• How do your products represent social groups or issues?

• How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

• How do your products engage with the audience?

• How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

 

Our music video centers around the themes of invisibility, women in education, and the position of women in the general society. The blindfold and blacked-out text portrayed a force that typically keeps women away from their passion for education and literature. This brings in the concept of patriarchy in society and represents the women who are affected by it, and as a consequence, begin to lose their identity and feel relatively invisible in society. This is portrayed by several scenes in our music video, such as the artist being blindfolded, the text in books being blacked out, portraits of women, an empty frame, no reflection in the mirror, etc. Additionally, our video challenges the idea of a woman being the submissive figure in society, given that we see her break out of the shackles that were keeping her down towards the end of the video. It shows women as a strong force that simply need their own creative outlet and the ability to have the freedom of expression, which is considered a privilege for many women affected by deep-rooted patriarchy, especially in South Asian countries. Feminism is an important ideology that is applied to our video. I wanted to ensure that we represented a big chunk of the population through our video to gain as much exposure as possible and shed light on important issues women face.
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We brought in various intertextual references to amplify our products' identity. The name Mrs. Midas itself is an intertextual reference to Carol Ann Duffy's poem of the same name that amplifies the narratives of women in history who are sidelined in front of any story a man may have. The use of motifs, such as the recurring image of clocks, provides a sense of timelessness, while images of women drowning or the upside-down vase portray disorientation. The book that the artist picks up is named “A Place Called Freedom” which signifies her willingness of her to break out of her circumstances. We also took inspiration from Rene Magritte’s surrealist paintings and portrayed them (00:33-00:40) through a feminist lens. The name “Moonage Records" is a homage to the lyrics of David Bowie’s Moonage Daydream, which follows conventions of indie/alt record labels because many tend to be inspired by old songs, and this, therefore, follows industry standards. The "Book of Myths" in the tracklist on the back of our digipak is an allusion to a verse from Adrienne Rich’s poem that exemplifies the theme of women's stories not being valued in history, which adds to our concept of invisibility and loss of passion. These required Tashfa and I to research references that we wanted to include in the music video. Our artist also avoids showing her face, which is another common trait and convention of alt/indie music videos that we followed. 
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Our product also applies various technical and colour codes to create a sense of branding. Step printing is a well-known technical code that I applied in 1:43-2:00 of our video using Premiere Pro. This was an inspiration we took from films by Wong Kar Wai and required me to carry out adequate research to achieve this effect accurately. Apart from that, we’ve used consistent serif fonts and colors for our social media, digipak, and video, and all text is in lowercase, which follows a style that quite a few indie/alt artists adapt according to our research. My research on typical alt/indie music video tropes allowed me to ensure that I could follow conventions such as the use of low-key lighting, slowed-down shots, and using subtle transitions such as flash and dissolve. I took inspiration of overlaying some footage by d4vd's "Romantic Homicide". This video also prompted me to include a blindfold in our video. One way that I did not adhere to conventions was through the record label logo that I created, which was much more personalized and stylistic than typical record label logos tend to be.

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The designs for the social media profile, digipak, and many shots were dictated by the primary research we carried out through our form. The video itself is open to interpretation, therefore audiences can create meanings from things that resonate with them. 57% preferred seeing aesthetic visuals over everything else in a music video and 32.9% wanted to see thought-provoking themes, therefore it was essential for me to ensure that the shots I took could depict our concept accurately while being pleasing to watch. 87.3% of people who replied to our form said that they use Instagram as a primary source of following and keeping up with their favorite artists with YouTube being a close second. I created a social media profile on Instagram and began engaging with our audience by posting teasers and posting polls on our stories that they can interact with, with a website linked to the bio where they can watch the music video on YouTube. I also wish to expand to either Twitter or Tiktok soon so that our audiences can interact with our products more, which would cause our video to gain popularity and maintain a relationship with our audience. My designs for the Instagram page followed conventions by being minimalistic in design and incorporating stills from our music video. This was primarily inspired by the artist Clairo.
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The location where we shot this music video was the Lahore Heritage Club, which itself has a niche following of people who enjoy literature and young adults/teenagers, therefore visitors of this club would also engage with our music video, considering that their Instagram page with nearly 6000 followers reported our video and mentioned us. In consideration of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I came up with the idea of having a "Virtual Concert" announcement for our social media page so that we can engage with fans from all over the world. This was an inspiration I took after seeing my K-pop artists carry out virtual concerts through live-streaming (such as BTS), which challenges the typical convention of artists only engaging with fans through concerts and meet and greets. The merch I designed for the social media account will also engage with audiences who will purchase the items and use them, which will spread our video through word of mouth, therefore I had to ensure that it was trendy and follows the current fashion taste that alt/indie fans have. Our merch also partnered up with eco-friendly companies to keep up with the consumer trends of our audience.​ The sweater that the artist is wearing by the brand Outfitters will also attract audiences because the brand will repost our video due to the product placement. Customers of the brand will be intrigued and engage with the music video, which will be mutually beneficial for both parties. 
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Given our resources, we could not carry out extensive promotion such as putting up the song on streaming services like Spotify or having our song featured on a television show or advertisement. In an ideal world where we had the monetary resources and connections to do this, I would have definitely wanted to carry out extensive marketing to reach mass audiences.