My analysis of M.I.A's music video showed me that a music video can be interesting, successful and popular without voyeuristic treatment of the female body (for example, the way she doesn't wear clothes that sexualise her body.)
When we first planned our video we agreed on a skateboarding theme and as we planned our cast we realised we hadn't included any females. This shows the way current media conventions don't tend to promote females in unglamourous locations or underground activities such as skateboarding. The hobby does seem to be male dominated but we want Smaller Than You to appeal to both males and females.
We agreed to challenge this issue by including attractive yet unsexualised females within our video. This meant a large focus on what our female cast wore. We decided on skinny jeans (which also fit in with Ska and skateboarding conventions) and bright or black and white tops (also to fit in with the Ska genre). (Gwen Stefani from Ska band No Doubt also often appeared looking unsexualised before she became a solo artist and began wearing more revealing clothes).
The way we have challenged modern music video conventions of sexualising women also fits in with the Ska genre as it formed from yet challenged and changed original genres such as Jazz and Blues.
We are going to keep a clear focus on this as it is important to us to get the right balance between keeping within generic conventions and not forming crude stereotypes.
Our target audience is both males and females between the ages of 15 and 25. To appeal to our target audience we needed to include successful ideologies. We attempted to do this by choosing cast members who were between these ages and including skateboarding, something that appeals to many young people and has underground, rebellious undertones. It is also becoming increasingly popular for young people to become interested in older, past bands (this is reflected in the way high street stores that target young people such as NewLook and Topman have started to sell 'retro-look' intertextual clothes featuring artists such as Blondie, David Bowie and The Clash.)
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A competent explanation of your ideas, in your last paragraph explain what you mean by ideologies. Do you mean progressive ideology that doesn't include demeaning sexualised images of women but instead communicates gender equality. You could make an inter-textual reference to music videos that represent gender equally.
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