Genre Essay

In Year 13, we created music video. We had to create the music video from scratch – this involved choosing a song and then researching into the genre we had chosen. We choose the song Spinning Wheel by Black Honey. The genre of the song was Indie Rock. We liked this genre because it was different from all the current popular music we had listened to and immediately gave us plenty of ideas which we implemented in our video.

The main conventions of an Indie Rock video are: Chaotic, psychedelic, use of bright colours with a confrontational/aggressive attitude. We were able to highlight our genre through camera work, costumes and editing. We also were able to make our genre clear and recognisable by using the colour pink within the majority of our video and we were able to use the colour pink in our cross media products such as our website and digipak. The colour pink became the foundation theme running through all our products therefore making the brand and styles/genre of the band recognisable.

Through our research we learnt about two theorists – Carol Vernallis and Andrew Goodwin. We were able to implement some of their conventions of music videos in ours. Some of their conventions were applicable to our genre of Indie Rock such as Vernallis’s theory on editing. We used Vernallis’s theory on editing – which involves adding cuts to the beat. We implemented this by adding in split second black scenes that coincided with the beat of the song. These cuts reinforce the beat of the song and adds to the crazy atmosphere needed within an Indie Rock video.

Goodwin’s conventions became a prominent theme within our music video, with us using multiple conventions of his. The main one was used was the use of camera angles. One of Goodwin’s conventions is the use of close up camera shots to create a star profile for the main artist. We wanted to highlight our main artist’s personality clearly and present the confrontational manner of the characters so Goodwin’s convention really benefited our video and allowed us to highlight our genre well. We also implemented Goodwin’s ideas of iconography. Throughout the video and other ancillary products such as the website, we used the colour pink. The prominent use of the colour pink allows the band to be more recognisable to their target audience. It will ensure that if any of their products are seen, for example posters, the bright pink colours will allow viewers to link the band to that product and therefore make the band’s popularity and recognisability increase significantly.

Whilst we did conform to some of Goodwin’s conventions, we did challenge one. We challenged Goodwin’s convention of using voyeuristic angles to sexualize, stereotypically, female artists. We decided we wanted to challenge this because we wanted to portray positive and strong female role models to our target audience. We want our video to empower women and show them that they can be just as strong as men and encourage girls to look, speak, act and dress exactly how they want and not have to conform to stereotypical rules of society. The rejection of voyeuristic angles and the use of close up shots highlights our opposition to sexualising women and enforces our strength. Within the Indie Rock genre there are many strong female artists who do not rely on their sexuality to promote themselves but instead their talent and strength. This is another reason we choose Indie Rock as a genre and conformed to this convention of the genre.

Overall it’s clear that these genre and music video conventions make a good, well finished, multifaceted music video. The use and layering of different conventions can make music videos very poignant and allows the audience to pick up on these messages easily. These conventions also allowed us to put a personal twist on the video and allow for good ancillary texts to be created from it.