creative Post-production
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
Our product represents social groups in a very significant manner. As we discovered with our research, reggaeton music videos tend to hypersexualise women in quite a strong way. We wanted to represent mainly teenagers, and the way they experience young relationships and navigate love. In our music video, all of the actors were young teenagers, which we chose specifically because we wanted to create a music video which would represent teenagers and the way they represent certain stereotypes. Another thing we can notice is that they are both white, such as everyone else in the music video. This represents a certain ethnicity, and in reggaeton music videos the actors majorly tend to be white. Additionally, we included dancing and party clips which also help represent a stereotype of what teenagers like to do. Another element that we picked was that the main actress in the music video was wearing all white clothing, and a revealing top. We chose this certain clothing because we wanted to represent the stereotype which has been created towards female teenagers, and the way that they are sexualised in society, represented by the revealing clothing. The white represents the angelical vibe that they have been stereotyped with, and many times society will criticise women if they don’t follow certain characteristics or act a specific way. Another element in which we can see certain representations is the economic class. As we can see in the music video, there is a strong connotation of a higher class environment. We can see this in elements of the music video such as the main actor driving his own car, as well as the main actress’ big house and the lip syncing in the jacuzzi. All of these represent a certain economic level, which also makes sense with the genre, as reggaeton music videos tend to represent a luxurious lifestyle. Additionally, it has become very normalised to sexualise very young women, which we also wanted to portray with our music video and the clothes that the actress was wearing. This element in society has become a serious issue for young women, as we, early on in our lives, become sexualised without even being old enough to realise it. Overall, in our music video, we chose specific things which would help represent the group of teenagers and the issue of young women being sexualised and looked at in an inappropriate way, without them being able to develop into women before this.
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
Our products complement each other in many different ways. First of all, in our music video we include a narrative love story between a couple. In our social media page, we include a sneak peek of the music video, showing the couple at the end of the music video, foreshadowing the love narrative that will happen and the happy ending that the storyline will include. This creates a connection between the music video and the social media page, while also attracting the audience and engaging them in the plot. In our digipak, we include a drawing of a bouquet of dead flowers. The roses symbolise the love between the couple, and the fact that they’re dead represents the challenges that couples can go through, specifically the couple in our music video. Once again, this element creates a connection between the digipak and both the other products, evoking a sense of unity between the whole campaign and engaging the audience, making them realise the importance of love in the song. Additionally, all three products are very energetic and active. In our music video, for example, the rhythm of the song is very lively, and there are also clips of parties and dances which make the song seem more energetic. In our digipak, we used vibrant colours to provoke a sense of being at a party, which attracts the audience as these are the places where they typically listen to reggaeton music the most. In our social media page, we tried to be as engaging with our audience as possible, including updates of the song’s process, behind the scenes comments and overall trying to make the audience feel part of the whole campaign. All three products relate in the aspect of being energetic, casual and fun, which targets our audience and helps the overall picture of the campaign seem united and cohesive. If these products were real, I believe the one we would use the most to promote our final product would be the social media page. As our target audience tends to be in a younger age range, social media is a perfect way of reaching the people we want and making them engage with our products. To begin, social media is key to promoting our products as it is the space where people will find updates and news about our product. With our social media page, if it were to be real, we would focus on engaging our audience and making them a part of the process. Some things that would achieve this are posting updates of the song, behind the scenes pictures, notices of the artist’s live performances, sneak peeks of the music video, pictures of the digipak in process, the artist answering questions about the song, and so on. All of these things would help our audience engage with the process of our campaign, and they would feel anxious to get to the reveal of the final product. Social media is very important in the marketing of a product, because it is generally the first thing you see about a certain product, therefore, it needs to have an impactful first impression. Because of this, we would like our social media page to be filled with vibrant colours and videos that look fun to watch, to create a memorable experience for our audience to watch. Rather than having a boring but elegant social media page, we want ours to look casual and messy, so that it can be relatable to our audience and it creates desire from them to experience our product’s process with us.
How do your products engage with the audience?
We created our products with a specific target audience in mind. This audience includes young adults and teenagers, as these are the people who tend to listen to reggaeton the most. In our music video, we included party clips, which help engage our audience as these people tend to enjoy partying the most, and can relate to these types of activities. Additionally, we included a love story between two teenagers, where they face a conflict and end up resolving it at the end. This engages the audience because they can relate to the teenage love concept, and also the idea of a happy ending is typically what they look for in love, so it gets them engaged in the storyline and keeps them anxious to discover whether or not the couple will get their happy ending. In our digipak, we included very bright and vibrant colours, to simulate a very energetic atmosphere, which is cohesive to the song’s rhythm. This engages our audience as these people tend to be more energetic and look for products which match their energy and bring out a fun vibe. Also, in the digipak we included very few text, with fonts which connotate a casual and fun energy, which is exactly what our audience wants. In our social media page, we wanted it to be dynamic and active, showing the song’s process, giving sneak peeks of the music video and announcing dates for live concerts. This also helped engage with our audience, as our social media page keeps them connected to the artist and the song, and it interacts with the audience so that they feel part of the whole process.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
During our research, we learned multiple characteristics about the genre of reggaeton. Even though this genre was known to us, we discovered many elements that were chosen specifically to engage with its audience. Some of the main conventions we learned were the use of vibrant colours, a narrative love story, hypersexualisation of women, use of lip-syncing and dancing, amongst others. For our products, we decided to follow the genre’s conventions as much as possible. In our music video, we created a narrative storyline, based on a couple who was going through a fight and resolved the conflict at the end. Our storyline follows our genre’s conventions, as we created a love narrative, additionally to finishing it with a happy ending, which we found out reggaeton music videos also tend to do. We also chose relatively revealing clothing for our main actress to wear, continuing to follow the convention of the hypersexualisation of women. Moving on, we also included clips of teenage girls dancing in a sensual way, which also contributes to the sexualisation of them, as well as the girls singing in the jacuzzi, which also connotes sensuality. In our music video, we decided to include random clips of lip-syncing and dancing, which fits the genre’s conventions as this is regularly done in music videos. One of the main challenges we encountered was with the use of the dancing and partying clips. Even though these are typically used in reggaeton music videos, they didn’t live up to our expectations, and seemed to interrupt the storyline rather than adding to it as we would’ve liked. Despite this, I believe we still managed to create a solid foundation for our music video through our research, as we were able to investigate every detail of the genre’s conventions, such as types of camera shots and angles, colours, camera movements and narrative, which we could then apply for the products we created. Additionally, our planning stage allowed us to build an idea for what we wanted to create in a specific manner. In this process, we had to figure out every shot we wanted to create, as well as the action happening and the movement of the camera. This process was made easier by the fact that we had already researched about our specific genre, analysing different examples from real life which helped us to have an idea of what our product should look like. Both the research and planning stages allowed our production process to flow naturally and become easier for us to create. They also contributed to our post-production stage, as we learned that reggaeton music videos tend to include shots of a short duration, as well as few to no diegetic sound, which we applied while editing the footage we had. Overall, I can say that research and planning are both crucial to creating a product, and in our case they created our guidelines and building blocks to achieve the results we wanted.