EVALUATION

Evaluation

For ‘Under The Table,’ we focused on the social issue of toxic relationships. We found this interesting as it meant we could express our artist’s emotion visually and creatively through colour and lighting. This aesthetic choice represents the isolation and silencing that people, particularly women, feel when in unhealthy relationships. By using colour to represent the emotions our artist is unable to express to her partner, we tell the viewer that it is okay to feel like this. Furthermore, the red and blue sequence towards the end of the video, followed by the artist addressing the audience and breaking the fourth wall, tells the audience she is about to express these emotions in a more confident way to her partner. Here, we show the viewer that any romantic relationship must have good communication to work; this exposes whether the two people should continue to stay together, or if it is potentially harmful for them to do so. We also tell the viewer that this is okay if it does not work, through the conclusion the artist reaches with the issue at the end of the video.

Our music video creates a sense of branding through the use of colour theory to represent emotions. The use of red and blue in the projector sequence serve not only as the inner conflict of our artist’s emotions, but also the internal battle she has with herself as she feels vulnerable towards speaking out to her partner. The red and blue ink establish a clear ‘brand’ for the music video; we used it as imagery for our Digipak, with the red representing strength and anger and the blue representing vulnerability. Red and blue are prominent colours throughout the video, with the bathroom scenes consisting of blue surrounding our artist and red gradually seeping in around her as she is consumed by anger. This establishes a clear message from the artist, as well help the viewer invest in the artist’s emotional narrative. Overall, these elements of our video relate to our contemporary target audience of today, who value self-expression in music videos as part of their experience of consuming music.

Our product engages with audiences through different mediums. Firstly, our music video makes use of different settings within the house to convey different messages to the audience. For example, the bathroom represents a ‘safe space,’ a well known trope for female characters in media. These different settings engage our audience as they must decode what they see in order to understand our artist’s story. Our application of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media is relevant to our audience’s engagement with our product, as it is defined as ‘cool’ media, with them needing to ‘fill in gaps’ to understand the meaning of the video. 

Our music video was distributed through YouTube, therefore is available to a worldwide audience through the internet. A variety of ages are able to access our video, which is good as the target ‘alternative’ audience ranges in age. We also created a physical product for ‘Under The Table,’ through the form of a Digipak, as well as a social media page where fans can access the artist’s posts, merchandise and tour dates. The Digipak helps our audience engage with the artist as they are able to purchase a physical product and therefore experience a sense of connection and loyalty to the artist. Social media allows for an extension of this connection to the artist, as consumers are able to access the ‘world’ of the artist through their online presence. The images presented on the artist’s social media offer a carefully curated narrative, serving as imagery for the artist’s brand and the story of the album itself. We did this through the use of projector imagery such as the red and blue colours and lyrics from the song to paint a picture of what the audience should be expecting from this artist’s work. This was followed by the actual release of the album and finally the tour and product. This feeds into the audience’s emotional anticipation for the music video, as well as the journey of the artist and their story through music.

When completing our target audience research, we found that the ‘alternative’ genre was generally equal in terms of gender; however, we found that a lot of female artists often have a higher number of female fans than male. This is because a lot of female consumers who listen to their music often relate to their lyrics about shared experiences through a female perspective. This affected our social media creative choices as we used messages from the artist to the fans, as well as interactive posts they could comment on and share to make our artist more relatable to her audience. We also included a trailer for our music video, featuring a lyric from the song repeated alongside clips of our artist in the video. This creates a relatable narrative the audience can easily put themselves into through the engagement of social media.

Our video can be seen as unconventional for the ‘alternative’ genre as our portrayal of the relationship or social issue in the song is viewed on-screen, instead of referenced through imagery. A lot of ‘alternative’ artists follow this convention to provide their fans with ‘breadcrumbs’ to piece together a narrative using show don’t tell. We decided not to follow this convention in order to show the psychology of our artist and her relationship with her partner. In terms of Andrew Goodwin’s theory about music videos, however, this could be seen as conventional. His theory states that conventional music videos have a link between music/lyrics and visuals, which we followed in our music video. Examples of this include mentioning of wine in lyrics and visually, as well as the relationship represented through the characters sitting at the table. All of this creates the representation of the artist, including the use of voyeurism, in which we see the artist at her most vulnerable in the video; the intimate aspects of her relationship.

Another way our music video is unconventional is through the use of bold colours to tell a story, rather than conventional muted colours of ‘alternative’ music videos. This is often seen in ‘alternative’ music videos to depict a mundane view of life, without any lenses or enhancements to how we see the world. We chose to be unconventional here as our research showed that our target audience enjoys stylised music videos with a sense of nostalgia through colour. These two factors challenge the conventions of our genre by making the music video more memorable to watch and giving it a bolder aesthetic, which in turn helps us to market it.

To conclude, this project has helped me understand the sense of branding that goes into the creation of an artist. I have learned how branding affects an artist’s social media presence, as well as their designs of physical copies of music, such as Digipaks. Overall, I have a better understanding of the creative process an artist goes through to achieve this, as well as how to present social issues and successfully engage with my target audience.