A2 media studies 3

A2 Media Studies: Evaluation questions

By Lynette Carty

Question 1In what ways does your media product use,

develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The Verve Urban Hymns Album  

Beginning

• After going through multiple song choices and genres we could do for our project, I came up with the idea that we should do ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve, taken from their album ‘Urban Hymns’. They are an alternative rock band. This is different because many people would automatically go for the pop genre and pick a love song which is about a boy and girl breaking up or making up etc. so I wanted to do something outside the box and pick a song which hasn’t got a specific image or story attached to it. 

• First we wanted to recreate the video but have a split screen with a working class male and middle class male showing how different their lives are financially but how similar their lives are in certain situations. However we decided to scrap this idea and ended up focusing on just a working class male who isn’t doing well in education so sells drugs as a means of making money for his self. Although he wants to change, he’s a slave to money so he’s stuck in that mould for the rest of his life. 

We managed to make the edits go in time with the pace of the music in certain shots but at times it wasn’t possible. How we used the mise-en-scene made the mood of the song and the genre stand out even more, which I feel made our video more appealing.

The main part of our music video was shot in Camden town where its always busy and people will be bumping into you, no matter how hard you try to stay clear of people. This links to the narrative scenes of the video in which the actor is selling drugs but he wants to make a change. However he is stuck because he is a slave to money for the rest of his life and that’s the quickest and only way he knows how to make money for a living.

The actor wore casual clothing which consisted of jeans, black puffer jacket (symbolises bad things) and trainers. This was done to make his life seem normal but it contrast with the narrative scenes which show the audience what his life is really like

Conventions of music genres in music videos

I conducted research into the conventions of different music video genres e.g. rock, pop, RnB etc and found that different genres have different codes and conventions which allow the genre to be recognised and attract/appeal to their target audience. 

Here are some examples: 

Pop genre

• Bright colours• Creative settings• Close ups of the artist(s)• Targeting young audiences• Upbeat music• Dance routine being performed by artist(s)

E.g. Justin Bieber- Baby

Rock genre

 • Extreme close ups• Close ups• Dark settings• Simple settings• Equipments (drums, guitars etc)• Never happy• Performance based• Style of clothing is casual

 E.g. Coldplay- Fix you Hip hop/RnB genre

• Sexualized half naked women• Close ups and long shots of material items and money• Simple settings (house or club)• Artist surrounded by their entourage• Expensive items• Alcohol

 E.g. 50 cent ft The Game- How we do

• Because our video is in the Indie/rock genre, I decided to analyse videos from this genre to gain a better understanding of the conventions. I looked at Coldplay ‘Fix you‘ and the Goo Goo dolls ‘Iris‘ videos because they are in the same genre my group and I chose for our final project . This was because they feature the stereotypical conventions of a Indie/rock video. These stereotypical conventions include the artist/band performing throughout the video, with close up shots and extreme close up shots being used to show the lip synching and each individual band member. This can be seen  in Toto ‘Rosanna’. 

• Rock music videos like The Verve ‘Sonnet’ and Coldplay ‘Yellow’ challenge these conventions because in this video there’s no performance, it just features Richard Ashcroft singing in a chair by himself in dark setting while the other band members eventually appear towards the end of the song. And in Coldplay’s video, Chris Martin is only seen walking on a beach on a rainy day, lip-synching to the music. I think this is because they wanted their audience to feel the emotion of song aswell as see the emotion of the song being played out. Therefore this challenges the typical codes and conventions of Indie/Rock music videos.

Mise-en-scene

• The settings in the videos are dark with little use of lighting and the clothing is also usually dull colours like black, navy, brown etc. The editing will involve quick cuts between the edits to match the fast pace of the music. For example, in Coldplay ‘Fix you‘. This is similar to the music in this video, because when the music speeds up, the editing and cuts between instruments speed up too. 

• However for our video we used close ups of our artists to sell their image and the song as mentioned before, we used a dark setting for the lip synching scenes, our settings were simple (house, school and outside) and it was partly a performance based video mixed with narrative. The clothing of the band is usually casual. Our lead singer is wearing a black puffer jacket with denim jeans and trainers, and our other band member is wearing a navy hoodie and black trousers. 

Similarities and differences

• Differences- Compared to the original video, our music video tries to challenge the generic conventions of the rock genre because there’s usually never a narrative, it’s mainly performance based, but in our video it was a mix of performance and narrative

• Similarities- In the Verves videos Richard Ashcroft the bands leader, is always first to appear in the video and then towards the end the other band members appear. In our video we did the same by having our lead singer appear first and then the other band member Deon appear afterwards.

Narrative theory

• We looked at a variety of narrative theory's because they and how we could probably use them in our coursework. Only three theorists work was evident in our video

• Claude Levi-Strauss- social anthropologist, studied myths of tribal cultures and examined how stories unconsciously reflect the values, beliefs & myths of a culture.

• These are usually expressed in the form of binary oppositions (conflict between two qualities or terms e.g. night/day, good/bad, light/dark)

• In our video we used binary oppositions of good and bad. In one scene, the audience witness our male actor making and selling drugs (bad) in contrast to the scene where he’s in a church praying (good)

Roland BarthesA French semiologist, suggested that narrative works with five different

codes which activate the reader to make sense of it. He also used the terms denotation & connotation to analyse images.

• Action- a narrative device • Semic- (denotation) • Enigma - teases the audience by presenting a puzzle or riddle • Symbolic - (connotation) • Cultural - audience can recognise as being part of the Mafia

culture 

Out of the five codes, I think the action code is most evident because the actions that our actor does, tells a story about his life situation and the lyrics of the song adds to that story so everything flows. The semic code and symbolic code and cultural code are also included. There are the drugs (semic) and the symbolisation of it which is destruction and so on. The cultural aspect of it is that when people see a person especially a male in such conditions e.g. hooded outfit and so on and white substances in a film or music video, they know that they’re taking part in something bad. 

The expressions on the band members of the Verves face is always dull. There’s little expression so it gives the audience the power to put whatever emotion they want to upon it. In our video we also had our band members with little or no expression so our audience can too decide what emotion they feel describes it.

Media theorist

 Reception Theory: Stuart Hall

Hall believed that audiences don’t just accept what is given to them on a screen. He believes the individual reader comes up with his/her own meaning of the text based on what cultural and life experiences they've had. Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. He suggested three hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text. 

Preferred/Dominant reading- Producers encode texts which the reader then decodes. Interpretations vary from each individual, however producers can write things which allocate the reader to create agreements on what certain codes mean.

Opposition reading- The audience rejects the preferred reading and creates their own view or meaning.

Negotiated reading- This is a compromise between the dominant and oppositional reading. The audience accepts part of the directors’ views, but also have their own view

• I feel that when our audience watch our video for the first time, they will have a negotiated reading in mind; it’s not a hypnotic syringe. This is due to the fact that we (my group and I) as directors have only shown one way of what the song could be about due to the video. Whereas there are many different meanings an individual could give to the song by itself dependent on what they’ve experienced in life.

• In addition, I believe we’ve stuck to the conventions of music videos and genre specific conventions in music videos, to an extent which our audience can still identify the genre which it falls into with the use of camera techniques and mise-en-scene. 

Andrew Goodwin- theory of music videos

Goodwin believes there are six characteristics each video may have

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics

E.g. Stage performance in mental videos, dance routine for boy/girl band (as seen below with the 'The Backstreet boys'), aspiration in hip hop 

 Our music video demonstrates the characteristics

of the rock genre in a variety of ways• There’s extreme close ups and close ups• There are dark settings• Simple locations 

2. There is a relationship between lyrics & visuals

 The lyrics are represented with images

(illustrative, amplifying or contradicting)E.g. the lyrics 'Baby you’re a firework, come on

let your colours burst' followed by an image of fireworks bursting out of her body 

We have parts of the lyrics that link to the visuals

• ‘Slave to money’ then the phone appears eventually with the name money on it

• ‘No change I can’t change, I am here in my mould’ links to him giving the drugs to the other student

• ‘Million different people from one day to the next’ different faces appear

3. There is a relationship between music & visuals. 

• The tone & atmosphere of the visual reflects that of the music

           (Either illustrative, amplifying or contradicting )

 Some parts of our video was in black and

white which is a dull colour and makes the video and song have a more serious tone especially since he was making a stash of drugs in that scene. It’s also raining, and no one really likes rain because it just downs everyone’s vibe so that linked with the visuals because our actor was emotionless

4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist & the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work

These include:• Close ups (CUs) of the stars

face• Iconography of the band image• Visual trademarks & motifsWe used close ups on our bands

face  to show the audience whose music they’re listening to, and to show the bands image which is casual-serious. This ‘brand identity’ is therefore established

5. There is frequently reference to notion of looking                       (screens within screens, mirrors, stages, telescopes etc.)E.g. Katy Perry's California girls shows voyeuristic treatment of

the female body POV shots were used when the actor was walking down Camden

high street and the two girls split apart. Used again when the bus was going past, and also when he was selling the drugs in school.

6. There are often intertextuality reference to films, TV programmes, other music videos etc..

       e.g. UB40 'Can’t help falling in love' it was the soundtrack for the film 'Sliver'

 There was no intertextuality in our video although I would’ve

liked to have a picture of one of The Verves first albums, in the background somewhere. However its not that necessary.

Laura Mulvey: Visual pleasure & Narrative Cinema 

Erotic desire

• Mulvey argues that women have two roles in film:

• As an object of erotic desire for the characters• As an object of erotic desire for the audience

The Male Gaze  • The 'gaze' of the camera is the male 'gaze'• The male gaze is active, the female passive• Within the narrative, male characters direct

their gaze towards the female characters• The spectator is made to identify with the male

gaze, because the camera films from the optical as well as the libidinal point of view of the male character

• Thus three levels of the cinematic gaze- camera, character & spectator- that objectify the female character (the triple gaze)

There was some aspects of the male gaze present in our video when the actor was walking down the street

Conventions of real digipaks front cover/back cover

Front cover of digipak • Eye catching image• Colour• Name of artist/band• Name of actual CD album• Image/stickers e.g. parental advisory  

Our digipak front cover

The back cover of a digipak • Track names• Amount of tracks on the CD• Running order of tracks• Image• Colour• Logo of the band (if

applicable)• Production details

Our digipak back cover

Conventions of real digipak adverts

• Name of artist/band Title• Name of album• Release dates• Logo• Tour Dates• Price of CD• Artist/Band website• Pictures of artist/band 

Our digipak advert

What would I change?

Music video

• If I had better equipment, would have done a birds-eye shot of the band singing and looking up at the camera while on the grass or on a empty road. 

• I would of probably liked the band to have more lip synching scenes and maybe a split screen involved

Digipak/advert

• I don't feel there's much I would've changed with the digipak. I feel that it complements our video really well, and the same with our advert. 

• I feel we worked well as team in all three products and the outcome was better than I imagined. In the future if we ever come across a project like this again, I think our knowledge of editing and filming will be much better because we've really grown as a group, in the creative sense and have learnt new skills along the way.