Influences for Music Video

I feel that Blink 182's music video for their song "Always" is a strong influence for my group's own music video. Firstly the narratives are quite similar, in that it features a female protagonist with three males competing for her affections. The frame is cut into three horizontal sections, each portraying a different outcome for each boy. It succeeds in helping the narrative to flow in a unique way and it is something the group would consider when it comes to the final stages of production for our own video.

Narrative in Music Video

After deciding between two songs for our music video, we chose the song ‘Superman by Barry Gledden’, which is an upbeat tune, with a catchy positive chorus and female vocals about the relationship between a girl and her superman lover. We came to this conclusion since the team had brilliant fun and exciting narrative ideas for the lyrics. The lyrics have also given us the opportunity to express the humour in our video, as the lyrics are very metaphorical, and exaggerated. We have created an outline of what we want the narrative in our music video to include.

• Female looking for the right boyfriend.


• She goes on dates with a number of different boys from punks, to gangsters to geeks, in the same restaurant, at the same time on different days!


• The scene in the restaurant remains the same but the boys change, and the roses seem more wilted in each scene.


• But of course she chooses the best looking boy, but he ends up to be the most big headed boy, and doesn’t really care about her.


• However, the Geek that she dated really likes her and is the ‘real superman’. (He is seen in the background of most scenes wearing a baggy superman t-shirt)


• As the video goes on, the geek appears to be better looking.


• The girl begins to notice him again.


• After a number of awful dates with her new boyfriend she is bored and leaves him, he doesn’t care as he is too busy looking at himself.


• Finally she gets with ‘Superman’!


• Want the video to also include animated shots, which have been influenced by legendary comics and Superman cartoons. For example, speech bubbles and signs that stress the sounds

Influencing the Audience

If audience is a mass, it raises all kinds of questions about the power of the media to influence people - not just individuals, but whole sectors of society. There have been a number of theories over the years about how exactly the media work on the mass audeince. Two I will outline are called The Hypodermic Model and The Two Step Flow Model.

The Hypodermic Model

It grew out of what is referred to as The Frankfurt School, a group of German Marxists in the 1930s who witnessed first hand how Hitler used propaganda to influence a nation. According to the theory the media is like a syringe which injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audience who as a powerless mass have little choice but to be influenced - in other words, you watch something violent, you may go and do something violent.

This theory has been particularly popular when people have been considering violence in films. There have been films such as The Exorcist and A Clockwork Orange which have been banned in the past, partly because of a belief that they might encourage people to copy crimes within them. On the other hand no-one has ever really claimed that everyone will be affected by these texts in the same way. Many people have therefore seen the theory as simplistic because it doesn't take any account of people's individuality and yet it is still very popular in society in areas such as politics. Every time a young person does something violent and makes the news, newspapers and MPs will try to link their crime to video violence.

Another interesting example of the theory in action is the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Before every one of his murders, he watched a clip from his favourite film in order to get himself excited. This is the kind of fact that might seem to prove the hypodermic syringe theory.

The Two Step Flow

The Hypodermic model proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did not reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential campaign and published their results in a paper. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the mind of is audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active asociates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.

This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts.

The Cultivation/Culmination Theory

According to this, while any one media text does not have too much effect, it shows that although one viewing may not have a big effect, viewing constantly over time has a greater effect on people’s behaviour, making them desensitised (distanced from ones emotions). Therefore the result being that violence in the media means children become less shocked by real life violence. On the other hand many may become more sensitised, this is where the viewers are shocked by the violence, therefore becoming more aware and emotional.

Gratification Theory

According to this theory, we all have different uses for the media and we make choices over what we want to watch. In other words, when we encounter a media text it is not just some kind of mindless entertainment - we are expecting to gain something from it: some kind of gratification. In this model the individual has the power and they select the media texts that best suit their needs and attempts to satisfy those needs. Researchers have found four kinds of gratifications individuals recieve:

1. Information: we want to find out about society and the world, we want to satisfy our curiosity. This would fit NEWS AND DOCUMENTARIES.
2. Personal Identity: we may watch television in order to look for models for our behaviour. So, for example, we may identify with characters that we see in SOAPS.
3. Intergration and Social Interaction: we use the media in order to find out more about the circumstances of other people and help us to empathise and sympathise with the lives of others.
4. Entertainment: sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxtion or just to fill time.

Reception Theory

This theory is based on the idea that the audience create their own image of media texts, meaning that although a number of people watch the same programme, individuals interpret it in their own way. This can be influenced by the our individual upbringing, the mood we are in, the place where we are at the time or all kinds of other factors. David Morley classes the varied readings of people in three groups, which are:

Preferred Reading: what the media producers hope the audience will take from the text.

Oppositional Reading: audiences from outside the target audience may reject the preferred reading, receiving their own alternative message.

Negotiated Reading: audiences acknowledge the preffered reading but modify it to suit their own values and opinions.

Constructing an Audience

Pop music is a genre that was created as a softer alternative to rock 'n' roll. The pop rock genre emerged and acted as a fence which satisfied an audience with an admiration for both pop and soft rock. It has a focus on commercial recording, often orientated towards a youth market, usually through the medium of relatively short and simple love songs, dealing with the wide range of emotions from physical or emotion love. While these basic elements of the genre have remained fairly constant, pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music. Since the pop genre is extremely broad, different levels of pop are admired by diverse audiences. Therefore our team have created a questionnaire, to be able to establish our target demographic.

Foundations By Kate Nash & Directed By Kinga Burza

Kate Marie Nash (born 6 July 1987) is an English singer and songwriter based in London. She had a UK #2 hit "Foundations" in 2007, followed by the platinum selling UK number 1 album Made of Bricks. Nash started her career in 2006. After several gigs, Nash uploaded her music to MySpace. She found a manager for herself before seeking producers for her music. On November 14th 2007, Kate Nash celebrated her debut album 'Made of Bricks' going platinum. Whilst playing a sold out show at Shepherd's Bush Empire the news broke that her album had passed the 300,000 sales mark after Fiction records conducted a massive sales check. The album currently sits as 2007's second best selling album.

Foundations


Kinga Burza
Kinga was born in Krakow, Poland and raised in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia before moving to London in 2005 and signing with respected film production company Partizan of Michel Gondry fame in 2006. She completed a BA at the University of New South Wales, before she went onto postgraduate studies in Theatre and Film at UTS in Sydney. Whilst studying at university, Kinga began teaching herself by making amateur videos for her then boyfriend Sydney musician Jack Ladder and many other friends she had in bands. Since being in the UK, Kinga has shot videos for M.Craft, The Thrills, The Rakes, The Teenagers, Calvin Harris, Kate Nash, Ladyhawke and recent Billboard No. 1 newcomer Katy Perry in LA. Promo Magazine has dubbed Kinga to be among 'the next wave of up-and-coming directors' while both I-D and Dazed and Confused Magazine have also run features on her. She was nominated Best New Director at the CAD Awards in 2007 and won a Young Gun award for Music Video Direction for Kate Nash's "Foundations" in 2007. Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" reached No.1 on the BillBoard charts. In 2008 Kinga won Best Pop Video at the UK Video Music Awards in London for Kate Nash's "Foundations".
I thoroughly enjoy watching the video to Foundations at every available opportunity. Its light-heartedness and simplistic techniques (excluding the animation) is something I would like to incorporate into my own music video. The humour used with simple camera angles and editing techniques I feel would appeal to the audience I am trying to reach, i.e teenagers around 14-18 years old. I believe it would create light hearted and at times humourous connotations throughout the video.

Criteria of Advanced Portfolio

Our criteria for our Advanced Portfolio explains what is to be included in our promotion package for the release of an album. The three main tasks are :

• Main Task: Produce a music promo video
• Ancillary Task One: Produce a website homepage for the band.
• Ancillary Task Two: Produce a CD/DVD cover for the release of album as part of a digipak.

Our research, planning and evaluation involves the use of our blog where we will evaluate and reflect on the creative process and experiences of our production.

We must answer the evaluation questions. These are:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and acillary tasks?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Questionnaire Results - Music Video

When collecting the data from our questionnaires I inputted the information from the questionnaires into Microsoft Excel in order to create a tally or a graph. This would help us to see clearly the results and decisions of our demographic.

Gender and Genre

In order to determine the preferred genre among males and females, our results depicted that the genre of pop (our group's chosen genre) was most popular, particularly among females, with half of our participants from both genders choosing it. It seems though that the target audience for this genre will be females, with 7 out of 20 choosing the genre compared with 3 males.

Target Age Range

As the group have chosen Pop as our preferred genre for our music video, we wanted to investigate how popular this genre was depending on age and therefore who our target age range would be. Out of twenty people, it seemed the age bracket of 14-18 deemed Pop one of it's preferred genres with over half choosing it. This concludes the question that our target audience for our music video will be between these ages.

Attraction to Music Videos
When asked what attracted them to a music video, people included the answers of storyline, setting and humour. As the graph depicts, storyline proved the most popular answer with males and females with nearly 3/4 of participants including this in their answer. The second and third most popular were humour and SFX. While SFX may seem the more difficult and time consuming to include, we will have to go buy the effects we have on an iMac computer. However storyline was deemed the most important and as a group we had discussed previously that a storyline would prove integral to our production.

Preferred Album Cover

One of the future ancillary tasks is to produce an album cover and so it was important to begin thinking about this. Our questionnaire highlighted that Mika's album proved most popular, but only with females. Whereas Groove Armada's was only popular with males.