COMP 3: Statement of Intent

 A Level Media Studies

Here justifies the statement of intent on the music promotion package. As a team, we all involved ourselves in the discussion of the genre, final song, target audiences and engagement, theme and message, representations, and many more. This blog post is written by me (Sharon).

 Below is a table given to us as a guide in forming the statement of intent, which was written by me (Sharon) and Maxi.

Below is a fully written statement of intent by Maxi - taken from his blog.

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 the past. By doing so, we are also trying to represent a commonly under-represented demographic in the 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 with a toxic relationship, 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.

Self Reflection: This statement of intent helped my group by giving a sense of direction, guidance, and a plan throughout the time given for the production of this music promotion package. It assisted my group in planning the general concept, fun, energetic, and free, in ways that the star's personality must reflect on that, the overall tone of the music video, outfits, activities, and 'energy'. My role in this task would be filling out the table guidance given by our Media Studies teacher, which Maxi helped me out too. However, I was struggling to justify a solid explanation for most of them since some are quite repetitive (so Maxi developed a summarized statement of intent to ease comprehension for readers), and, it was taking a good amount of my time (took around a week to complete the statement of intent fully). Yet, I felt alleviated that I was able to finish this upon schedule and not hold any setbacks for the team. The next time, I should finish my task as soon as possible and avoid any procrastination whenever I encounter anything challenging. Also, I couldn't seem to embed the link of the PDF (downloaded from Google Docs) to Blogger, therefore, I asked for guidance from my teacher and did my own research from YouTube (further explained in my 'COMP 3: Technical Skills (Online)' blog post).