the digipak, the lead singer is positioned closer to the camera and crouching below the other members in order to gain attention from the audience. On the inside right, we see imagery taken from the music video, where the lead singer is stood infront of the graffitied wall, this tells the audience who is the lead singer, and who is the main representative of their band.

My intention across my campaign was to make an appeal to the audience by creating reoccurring attitudes, values and lifestyles to attract the target audience. We have chosen to reflect to our target audience of young teenage girls demographic through the choices of branding reflected in our elements of digipak, social media and music video. We created a correlation of graffiti style fonting on the digipak as seen In the music video, this creates branding so that the audience can identify the graffiti writing to this band. 

The digipak includes images that were taken on set of the music video, we positioned the lead singer infront of the iconic graffitied wall and took photos which were then posted on the social media, by doing this it creates an appeal to encourage the audience to see the other products in this campaign and builds this sense of community for the audience to participate in.  

We have created a star image incorporating aspects of rebellious attitudes which is reflected in the choice of hot pink and black colour schemes seen in all of our campaign in order to tie them together. The social media pages connect with our target audience, we kept the followers up to date with release dates, behind the scenes, tour dates and sneak peaks to the release of the music video and album. By showing snippets from the music video preview as well as posts about their day to day lives, it allows the audience to feel as though they are relatable to them. This is an example of one of Dyer’s Star Image paradox’s, ‘‘A star must be extraordinary and ordinary”, such as behind the scenes in recording studios, performing live pop up shows, and also their ordinary lives to keep the audience related to them. We followed Dyer’s Star image theory of They have to be both absent and present’, we applied this paradox by feeding the audience a bit at a time on the social media pages, by doing this is kept them engaged to want to know and see more, but not presenting too much that the followers get unoccupied and sick of seeing our account. 

As our campaign is a band, we presented an image of them altogether on the front cover, however we focused on using our lead singer to mainly represent the band. Throughout our music video, we capture close up shots of each of the members playing their instrument while looking attractive to the audience in order to sell each individual member as well as the music. This creates a male appeal as we objectify the band members in the music video. 

In our campaign, we efficiently engage with our target audience by using gratifications, including diversions, personal relationships, personal identity and surveillance, taken from the theory that ‘audiences are not passive, but they are active’. This theory argues that audiences use media texts to provide information and entertainment that they need, we created the campaign in order to provide the audience with pleasure away from their reality. McQuail, Blumler and Brown identified these 4 main groups of gratifications. Our music video glamorises our female band as we use costume, hair and makeup in order to reveal them as appealing and attractive. The bright colour scheme of pink coordinates with the dresses and the barbie set, along with the bring flashing lights to keep the audience engaged. By capturing scenes of the girls legs, faces and body, we objectify them to create a type of entertainment to enable the audience to forget about their day to day jobs and problems, and be captivated by our glamorous, sexy, wild and eye capturing campaign. The main message highlighted in our camping about understanding your true identity and subverting from reality’s normal expectations and be yourself, this is relatable to the audiences who live under society’s expectations. Our audiences can watch our campaign and gain a sense of refection upon their own lives, and the values they follow and feel inspired to be their own person and not feel pressured by societies expectations of girls. 

The digipak engages our target demographic of this edgy, feminist girl band and have a clear essence of empowerment. Our instagram and twitter provides information to the audience about release dates, tours and shows, this creates a thrill for the audience reach. 

Record labels present facts about release dates, tours, concerts, merchandise and more on posters, magazines, interviews and other types of media. We informally mentioned sneak peek previews on our instagram account to gain hype and to the target audience for when the music video and album was released.

We create personal relationships between the consumer and the band by, interacting with the audience through social media, we frequently show behind the scenes insights into the casts own lives in order for the audience to feel relatable to the stressful environments of reality. On twitter, we ask the audience questions for them to interact and respond to using comment sections, share buttons and the chance to join live streams on the instagram account.  

We carefully analysed our song choice and started to gather inspiration for our band campaign, this research helped us to decide our genre as a pop/rock band. I began to independently research female band/artists under the same genre, such as Avril Laveign, No Doubt, The Runaways and Kelly Clarkson. 

By doing this it helped us to gather what stereotypes we either adhere or subvert to, their star image to appeal to the target audience. I followed Andrew Goodwins theory on conventions for a music video to ensure we met these conventions so that we matched our chosen genre. I analysed similar music videos of the same genre in order to better understand what we needed to do. We focused on close ups of the lead singer, created a narrative structure throughout our music video which highlights the message about being yourself and subverting to societies expectations, we included actions in the music video which linked to the lyrics and also focused on the main theme of women.

 All of these conventions were seen in Laveign’s music video which was our main inspiration.

 I saw Laveign’s way of promoting her upcoming shows on her instagram and twitter, so created a timeline of posts and events to post on our social media’s in order to attract hype from the audience for the upcoming release of our music video, we incorporated behind the scenes, day to day life and release dates of tours as seen on Laveign’s social media account.

We used conventions of album artwork for our digipak by including the name of the band, the album name, track list, barcode, parental advisory sticker, legal information and the composition of portraying the female pop/rock band genre by the use of edgy black, pink and white colour scheme with a reoccurring graffiti font.

 Moreover on the back cover we used conventions as seen in Clarkson and Laveign’s back cover where we portrayed our main lead singer in order to sell the star image as she represents the bands whole image. While in The Runaways and No Doubt’s back cover we see imagery of the whole band and their instruments to reinforce the rock genre, however we focused on showing status by only presenting our lead.