Post Modernism: How we engaged our audience

Post Modernism in terms of music videos basically shows the rejection of reality and a basic narrative and in its place has a mixture of different elements and ideas from other sources.

There are 4 main elements to Postmodernism which we have tried to incorporate into our music video:

Rejection of a linear narrative:

Our music video gives an ‘anti-narrative’ approach as we are start by telling a story but then throughout the video we cut back in time to give a feeling of reflection. Our music video is based on the story of a man neglecting his daughter and after his death is being shown what he had done, and then showing his reaction to this. This is why we feel cutting back in time gives the most visual way to represent this. Near the end of our music video the story is then rewound so providing a different way of seeing a story, we did this to show our audience how the mans feelings have changed throughout the course of the video.

Visual spectacle:

We have tried to create a visual spectacle for our audience to engage them in our video and to grab their attention. We have created a different aspect of the usual convention of a song referring to love or lost loves, our video contains aspects of family relationships which aren’t as common, therefore providing something slightly new for the audience. Also the way we have created the story with someone over looking their own life gives a surreal aspect to our video. We have also used images of clocks going backwards which gives the connation of going back into time which looks quite interesting. The story, then rewinding provides an interesting view for the audience.

Ambiguity:

There is probably going to be a lot of ambiguity in our music video but without actually seeing all of our filming it’s difficult to pin point certain parts which could be viewed in a number of ways. Our lyrics however are very ambiguous there are many lines that when Ciara and I tried to analyse them we couldn’t come up with a set meaning for example, ‘sixty years of sorrow, he got five or six of bliss, left my mothers, mother without so much as a kiss’. These lines confused us as the way it is worded we were unsure if the father left ‘without so much as a kiss’ or if the mother left ‘ left my mothers, mother’.

Intertextuality:

When we started to think about Intertextuality in our music video we were kind of stumped, as we couldn’t think of anything that we made reference to, but when we sat down and went through our lyrics and what we had planned for each scene a few references came to mind. Our main thought before we started storyboarding was that we wanted to create a ‘Ghost of Christmas past’ effect, to portray reflection and the idea of watching over your past and how that can change you. After explaining this idea to our focus group, one person mentioned it reminded her of the film ‘Ghost’ with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and I think our music video does have a subtle vibe of this film by someone watching over but not being able to change what is happening. Another form of Intertextuality in our music video is where the main character is watching a video of his wedding day. This idea of watching something from their past on a TV screen has happened in a few videos and gives the idea of reflection.