Our music video uses the forms and conventions of music videos as it demonstrates particular Bhangra genre characteristics. Like most Bhangra songs, ours is lively, colourful and contains some references to the Punjabi culture where Bhangra was originated. It contains Bhangra dance moves. Some of the moves are famous and easily noticeable that it is a Bhangra dance. The main character, our main focus, is dressed in the Punjabi suit along with the four Bhangra dancers in the studio. The Punjabi suits that the girls are wearing are of mainly yellow, green, red, the colours that are quite popular in the culture. Accessories like Indian bangles and bindis are also shown in the video for cultural references.
Our music video shows no relationship between the lyrics and visuals. In this way, it challenges the general convention of such music videos. In most Bhangra music videos, the artist is performing, usually lip syncing. Often such videos cut between narrative and performance. We decided not to follow these conventions because the lyrics were quite a negative view on women which we feel contradicted with the positive energetic dance vibe. The reason for not showing the artist/singer is because we wanted to challenge the convention of music videos. Our music video is therefore concept as well as performance driven. The idea is that anyone no matter of what age or race they are can still have fun and dance to this music. The main character in the video acts as a medium introducing everyone to Bhangra music and dance. She is giving out happy, energetic vibes making people dance with her as she dances along the way to her Bhangra class.
Like some music videos, ours include brief opening and closing sequences with ambient sound and a little dialogue from the main character at the start and an elderly bystander at the end.
There may be a hint of intertextuality with Bollywood movies and music videos which only audiences who have watched Bollywood movies might recognise. For example the close ups of the bangles and shawls are often shown in typical Bollywood movies when there is a song in a celebration or wedding scene.
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our music video contains a lot of cultural elements of the Bhangra music genre. The main character and four other dancers are all wearing Punjabi dresses and accessories. There are close ups of putting on the bindi, bangles and shawl. The first shot establishes the character as well as the Punjabi/Indian culture. The dancer and the main character in our video are performing well known Punjabi dance moves. The colourful lighting used in the dance scenes in the music video is red, yellow, orange and green, which are the colours we have used as a theme in all of our products.
The colour theme of our digipak was inspired by the DVD cover of a hit Bollywood movie “Om Shanti Om” as well as being the colour theme for all of our products. The colours go really well together and symbolises spring. As Bhangra began as a folk dance to celebrate spring, the colours would help establishing Bhangra music. Again the floral patterns would also connote spring and also in the front cover the patterns are in henna colour which relates to Punjabi culture. The silhouettes of different dance poses represent the video as a dance video and also links to one of our shot in the music video.
The colour of the name of the song is in similar colour to the Punjabi dress the main character is wearing so people can link the two. The colour theme follows on to the inner sleeve of the digipak. It contains information about Bhangra and Dr. Zeus and also has the original plus the translated version of the lyrics to the song so that people have better understanding of our product.
Since the magazine advert is intended to sell the digipak, we thought of taking a picture of the actual digipak on the table or with other digipaks. After drawing few drafts we thought of a picture of the digipak on the shelf amongst other hit albums in a music store. This tells the audience that it’s out there to be bought and connotes that our music video is as worth as the other featured popular music videos next to it. The main focus is at the centre of the picture where our digipak is. Our digipak is in colour where as the others are in black and white to put more focus and attention on our digipak. The texts are similar to the ones on the DVD cover to establish it as the brand. The colour theme is also kept similar to link all the products together.
Overall, we used the main character with her particular pose at the end of the music video to be our brand image and we have this image in all of our ancillary texts. The colour theme is in all of our products.
3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our target audience is possibly everyone who enjoys listening to new kind of music and likes to dance especially who are living in Britain. We do not have specific age range because we do not want to narrow our target audience market and we want to show that Bhangra is for everyone. We conducted questionnaires on 30 people and took one on one in-depth interview of 6 people all together. The results concluded that they prefer brilliant storylines and feel good factors in music videos. They did not like voyeurism in music videos as it gives negative impact on children and repetitiveness is found boring by the audience.
Looking at the target audience research, we thought of making the music video fun by adding bits of humour because we found that they do not like seeing depressing and boring videos. We have used lots of quick cuts between the shots to keep the audience attentive to the music video because in our audience research we found that they do not like repetitiveness because it’s boring. The lighting in the dance studio is colourful and funky giving a good energetic effect on the dance moves making it more groovy and enthusiastic because our audience wanted feel good factors. Since our target audience are people of all races and age, we have represented most of them in our music video like the two kids looking gleefully at the main character dancing along the street as well as the middle aged black woman and older man. The settings in our music video are places that are familiar to our target audience for example fish and chips shop. This sense of familiarity helps the audience relate. This is appealing to the audience because in our research we found they like watching videos which they can relate to.
Our audience feedback which we gathered from Facebook and YouTube and also group viewing in the class, was mostly good. Most people liked the whole concept of the video and were entertained by it. They said it was close to a professional level. This was before we coloured the video. We used basic warm effect to colour the video so to make it look professional. They liked the editing and camerawork. They also had good response to the scenes for example they laughed at the park scene. This is a good sign because that was the exact reaction we wanted for that particular scene. They complimented on how well we managed to get the public to be in our video and how well their reactions were caught in the video.
We had good feedback on the digipak as well. The audience said it was edited at a professional level. They said the images used were good representation of the music video. They liked the silhouettes and the floral patterns because it goes with the theme. They all link to the Punjabi culture and with each other. They also liked the composition of the digipak. The magazine advert was improved with the help of audience feedback on the two drafts. The writings on the drafts were not too clear and the picture was very busy and not too focused on the digipak.
4) How did you use media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?
In our planning stage, through the internet particularly YouTube we got ready access to watch two music videos (per person) of our choice to analyse them. We looked through different artists and songs for our music video, listening to songs through CD players and YouTube, MySpace, and several other websites. Also using the internet search engine (Google), we also searched the background and history of the genre of our music video and wrote up a subject matter analysis where we also analysed few other music videos related to our music genre which were also available in the internet. We did this to make sure that we got the correct background information and to receive some ideas of the forms and conventions of the specific genre music video. We searched the lyrics of the songs in the internet and tried to find its translation in English since the song is in Punjabi. Although we found the translated lyrics of the original song “Aa ne Kuriye” over the internet, the lyrics seem to be a bit different in our song which is a remix so we requested someone who is a Punjabi to help us translate it. We also under took an in-depth interview asking the audience’s view point of a good music video. We typed up the results of the interview and their analysis in Microsoft Word and put it up in our internet blog at http://www.blogger.com/ .
In fact, we have put up everything to do with our production work up in the blog in order to keep a record. The blog is a very efficient technology to keep record of our work. It allows us to do anything from typing our work to uploading a video. It is also organised, it has label clouds which like a book marker gets you to the exact page you are looking for. Since some things are better recorded with images, we have also uploaded a lot of pictures which we took while working on the production.
Before doing a storyboard, we went on a recce. We took few pictures of the location so it is easier to visualise different shots and angles.
As the director, after doing the final proposal I sketched a storyboard of our music video. Blogger also enabled us to make a video of our own so I scanned each frame of the storyboard separately and uploaded it on the blog and combined our song to the storyboard. This enabled all the other people working in the production visualise what I had in mind so they would understand my directions better.
For shooting, the camera we used was Canon XM2 digital camera with automatic/manual focus/exposure and widescreen capability, plus an on camera microphone. This modern technology made the quality of the music video to a high level. For the shots in the dance studio, we used 2 redhead flood/spot lights and coloured filter papers to give colourful lighting which added fun effect on the shots. As Chaiya our main character was originally assigned as the camera person, as the director I had to take over the role as the assistant camera person her sequences. The park scene was very difficult but with the help of tripod we overcame. We had few other difficulties too but we overcame them as well.
Eleanor was assigned to be our editor and she did most of the editing for the video and we were also in the editing suite while she was editing most of the times to help. We used Apple’s Final Cut Pro to edit our music video. This software was not too different to the one we used last year so it went smoothly. We used lots of reverse and slow motion effects which made the music video look funny. We used the sound mixing effect to make the sounds at the beginning and the song blend together.
For the DVD cover, we organised a photo shoot, the camera used for this was Sony DSC-H10. This made the quality of the pictures to a high level. Then, we used Adobe CS4 Photoshop to edit the cover. Photoshop is a latest technology for professional editing. The software helped us editing the picture that cannot be done in other editing software. For the magazine advert and the inner sleeve of the DVD we used Microsoft Publisher. For the audience feedback, we uploaded a rough cut version of the video in YouTube and Facebook asking people to comment on it and also showed it to a group of 24 people in a class for direct feedback. This was really helpful as we could improve ou products and get feedback from people all around the world.
Overall, we had great experience through this project while having fun and working really hard at the same time. I think the music video is done at a professional level and so are the ancillary texts.
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