Critical Reflection

           The music video for “I Don’t Wanna Wanna” by Playkill* works alongside its social media presence and limited CD digipak to create a light-hearted and humorous exploration of relationships gone sour.

The three components work to communicate one consistent brand both through stylistic and emotional means. For instance, the entire project uses the same font and colors throughout, and the image of tomatoes permeates the piece, whether through emojis, iconography, or the real thing. The content for every component was derived from the same shoot, so there is consistent reference to the same grassy field, costumes, and props. Moreover, the video and social media mirror each other in emotionally evoking the light-hearted theme. Where the video plays an upbeat track with saturated imagery, the social media content incorporates funny outtakes and popularly memed songs.

In creating a fun indie rock video, I utilized research into bands with similar audiences, within the same genre, and some that were local to the same area. Most notably, the music videos for “Shampoo Bottles” by Peach Pit and “Daddy Dookie Brown” by Mustard Service inspired the use of whimsical parallel storylines, colorful grading, and noticeably bad special effects within the piece. The approach to social media was not without its inspiration either, coming as a culmination of techniques and posting regimens that I gathered to be most successful from other local bands like Mustard Service, The Haunt, and Dirty Rivals. Conversational captioning, signature emojis, and upcoming show reminders were elements seen on band accounts across the board, but there were also some conventions I did not follow. For example, I chose to use hashtags as a means to reach a wider audience, even though many artists shy away from using them. At the sacrifice of a more consistent feed, I also placed show flyers up front in posts rather than in a carousel of pictures of the band members in order to ensure that they could be easily found by someone scrolling past. 

As a genre, indie rock is known to be more progressive than many others due to its nature as an alternative for less conventionally advantaged people. However, every woman in this music video fits under the stereotypical “psycho girlfriend” trope, which is more reductive than is conventional. Due to the scenarios occurring within the imaginations of cishet men, the female characters serve more as elements of the environment that the band members must navigate than as characters themselves. This idea of male the fantasy of women is further reinforced by the fact that male friends of the band members were costumed in order to portray their own interpretation of women rather than actually having women in the roles.

For this reason, the target audience of the video is limited to being predominantly men. It also closes itself off to potential queer viewership in the way that it reinforces gender binaries by assigning certain clothing as expressions of womanhood. In any case where humor is combined with cisgender men dressing in traditionally feminine clothing for any reason other than earnest gender expression, there lies the silent implication that failure to engage in traditional masculinity is humiliating and comedic, an idea that queer youth have heard all too often against them. Aside from those limiting factors, the video shares its target audience with that of indie rock and local music enthusiasts. People ages 16-22 who might be avid consumers of alternative media and fashion, and who likely enjoy supporting local and sustainable pursuits. 

This target audience is engaged through the social media page, as Instagram is the second most common form of social media for generation Z, behind only YouTube, which is where the music video will be posted. Within the instagram content, hashtags with small post counts are used to target a specific audience, and songs currently on trend within our genre and on tiktok are used to boost visibility. Posting reels was also a strategic choice knowing that Instagram pushes them out to compete with TikTok, the fastest growing platform among generation Z. We also held a raffle for the digipak that would simultaneously generate shares and give feedback as to what content our followers like best.

The digipak serves as a physical representation of the video and overall ambience created in idww. In the postmodern era, this physical consumable thing representative of one’s tastes is of high sign exchange value, especially to a target audience that has grown up entirely within consumerism. Furthermore, since it is a one of one copy, the target audience for this particular genre would be especially enticed to participate in the competition, knowing how much the indie genre values that which is individual and unique. Therefore, the raffle accomplishes goals for both the band and the audience.

Overall, I am proud of how my project components turned out and the skills I was able to acquire along the way, but I lament that I couldn’t fully realize my ambitions within the timeframe or communicate the extent to which I researched and made thoughtful decisions within my blog. Since this project was my first experience working with a client, and one more established than myself at that, I prioritized making my media components the best that I could. As a result, my blog, something I had a lot of fun with in AS level, suffered immensely. Coordinating filming dates with a group of seven that live an hour away was something that I didn’t give much thought to at the inception of the project, and proved difficult. This resulted in much less time allocated to editing than I had initially planned, leaving some elements like timing and color grading to lack consistency from one scene to the next and fail to establish an overall aesthetic akin to my inspirations. I do, however, plan to continue making tweaks after receiving a second round of feedback from the band in order to create the best iteration of the video as possible for their scheduled april 29th release date.