Audience Profile

Audience Profile

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Media Investigation: Relating These Issues To My Production

Media Investigation: Relating These Issues To My Production

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Audience Research Task

Audience Research Task

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Narrative Development

Narrative Development

Although we had previously created an almost full narrative for our music video, after two shooting sessions we encountered some difficulties. We became concerned with a general lack of substance and the strength and purpose of our initial idea of the use of masks. We therefore decided to call a succession of group meetings in order to discuss what should be done.
During these meetings we agreed on the following basic changes which we must make:
· The female character must have a more prominent role, taking some spotlight and pressure away from the male protagonist and allowing for a multi-dimensional narrative
· A greater variety of locations should be incorporated, creating a more exciting mise-en-scene
· There must be more twists in the narrative providing more excitement and more substantial potential for shooting
We agreed that these three factors would be the focal point of how to improve our ideas, and that any new ideas should be relating to these concepts. We were eventually able to produce a revamped narrative, detailed below:

Revamped Narrative

Crucially, we decided against our initial idea regarding the use of masks, scrapping that idea completely. Instead, the most important new narrative detail is that one of our characters, either the male or female, will in fact be dead throughout the narrative. This would be a narrative technique similar to that used in Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), in which Crowe (Bruce Willis) is shot in the opening ten minutes of the film but, assumed recovered, is the main character throughout the film, only to realise at the end that the bullet had in fact killed him. Crowe’s fading relationship with his wife becomes an important aspect of the narrative, and is ultimately the means by which he realises his death. This is the aspect of the film which we are interested in incorporating in our music video. The idea is fitting to the music as the lyrics clearly suggest a protagonist searching for a lost love, in our case the lost love has died. An important idea to consider is that of perspective; who is doing the searching, and who is the lost one. The ‘searching’, however, could be applied to both the living and the dead character. For the living character it is simple, his/ her loved one has died, he/ she cannot move on and is still looking for anything to bring back the past. It could also be applied to the dead character, as it is done in The Sixth Sense, where the character may be unaware of his/ her own death and is surprised at the loss of contact with his/ her partner. However, both could be true; both characters could be searching for their aforementioned reasons, and with both of our characters having recently been given equally important roles in the narrative, this is what we will aim to achieve. By incorporating this idea of a dead character, then, we will have improved our narrative by using two of the three concepts we nominated as our goals, as it allows us to give the female character a more prominent role, incorporating her perspectives – thereby creating a multi-dimensional narrative – and to introduce an important twist creating more potential for shooting material. Furthermore, the idea also allows for the inclusion of a greater variety of locations. Our original location ideas were urban settings; narrow streets, alleys and cobbled streets. However, if there is a character that is dead yet the audience isn’t intended to find out until the end, then certain locations connoting a death are required, to prepare for this theme. The idea, then, allows us to incorporate locations such as a Church graveyard, which has the potential to provide very atmospheric scenes, as well as being a break from streets and street corners.

However, what we still had to decide on was who should die; the male or the female. After discussing the pros and cons for each, including possible opening and final scenes, we decided to opt for the male character to be dead. We decided this because it is perhaps less conventional to have a dead protagonist searching for a lost love than it is to have a living protagonist looking for a dead loved one, hence the popularity of The Sixth Sense. However, in a philosophical sense, both character are dead; one in the literal sense but the other in the sense that the person she was when she was with him is now dead, therefore our music video will be exploring these themes of loss, searching, remembering, contemplation, love, sadness, death and moving on. In order to do this, we must incorporate certain genre conventions and a certain style.

Style and Genre Conventions

For the themes of death, it is important to include aspects of gothic signifiers, for which a church graveyard will be perfect. Also, as well as for the themes of remembering and moving on, we will look to use conventions of film noir, in particular the use of shadows and tilted angles, as these represent two of the key themes of the genre: a nightmarish reality and a haunted past. These elemental themes are the foundations for almost every film noir (such as The Third Man, 1949, Double Indemnity, 1944, The Maltese Falcon, 1941 etc.) and mise-en-scene features such as the tilted angles, low angles, elongated shadows and wet shiny pavements which connote these themes are therefore crucial to the instantly recognisable style of noirs.

Story Boards

Although we had already created a sequence of storyboards, we felt obliged to create a new one reflecting our new narrative. During our group meetings where we decided on our new narrative, we agreed to all sketch any ideas for possible scenes, cut them out, and then arrange them together into a sequence. By doing this, we could also re-use some of the drawings from the initial storyboards as some scenes were relevant to the new narrative as well. Much of the initial pencil drawings were done by myself, whilst the colour was added by Helen. Arranging them into a sequence, however, was a real group effort.

Storyboards With Commentary:

By following this narrative, we will be creating a similar music video to those such as Madonna's 'Like A Prayer' and Celine Dion's 'It's All Coming Back To Me Now' which, although are a different genre and are very different songs to ours, do explore similar themes and emotions within the lyrics to ours, thereby allowing for a similar narrative.

Madonna - Like A Prayer

Link to Celine Dion's 'It's All Coming Back To Me Now':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMHGgnlXfSA

Textual Analysis of a Music Video - REVISED

'Rumble Strips Not The Only Person' Analysis

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Meeting Schedule

Meeting Schedule

At the beginning of the course, we decided on set times on which we would meet as a group and discuss any ideas or concerns relating to our music video. Below is a scanned image of my timetable for lessons, marked with an ‘M’ are the slots we agreed upon to meet:

Initially, these meetings were used to acquire the basis of our narrative, to discuss potential locations, actors, themes and motifs et cetera. After most of these were agreed upon, however, the frequency of these meetings naturally decreased according to mutual consent due to other commitments, and now many of them have been transformed into shooting times. We would then expect most of the slots to be used for editing.

Helen and myself at Cafe Nero's during the early stages of our planning

Clearly, though, much of our shooting has taken place outside of school times, whilst some was also done during double periods of Media Studies. We have also used the half-term holiday as a chance to progress with both shooting and editing, designating two full days (Monday and Tuesday) of shooting and editing. We met at a group member’s house and did the editing there, whilst the shooting was done at previously agreed locations. These meetings outside of school times were all agreed on mutually according to when all three of us happened to be available.

Materialism in Music: Follow-up Research

Materialism in Music: Follow-up Research

I have decided to conduct a piece of follow-up research using similar procedures to that of my earlier investigation. This time, however, I will analyse only current music and that which is the most popular. Consequently, I will be investigating the actual level of materialism present in current popular music rather than an increase of materialism over time.

On the 11th of October 2009, the Official UK Top Ten Singles Chart according to http://www.mtv.co.uk/music/charts/official-uk-singles-chart reads as the following:

1. Taio Cruz − Break Your Heart
2. Jay-Z Ft Alicia Keys − Empire State Of Mind
3. David Guetta Ft Akon − Sexy Chick
4. Shakira − She Wolf
5. Black Eyed Peas − I Gotta Feeling
6. Jay-Z Ft Rihanna & Kanye West − Run This Town
7. Temper Trap − Sweet Disposition
8. Pixie Lott − Boys & Girls
9. Pitbull − Hotel Room Service
10. Dizzee Rascal − Dirtee Cash

Using the same list of materialism signifiers as in my previous investigation, I will rate the music videos of this top ten according to their materialism levels. By doing this, I will hopefully gain a broader spectrum of materialism in different genres, rather than just pop music as in the earlier research. This will also provide a detailed look at current popular music, as these ten songs are technically the most popular songs as I am writing this. A further interesting point to consider will be the materialism score for Shakira’s ‘She Wolf’, as Shakira was a major outlier in the previous research with very low materialism scores compared to other artists, will her latest song have increased in materialism?

Results

Artist	Song	Materialism Score According to the Checklist
Taio Cruz	Break Your Heart	10/ 14
Jay-Z Ft Alicia Keys	Empire State of Mind	9/ 14
David Guetta Ft Akon	Sexy Chick	10/14
Shakira	She Wolf	2/ 14
Black Eyed Peas	I Gotta Feeling	8/ 14
Jay-Z Ft Rihanna & Kanye West	Run This Town	7/14
Temper Trap	Sweet Disposition	0/ 14
Pixie Lott	Boys & Girls	7/ 14
Pitbull	Hotel Room Service	10/ 14
Mini Viva*	Left My Heart In Tokyo	3/ 14

*The video for Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Dirtee Money’ was unavailable on http://www.youtube.com/, therefore this song was analysed instead as it is no. 11 in the chart.


As we can see, there are three very obvious outliers (the songs by Shakira, Temper Trap and Mini Viva), whilst the other seven music videos all have reasonably high levels of materialism. The average materialism rating for all ten songs is 6.6/ 14. Considering that in my previous research the highest average score (the average score for the 1990s decade) was 4.6, whilst the highest score for more recent artists (2000 onwards) – which excluded the outlier that was Shakira – was 5.5, this is quite a high score. If we take out the three outliers, which isn’t so unjustifiable as, for one thing, Mini Viva were not in the original list and, by the sounds of it, ‘Dirtee Money’ may well have had a higher score, which would leave just two outliers – suggesting that 80% of today’s most popular music has a reasonably high level of materialism. The average materialism score for 7 of these songs (excluding Shakira, Temper Trap and Mini Viva) is 8.7/ 14. This is very high compared to my previous findings. Of course this is not to say that all modern music is materialistic and these findings cannot be generalised to the whole music scene, however what it does suggest is that, out of the music being produced at the moment, the more materialistic ones are the most popular ones. This is a very important point, but does this mean that the more materialistic a song is the more popular it will become? An interesting thing to consider is the role that the music video plays in the song’s popularity. There can be no question that these highly materialistic music videos are created for the sole purpose of selling the artist, but is this why they are popular, or is it for their music? Do music videos really have this amount of selling power?

Another important thing to consider is that there are several other important debates regarding representational issues in music videos. Perhaps the most important of these is the way in which females are represented in music videos. We can see that in terms of materialism Shakira had a very low score, making her one of the ‘good guys’, if you will. However, in terms of female representation, her video ‘She Wolf’ is quite shocking. My attention was brought to this by an interesting comment on the youtube page by ‘dannythekiller100’ who commented:

“i feel like i am getting violated watching this video. it does not feel good at all.”

Despite the unfortunate username, he has a point. I must admit that I too felt rather uncomfortable whilst watching the video, which may sound unusual coming from a 17 year old boy, but it really is that bad. Some may claim that it’s a message of female strength and freedom, and I can see the arguments for that (and in that sense it’s very effective), but it cannot be ignored that it is absolutely full of sexual implications and phallic symbols, from the wolf to the sucking of the fingers and the bursts of heavy, orgasmic breathing. In my opinion it simply does not provide a good message for young girls (and boys) who have no trouble whatsoever accessing it. Even though the message may have been intended as a positive one, and from a more mature perspective it can justifiably be regarded as that, but viewers under the age of 16, maybe even 17/ 18, will not understand this side of the video and only see the attractive woman breathing heavily in very revealing clothing. Therefore, although I had not originally intended to discuss female representation (but this video provided too much of an argument), it is clear that there are many other issues other than materialism regarding the debate of ‘what makes a good role model’, and as this video suggests that performing well in one area doesn’t absolve an artist of performing poorly in another area.

Back to the issue of materialism, however, perhaps the most important issue here is the idea of the music video selling the artist, which I touched upon very briefly earlier. This is important because if a video has the power the sell an artist, then it is simultaneously selling the ideologies and lifestyles portrayed in the video. And this is the essence of the problem; the ideologies in many of these music should (at least in my opinion) be regarded as immoral, yet it is quite possible that these videos are successfully selling immoral ideologies to viewers, judging by the fact that these songs represent the most popular songs at this moment and assuming that the music videos had something to with it. Because on this assumption, if they are buying the artist (which they are) they are also buying the negative ideologies. This is the worrying thing, and it is worrying that my findings support this.