Planning Artist Image

For our video, our artist is going to be represented as fashionable and confident. Since our chosen artist Rita Ora is of the Pop and R&B merge genre, it's expected that she'd be dominant and confident for her target demographic to be able to remember and relate to since within those genres, females are becoming more iconic and having images for themselves that differentiate them from other artists in their typical genres.
We want the artist to come across as someone to look up to image wise, since a lot of young females from around the ages of around 16-21 begin to become a lot more fashion and image conscious.

For instance, Rita's fans can recognize her edgy and urban style quickly when they see her at public events and at concerts - however, they don't feel to threatened by her and she still comes across very realistic. An example of an artist who maybe has a style that's a bit more intimidating rather than relatable to their audiences are Lady Gaga and Katy Perry as a lot of their fashion include statement pieces which are almost considered out of reach to the average member of the public. Overall, I think that our target audience will be able to build a relationship with the artist because she'll appear ordinary in the clothes that she's wearing because they're in reach for the audience to purchase themselves but will still look good and fashion forwards on her, plus the confidence of the artist will contribute to this. But at the same time the confidence will work and help make look our artist untouchable which follows and conveys to Dyers Star Theory.

Clothes being used in our music video
Since we're using different styles of clothing in our music video to represent two different personas, we need to make sure that our audience can define between the two characters we've portrayed. For the girl who we've made as the "Alice in Wonderland" persona who discovers London and gets to explore the city, we've decided to make her look a lot more innocent and naive. Her clothes won't nessecarily be out-dated or unfashionable but we'll definitely make her look less manipulated by "what's hot" in the modern fashion world putting her in things that connotate fairytales - such as a puffy, short dress with maybe army/military like boots which will contrast between the girly image giving it an R&B edge which will help us become more conventional and conform to the expectations of R&B/Pop crossover with edgy yet mainstream appearances from the stars featuring in those types of videos.
Our second main persona featuring in the music video is our 'White Rabbit' - in the traditional story Alice follows the rabbit into Wonderland while in this story Alice follows the more fashionable dressed girl into the woods and discovers the culture and fashion of London. Since we want our 'White Rabbit' to be the guidance into London, we think that she should be dressed fashion forwards and in modern clothes that our audience will recognize as "in" at the time of the music videos release and something that connotes the unique and vibrant styles of London. Items of clothing such as; creepers, leggings, wet look trousers/leggings, bomber jackets and hipster like jewelry.

An idea I had for the artist when they supposedly follow the "White Rabbit into Wonderland" or London, as it will be in the video is a Guns 'N Roses T-Shirt. I think this will be fitting because it contrasts with the image that the audience have seen our artist in, in previous parts of the video and therefore will emphasize and highlight the change in attitudes and glamour when it comes to fame.
Also this will bring some intertextual reference into our video which we'd noticed was generic of the R&B genre. While Guns 'N Roses may not be a band that my target audience is familiar with, over the years because of their legendary legacy, they've also turned into a brand that've been fashioned on T-Shirts by all sorts of influences in the Pop culture.

 I decided that I liked the idea of our artist wearing a knitted jumper or some other kind of knitted clothing for the narrative where she hasn't gone into Wonderland because I think clothing of this kind goes against R&B conventions and definitely doesn't form to the materialistic, glamorous lifestyle the genre often promotes. This can connote to our audience the ideology that our artist hasn't actually been exposed to the "high life" again and instead is kind of at the same naive level as the audience are, not knowing about the fine detail of the life of fame. Therefore suggesting innocence and premature as a star, which ties in with the whole concept of our artist being a rising artist, yet to be established.

I thought that having the artist to our music video in a black dress would be ideal when they're singing to the camera and creating the performance based parts of the video. This is because it's different to the two items of clothing that are going to be shown in the narrative and is a lot less statement making. Therefore it won't distract our audience from the two characters we're creating with our audience in the narrative (pre-fame and post-fame) but at the same time the dress isn't completely random as well, it still has connotations of glamour, taking care in presentation and builds more of a neutral look which is less bold than the two items that'll help create certain looks explained above.



Our Video... 
Not only did we style our artist literally with planned clothes to represent different things, we also planned our audiences image in a metaphorical way. For instance, where our artist was filming the performance side of the video I made sure that our artist was styled in a neutral way that wasn't too complicated so that our audience could understand and relate to her without being too distracted by anything she was wearing/fashioning. However, the leather jacket and white top symbolized a cool and casual way of life which is conventional of an R&B artist to an extent.



However, towards the end of our video when the narrative unravels and we find out that the 'Wonderland' isn't as nice as it appears, we decided to represent our artist as 'broken' or 'controlled' metaphorically by giving her streaked make up and messy hair. This created a kind of post-primadonna effect almost showing the side effects of the dream that we'd been glamorizing for so long throughout the course of the music video. Doing this helped us express our stars ideologies about fame and her values which is what we found real stars in the industry do after researching Dyer's Star Theory.