My media production work is in the form of a music video, with the genre of the video being alternative. This genre fairly fits in with the genre of the band we chose, yet they are primarily an electronic band. The main genre of the song, electronic, is not something listened to by the majority in the UK and it falls behind genres such as pop, R&B and indie. On top of this, as the band are also described as alternative, it suggests further rejection from the mainstream genres. This is above all why we opted to create a music video of the alternative genre. Even though the genre of our song and music video express anti-mainstream characteristics, the video we created does generally follow the forms and conventions of others from this genre. Alternative music videos do not particularly have a fixed style and they can vary from performance, narrative and abstract videos, however it seems that mainstream artists tend to use performance videos more than the progressive genres. Through researching videos of this genre I found that a slight majority use a narrative form which allows the song to act as a short film to tell a story or portray a message. An example would be the Arctic Monkeys song “When the Sun Goes Down,” which has a short film alongside the music video. In this sense our music video follows and uses the conventions of other media texts. However, our video is somewhat unconventional as a result of our choice of band members. Commonly, the lead singer of a band is the main focus in music videos, and in spite of this we chose to include all three members equally in the video for the fictional band, which I chose to rename, “Glass Castles.” Furthermore, all of the fictional band members appear on the advertisement I made but this quite conventional. In addition to this, the three band members are all female. It is not uncommon to see girl bands in mainstream music, but it is slightly unusual for electronic/alternative genres and we have therefore challenged the conventions. Originally, we did choose a male role to play the lead part, however this did not work out. Personally, I think the music video works better with an all female band and it also contrasts to the fact that this genre of music is more popular with males. Another convention we followed in our video is the use of costume and make-up. All three members were dressed in black and leather, which made them look quite cool and chic. Although, we chose to represent all three equally in the narrative, we do have a leader of the ‘cult’ (right).
And although she is dressed in the same costume as the others, we wanted to represent her an older character with the use of sunglasses hiding her face. However overall we did want them to look quite alike as the narrative for the video is them being involved in a cult, so they had to look like part of the same group. The costume was simple but also symbolic of the electronic/alternative genres as it is typically what females wear from these genres of bands. We took a lot of inspiration from Alice Glass who is the lead vocalist in the original band of the song we chose. Her make-up was our driving motivation, with a lot of dark eyeliner and bright lipstick. Generally, our video does follow the conventions of media texts from this genre. The video being in black and white is quite conventional of alternative music videos and the colour scheme I chose to use on my ancillary texts fits in with this. The colours are very dark and explicit which is unconventional of mainstream music, but assimilates well with the alternative genre.
Postmodernism greatly effects media texts in today’s society, the music video is no exception. Music videos are now just examples of simulacra. Some are pastiches of others and some use eclectic borrowing. I believe our video uses bricolage and mixes new and old ideologies, to create something innovative. Through analysing music videos during the research stages, I noticed how many features of postmodernism are used in them. For example ‘All the Small Things’ by Blink 182 is a parody of numerous pop bands around at the time, most recognisably the Backstreet Boys. It is clear to see that nothing is original anymore. Narrative videos are pastiches of films, long or short, and usually borrow styles from different genres and often use intertexual references. As mentioned before, the Arctic Monkey’s video for ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ is a pastiche of a short film and this particular video borrows stylistics from the crime genre, and perhaps documentary, as its showing the events happening in the young girls life. Our music video, could arguably be a pastiche of a short film, although this was not the original intention. However, I do believe our narrative eclectically borrows from other genres, such as mystery. The use of symbols such as barbed wire and the number ‘13’ to an active audience would create some scepticism as to what is going to happen later on. I think this makes the video seem almost like a conspiracy, which creates a different meaning from what those signifiers usually stand for. After all, the story of the video is about two girls being forced into a cult and receiving their ‘baptism’, so eclectically borrowing these symbols helps emphasis our plot. As well as eclectically borrowing, we use bricolage to recontexualise religion and cults. This can be seen in the scene (below) that acts as a ‘modernised last supper’. All of the symbols in this frame, including rosary beads, the bible and the wine, come together to create a new, innovative meaning of religion. The mise-en-scene and the costume in this frame make religion look cool and urban, things that wouldn’t usually describe religion.
A similar use of bricolage can also be seen in Lady Gaga’s performance video of ‘Judas’. After analysing this video on my blog, I noticed how similar post-modern tendencies are used in both of our texts. Lady Gaga, similarly to us, has created a video that intended to recontexualise the 12 disciples and the betrayal of Judas featured in Christianity, through the usage of costume, props and mise-en-scene. In the opening scene to the video, the 12 disciples are seen riding motorbikes with studded leather jackets. The imagery of the bikers completely contrasts to that of the original disciples, creating a whole new outlook on the subject. It is clear to see that the costume also modernises the biblical story, which is something we have done too through the use of the leather jackets, parallel to that of Lady Gaga’s video. Amongst these tendencies, intertexuality, an extremely important feature of postmodernism, is not used in our video. It is usually one of the most commonly recognised features in post-modern texts, however with our genre being alternative or ‘anti-mainstream’, we felt references to other texts wouldn’t really fit in. And although our text takes a narrative form, we felt intertexual references integrate better with pastiche or parody texts, rather than narratives representing controversial stereotypes and ideologies.
With regards to our target audience and postmodernism, I feel they do not have to be completely active to recognise what the theme of our video is. Although I do feel that they should be active to a certain extent to understand the comments made on religion and how we use a bricolage of religious signifiers to create an alternative meaning. The target audience includes students between the ages of 16-24, usually in full time education, placing them into the E1 category. The E1 demographic is quite large as it covers all students and also pensioners. Students are most likely to be the ones consuming and downloading the most music, so this is a good demographic to target our product at. The likelihood is that students who fall into the E1 category, download their music off the internet, often illegally. This is why on my advertisement, I made sure to add iTunes, Amazon and Play.com icons as students are less likely to buy a physical copy. As we ourselves are members of our target audience, this helps in understanding what appeals to the audience and what they are interested in. Ultimately, I think they will be highly interested in fashion and the latest trends, along with regularly attending gigs and festivals. I think our music video shows representations of students attitudes and values, especially with regards to the religious nature of the video. The teenage ideology is represented by the girls on the left and right (picture below) who act as the people that are being forced into this religious cult. Religion today is generally on the decrease among the younger generation and this is why the cult leader (middle character, picture below), who acts as an older woman, is forcing them into this.
Furthermore, I think the video reflects some of the teenage stereotypes that exist today. For example, all teenagers being fashioned orientated. This is reflected in the costumes of the band, which I previously stated were seen as ‘cool’ and fashionable. The younger generation are also stereotyped as being rebellious and anti-mainstream and I think in ways our video reflects that too, as religion is not seen as one of those mainstream subjects that young people are interested in.
On the whole I believe my production pieces, containing a music video, a magazine advertisement and a website homepage for the band, worked positively together. This is backed up by our target audience and their feedback. Feedback suggests that the three products work well together and the people who did my questionnaires concluded that the three products were representative of the alternative genre. When asked why, the collective answer was the colour scheme and the bold, basic style. I agree with this and I’m happy to have achieved my goal in creating a recognisable, unifying style for the three pieces. The feedback I received was positive and there were no negative remarks. Although, personally, I don’t agree that the website homepage I created works as well with the video as the advertisement does. My objective was to create a basic, minimalist style for the website, which I believe I have done but I am just not as pleased as I had hoped. I now think it needs more to it, with more features. Also, the style of image I have used on the advertisement should link to everything else, yet I have used no pictures on the homepage, just the YouTube video. The only link it has to the other texts is the colour scheme so I feel I could of added more. During production I decided not to change it however, as it was the style I was aiming for and the theme of the other pieces linked with it. Choosing minimalism for my style and layout did not leave me much to work with as I wanted it to be spacious and expansive, meaning I couldn’t clutter the page with lots of features.
Throughout the production process I knew that audience feedback was extremely important for the pieces, as the audience were the people that were eventually going to be encountering my media products. Knowing what my target audience wanted would unmistakably help me create and shape products that they would enjoy. On top of this, the audience (being students 16-24) was accessible to me everyday at college, which was really helpful. By placing various polls on my blog, I could progressively see what the audience wanted, which again is very important. Through the construction of our video, we changed a few things that affected the appeal of the video and we got some verbal feedback from our target audience on these changes. Firstly, we had to change to an all-female cast, the feedback told us that this did not affect the video and it was actually quite unusual, so this was good and again helped us challenge the conventions. Secondly, we were going to use a spoken quote to overlap the music and the water shots at the beginning of the video, however, during the editing process we decided that we didn‘t want to use it. Again, we asked our peers their opinions and we were told that the quote would not fit in with the pace of the music video and it would still be enjoyable without it, backing up our decision to remove this feature. The final change came within the color scheme, we originally had a purple tint on our video as we saw the original album cover for our chosen song and that had a purple tint which looked really fitting to what we wanted to achieve.
However, a lot of the shots weren’t taking to the tint so the video looked odd with some frames in an obvious purple tint and the others still being really bright. Due to this, we decided to make the whole video black and white. The audience again agreed that this worked and made the video run smoothly without the different coloured/brightness of the frames previously. It is clear to see that audience feedback has been very important in the production of my final three products, without the feedback a lot of things may have been different in our video, as well as my ancillary texts.
During the planning and research stages of the coursework I used several new technologies that were key to my progress. After coming up with initial ideas for our video, we intended to draw our storyboard. We did this by using the traditional pen and paper, but with a storyboard template so you could write down all the information that was needed. When this was complete I used the college scanner to get the pictures onto my computer. This was particularly helpful and definitely the easiest way to upload the storyboard. The storyboard was then readily available to post onto our individual blogs. Blogger was undoubtedly essential for the planning and research stages that we did. Blogger is a web 2.0 device and stored all of my work online, meaning that it could never be misplaced or stolen. The blogging site, run by Google, stored everything I had worked on, including pre-production and post-production work. It was excellent in keeping my work organized and its posting system meant that you could save posts as drafts if you needed to work on them at another time. The system also places the last published post at the top so it is in chronological order, keeping everything organised and easily accessible. Another convenient feature of Blogger is that you can add polls to your blog that are available to anyone to vote on, this obviously helped a lot in gaining audience feedback. Web 2.0 was also significant when I was doing my research into music videos. I used Wikipedia to find out most of the information I needed, although it is a questionable source, I checked everything through other sources and the information they gave me was correct. My research was helpful in widening my understanding of my chosen genre and the conventions that it holds. In addition, I regularly used YouTube to analyse other music videos from my chosen genre and others from the mainstream genres too. I did this to contrast the different styles and forms of video so I knew how to follow and challenge conventions in my own alternative video. Analysing music videos was also accessible on Blogger as you could paste the HTML codes of the YouTube video into a post on Blogger and it would become viewable on your blog, meaning you could analyse it there and then. It also meant that the YouTube videos you needed were easily accessed through your blog, which saved a lot of time in the planning and research stages. During this time, I was looking at a lot of music videos and noticed a lot of conventions present in all genres of music videos. The main convention that drew to my attention was cutting to the beat, I found this extremely important as it could be the difference between a music video flowing correctly or looking out of time. When I noticed this I created a list of the timings in our chosen song and kept it at hand when editing our video. For my ancillary text research I again used web 2.0 to analyse other artists’ website homepages and I also used various magazines to look at advertisements. I paid particular attention to the NME and Q magazines as they are magazines from the genre I have chosen therefore, I figured a lot of alternative bands would be advertising in there.
During the production stages of the coursework, things became more difficult. We originally started filming on a DV tape on one of the camera’s the college loaned out for students. On this camera, we filmed our opening sequence of water shots at the time we had planned to use the quote over the top of them. The next time we went to film, due to an unavailability of cameras at college we had to use our own. Filming went well and we got all of our footage, and the Canon camera we were using had brilliant features including zoom and auto-focus. After completing filming, we put our footage, that was now stored on an SD memory card, on the edit suite. This is when we hit a few problems, the new camera we were using had different size settings and we had filmed in a 4:3 format instead of 16:9. This meant that we would have to scale all of our images to fit the screen when it came to editing, this created problems regarding time and was it quite consuming during the editing process. The different sized shots also meant that we couldn’t use our original shots from the first time we filmed. Although, the camera caused some problems for our editing, we also took the photos for our ancillary texts on it and they turned out really well. The programme we used to edit our video was Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, which was fairly easy to use and made editing simple, even with the problems we were facing. Adobe Premiere offered lots of different effects and we chose a strobe effect that is featured throughout the video. We also used the motion feature to reduce the speed of shot and also to play the shot backwards, which is featured a lot in our split screen frames. In addition, we used the purple tint on top of all the frames, however this changed to black and white, which was easy to achieve by pasting the attributes of one frame to all of the other frames. Once we had finished editing our music video, we exported the file using Adobe Media Exporter and saved it as a WMA file. Both of us then created a YouTube account so we could upload our video onto YouTube, to then post onto Blogger, like we did for our ancillary texts. There is an option to upload straight onto Blogger but it is encouraged to use YouTube as it results in a higher quality video.
To create my ancillary texts, a magazine advertisement and a website homepage for the band, I used Adobe Photoshop CS3. I have used this programme before in my AS year of media for the foundation portfolio work. I find it is an excellent programme to use as it offers so much in terms of photo editing and you can achieve almost any look you want. Having previous experience helped me a lot in the making of my ancillary texts and so this saved me a lot of time. Photoshop made the production time very short when making my subsidiary texts as a lot of things were already set up for me. I experimented with lots of effects and picture filters on the image for my advertisement and finally decided to use a luminosity filter which created the look on my final advertisement. I like the effect used as it is unusual and it flooded the bottom half of the page with solid colour leaving me space to add “Glass Castles” and the other information featured. Although I didn’t choose to create a digipack as an ancillary text, I felt it was necessary to feature on album cover on the advertisement and homepage, so I created one, again using Photoshop. I took an image I was previously going to use as the picture for my advertisement and used the Pixellate > Crystallize effect on it to create the look it has, I then added “Glass Castles” and used that as my album cover. I think taking the extra time to create an album cover has been effective for my ancillary texts and it follows the conventions of real advertisements. Finally, for word processing of any long amounts of text that needed to be featured on my blog, including my evaluation, I used Microsoft Office Word 2007 as I find it easier than typing straight into a post on Blogger. Overall, I believe that without these new media technologies that I have used so extensively and have been so central in the construction processes, I would not have been able to achieve my final products.
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