Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our music video for Vulfpeck's song Adrienne and Adrianne, we conformed to and challenged many conventions of real funk music videos. These included:

The Narrative

Most funk music videos tend not to have a clear narrative, and instead focus on performance based videos. This is seen in videos ranging from indie funk videos (Vulfpeck) to professional funk (Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars).

 

Funk artists tend to have performance videos as it reinforces their musical credibility and proves that they can play their instruments or sing. For our video, we thought it would be better if we didn't take ourselves as seriously and instead made a video with a comical, ridiculous narrative. We felt this would be better, as Vulfpeck don't need to reinforce their musical credibility because they are an indie band. This means that proving that they can play their instruments isn't important because they're making music for entertainment. A much larger artist, such as Bruno Mars or Mark Ronson, might receive criticism if it appeared that they weren't playing their instruments or singing their own songs.
Adrienne and Adrianne is an indie funk song. Indie funk tends not to be dance music like traditional funk. This worked in our favour, as it meant that a solely narrative video wouldn't seem out of place. This is because narratives are becoming more common in indie funk music videos. For example, Thundercat's Them Changes is a narrative based video.

 

The Visuals
The visuals were something we both conformed to and challenged. Funk videos normally tend to have bright colours, and these bright colours are normally contrasted with solid blacks from things such as lights being off. Both bright colours and solid blacks are seen in the video for Michael Jackson's Don't Stop Til You Get Enough.

In this video there is a contrast between Michaels Jackson's black tuxedo and the bright colours that constantly change in the background. Funk artists use bright colours like this to reflect the genre, which is almost predominantly dance music, so having vivid imagery like this fits well with the audio.

In our video, the bright colours are present at the beginning. However, as the video continues and it gets darker in tone, it also gets darker in terms of visuals.

These screenshots show similar shots at the start and at the end of the video. By the end, the colours are a lot duller and there is less contrast. The colours that the character is wearing are also a lot darker compared to the beginning, going from blues and whites to browns, greys, and blacks. We deliberately chose to have the bright colours disappear throughout the video, because it was supposed to reflect how the narrative got weirder and darker in tone as the character gets tormented by his clothes.

Mise en Scene

This convention ties in with the narrative of our music video. We chose to have the mise en scene in our video reflect the narrative. This meant, because the video revolves around a person in their house, that the house would look like a normal house. To make it just seem like a normal house at the beginning, we would fill each shot with general clutter that someone would find in their house. For example, boxes around the character's room, towels hung up in the bathroom, and notes on the fridge. We could also show the passage of time through the mise en scene, as parts of the background would change when revisited.

These screenshots show the fridge the first time it's seen and the second time it's seen. Clearly the note and magnet have been moved, as well as a new note being added entirely. There are also small changes that reflect the narrative of the video. These are small things we thought we would add, where clothes would be piling up in different shots.

We added different clothes into these shots, like shirts, socks, jumpers, jeans, etc., to reflect the story that the character is getting overwhelmed with items of clothing.

Mise en scene in funk music videos tends to be reflective of the general theme of the video. For example, the mise en scene in Uptown Funk is meant to fit with the quasi-70s theme. This is done through the design of things like neon signs in the background and the car that appears halfway through the video.

In terms of having the mise en scene fit with what's happening in the video, we conformed to that convention in our music video.

Digipak

Our digipak. 

We also conformed to and challenged conventions of funk digipaks. One convention we challenged was having the music video and album artwork thematically or visually similar. Ours contrast very strongly, as the music video is bright and comical, and the digipak is black and white and appears to take itself quite seriously. This is done as a satire of over-the-top serious album covers, and contrasts heavily with the music itself, which is very upbeat.

Our music video and digipak combination contrasts with a real music video and album combination by an indie funk artist, Thundercat.

The cover for his album, The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam and this screenshot from his video for Them Changes (from the album) are very visually similar. The rest of the video also has dark silhouette imagery similar to the album cover.

The satirical contrast of our digipak and magazine advert challenges conventions of the funk genre, however, the actual satire element is something we feel conforms to the funk genre, as satire is very common in funk.