Media Studies - COMP 3 Statement of Intent

This Blogpost (Written by me, Maxi) features our Music Promotion Package's statement of intent, which details what song we chose, our artist's personality, target audience, genre, and more. As a team, we all discussed and brainstormed the initial ideas and themes for our music video, while as an individual, I wrote out and expanded upon those original concepts, putting it all in standard essay form.

Statement of Intent:

For our music promotion package, we have decided to make a music video in the pop genre that targets young-adult, female audiences from the age of 16-25, from all ethnicities and backgrounds, but more-so targeting Asian demographics, as we aim to have our artist be Asian, as well as using other Asian actors to play as additional characters in our music video. Our artist will be a 17 year old Asian up-and-coming artist, who is already well known from being a child actor in her youth. By doing so, we are also trying to represent a commonly under-represented demographic in the western and english speaking music industry, which would be Asian artists. We want our artist to have a cute and warm personality and a celebrity that still feels like someone audiences know and can relate to. 

We decided that to best represent our artists personality and beliefs, to use the song "Feather", from the 5th studio album of American pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, "emails i can't send". We believe the song itself would be perfect for our artist and music video as the songs lyrics focus on topics and issues that we believe audiences in our target age group and demographic care deeply about and can definitely resonate with. We can see this as in the song, Carpenter focusses on how after cutting ties from a toxic relationship, she once had, she feels much lighter and is able to live her life to the fullest. This allows us to spread the message of how instead of being sad and feeling down over a break-up, audiences should instead see how life can and should actually become exponentially better after ending a harmful and hurtful relationship. This idea/message is something that we believe many young people, and especially female audiences, will be able to connect with, appreciate, and want to have in their own lives.  Furthermore, the vibe of the song is funky, fun, and disco influenced and has a very catchy beat and chorus. The lyrics themselves are relatable and empowering, which all in all will allow us to showcase an inspiring and compelling storyline through our music video. The song is a feel-good anthem that is perfect for singing along with a group of friends, and allows audiences to feel relieved as they forget about their problems, which are feelings we aim to shine the spotlight on. 

Thus, for our music video, to capture these feelings of joy and the energy of freedom and letting go, we will follow the songs eccentric storyline and portray the experience of our artist enjoying every moment of her newly found single life - filled with experiences that are fun, exciting, and euphoric. These emotions are also commonly explored in, and are a convention of the pop genre, which will help us engage audiences who are interested and enjoy pop songs and their music videos. We want our artist/music video to promote and explore the representations of the topics discussed in the song like taking care of oneself, and letting go of what doesn't matter, a message that we believe our audiences will greatly appreciate and will want to hear. To effectively spread this theme and message, the general idea of the plot of our music video will most likely follow our artist and a group of her girlfriends as they hang out and partake in a variety of thrilling, exciting, and fun activities that girls that age like to do, for example including scenes where the group does makeup together, dance and sing, try on clothes, have a picnic, sleep over in a villa, and more. Additionally, since these representations of activities and our artist are similar to our target audience, they're interests will most likely fall in line with what is shown and portrayed in the video, which further allows them to relate and enjoy the video further.

Here we break the convention of the average "break-up" song, as most songs that talk about losing a partner often include connotations and representations of sadness, but instead we will follow the feel of the song and go for a happy vibe instead. According to Steve Neale's genre theory, breaking these conventions of sad breakup songs/music videos will help our music video stand out compared to other music videos of the same pop/breakup genre. We want the music video to be fun and for our target audience to have the chance to feel like them and their problems are being represented by our music video, such that when they watch, they'll be able to feel as if they're there with the artist and her friends, living in the moment and enjoying all the new experiences she's able to go through now after she's freed herself from the chains and anchors of her toxic partner.

Reflection:

Through creating this statement of intent, we were able to string along and list all the important features and ideas that music videos should include. We were able to, as a team, pinpoint the specific people groups, interests, and social issues that we aim to represent and portray. We were also able to effectively choose our song and analyze the meaning it has, which allows us to create a better plan on what we want our music video to eventually look like, the actors we want to cast, etc.

Below is a broken down form of our statement of intent that focusses on each element individually (written by me and Sharon):