. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
Lada Franulovic& Maria Raluca Streang
The style of music video depends greatly on the genre of music it is created for. The colour of the video, locations, editing, lighting and representation are just few out of many traits of styling a music video in response to its genre.
The music genre of this band is contemporary folklore or underground folklore. It is an explosive mixture between old Romanian traditional music and the new beats of today. It`s an eclectic combination that brings together melancholy Romanian folk songs, Romanian unity songs, traditional instruments and the rhythms of trip-hop, dubstep, hip-hop or dancehall. Due to its originality and diversity we decided to make a concept music video. Concept music videos usually have no storyline and have no relation with the lyrical content of the song. The imagery we see is usually surrounded by one idea/concept, however the footage does not have to make sense to the viewer, it can either leave an idea in their head, the concept they were trying to show or in other cases...can just leave the audience confused. Audience often remembers concept music video because they are individual, unique and memorable
Our concept music video challenges the convections because it has a narrative. The model is going through a rebirth (this was shown through exiting the plastic bag) and then later the model’s rebirth is accompanied with traits of traditional Romanian culture. This connotes the actual reinvention of traditions. Moreover we used the locations, costumes and make up to give the model a more modern/futuristic look. We have done this in order to combine the tradition with modern and abstract look, in the same way that the band mixes the traditional songs with modern beats.
However, we did follow the concept music video convention regarding the fact that it is surrounded by one idea, which is the mergence of new traditions of todays society with the old traditions (the costume, the bread, the dance moves)
Another way in which our music video follows the conventions of a concept video is the fact that it is more visually oriented and the audience can reinterpret it in many ways.
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To be more specific our music video is a symbolic concept video where there asre often lots of symbols to build up a meaning, lots of montage of clips and images, light is often used to suggest a mood, pace to represent emotions and meanings, pictures often support and contradict lyrical meanings. For example, at the part where we used the green screen, the pictures support the lyrical meaning. They are abstract moving images that were edited in such a way to represent the craziness. The lyrics at that point say: “Do you want me to go crazy? Why are you telling me that? “ In this case we followed the conventions and the lyrics in order to create a feeling of distress.
Other ways our concept music video follows the conventions is that it is done to entertain the audience and to promote the band. It is mainly focusing on that. The music is the main initiator for the visual images.
Our video is put into the symbolic category because it uses a lot of symbols to build up a meaning. For example: when the model takes the traditional bread it connotes that she wants to remember her roots and when she gives a flower from her, it connotes that she wants to give something intimate to tradition in order to keep existing. Lastly when she rolls the bread, the main connotation is that she wants to share the tradition with other so the next generations won’t forget about their roots. Our video is also fast paced because it is cut on the rhythm of the song; this is also one of the conventions of symbolic concept videos. Furthermore, in postproduction we used fast-forward and jump cuts to increase the liveliness of the video.
The main social issue this video is addressing to is the forgetfulness of our roots and traditions due to our busy, modern, technology driven society. We tried to show by using 2 complete extremes – an eccentric white doll that represents the modern day and the historical outlook through the use of props such as bread and the apron – that we can mix and match today’s culture with the cultural traditions. Our views should be open to diversity and mergence of old and new.
The social group we were mostly representing is the youth, because elderly are too strict with the traditions and it is hard to change their views while youth is more open to new ideas and has more contact with media in order to actually see the music video.
Moreover, here are few examples how we managed to represent the youth model. Firstly the locations we choose are urban, therefore the environment where most of the young people our found. One of the locations is located under a bridge where one can find various graffiti that were done by young artists. The last location we used is the city center and that is where at any time of the day young people can always be found. Lastly, the movements we used that combine traditional dance moves with the modern ones, are quite similar to the moves that todays young generations usually do when dancing in the clubs.
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By Maria Ioana Streang
