Question 1(b) requires candidates to select one production and evaluate it in relation to a media concept. The list of concepts to which questions will relate is as follows:
Genre Narrative Representation Audience Media language
In the examination, questions will be set using one of these concepts only.
GENRE:
My A2 Production was a cross-media
product composed of a music video of the track Californication for the American
indie rock band The Red Hot Chili Peppers to sell their album. As part of this task, I also
produced a carefully tailored digipack design for the album and a magazine
advert which would create awareness of the product. In short, I used codes that
would maximize all parts of the production as a promotional tool to sell the
album and promote the band: exactly what the music industry expects.
Although these three components
have different genre conventions, I never forgot that audiences need to see the
each part of the package as part of a synergistic whole, so that the advert
attracts and addresses audiences with bold graphics and clear text, stating
when the album will be released and featuring the band prominently, while the music
video will employ a variety of genre codes to spark new audience interest,
reassure committed fans and withstand repeated viewings. Finally, the digipack
should have very clear links to the music video with the stars prominent,
the style and overall feel of the layout reflecting the band's identity and
reinforcing its brand through the appropriate choice of image, colour, font,
layout and general design.
My music video treatment
reflects both research into genre conventions and visual codes that
reflect the band's identity. For me, of overriding importance was the need to
convey to audiences the band's genre: Californication are distinctively
American with universal appeal: they set out to relate to people across the
globe, who have that stereotypical view on what people in California are like.
In the music video the band
delivers their own interpretation of what Hollywood is actually like, which is
in heavy contrast of what many people who haven’t actually been to California,
perceive it to be – a Utopian, star studded haven. The song focuses on the
deterioration of society and how 'plastic' and 'fake' the world is, much like
Hollywood - according to the Peppers. The RHCP use their own unique brand of
downplayed, soulful rock to convey the hollow and materialistic attitudes of
the “Californication” lifestyle.
They have mainstream
appeal based on easy listening, undemanding lyrics, and long chill-out
instrumental sections. In our music video, we tried to emulate the message that
The Red Hot Chili Peppers tried to create throughout the song, but without
making it too similar, we added our own touch to it. Many of the lyrics
continue to explain about the plastic unrealistic image that Hollywood portrays
and the young forever image it sells to young people. The lyrics, "Pay your surgeon very well to break
the spell of aging" is shown in one of our scenes of myself, looking
straight into the camera as if it were a mirror, playing and poking around with
my face, as if I were dreaming - like all the other women in the world - about
having plastic surgery in order to have the ‘perfect’ visual appearance. This
is a clear example of the convention of illustrating the lyrics with the
visuals.
Andrew Goodwin observes
('Dancing In The Distraction Factory') that the visuals may provide illustration
or amplification of the lyrics, or there may be disjuncture. As our band is
indie rock, we wanted to illustrate the lyrics with a mainstream, conventional
approach: our lyrics don't really offer the possibility of literal treatment
for every line, but they do make certain really key statements that their young
and middle aged audiences would relate to.
-performance shot
-snapback scene – environment, where we hang out, socialize,
fashion senses, stop motion animation, how we did it.
However, we also intercut
the performance shots with the back stage story (Erving Goffman's
model of front and back stage behaviours here interpreted quite literally).
As well as seeing the band in action, we see the backstage story associating
with what each band member likes to do and where we all as a group like to hang
out and socialize. We use stop motion animation tools such as flipagram to show
group fashion sense – for example, we all wore different snapbacks, wore them
at different angles, and took still images to reflect different angles in which
we all view life.
Therefore, this narrative was very different - if you can call
it narrative, because I would support Heidi Peeters' view that narrative in
music video is much more about building the emotional environment
surrounding the band or star and thereby making connections with the audience
than about plot or interpreting lyrics. For Peeters, this ability to connect
the band to the audience is the KEY GENRE CONVENTION: 'One would be surprised
at how the majority of theorists still consider music videos to be
visualizations of a song. While they may seem discontinuous .., the shots (in
music videos)are highly connected through the image of the star.” “The star
promotes the phenomenon of identification, a process by which viewers
become attached to a star, ranging from emotional affinity limited to
the context of the movie theatre to projection, by which fans try to
become their idols through imitating speech, movements and consumer patterns.'
To conclude, I made a conventional treatment. That is, I showed
both the public and private face of the band to be one seamless whole. Both
narrative treatment and cinematography show this: I created a Utopian
world of which the star seems to be the instigator, as claimed by Richard
Dyer's Entertainment and Utopia. The world of the band, the place
where they hang out, practise, play and chill out, is depicted as a video diary
of friends enjoying working and playing together. I agree with Peeters that
“Narrativity does not seem to be an absolute necessity within the medium. The
fact that music videos in this sense are primarily poetic does not mean that
clips never contain narrativity. Most music videos do develop a storyline,
embedded within its poetic structure and some clips even contain introductory
story sequences or non-musical narrative sequences inserted within the video
number but "outside" its musical score. Narrative in clips becomes a
device to structure the poetic clip world and make it more accessible and
recognizable to the viewer.”
REPRESENTATION:
REPRESENTATION:
At AS, I made Zest, a comic film in the style of Bridget Jones, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snoggingand PS I Love You. All these films have two things in common: they are 'rites of passage' films about young people struggling with various degrees of success to fit into the adult world and they are diary-like in their narrative form.
In our film, an Australian gap year student comes to work in Britain at a restaurant called Zest in the affluent and leafy Surrey suburbs where she is infuriated by the obstreperous customers and the eccentric, obsessive chef who models himself on Heston Blumenthal.
I have chosen to analyse Zest as it offers many excellent examples of stereotypes as well as the protagonist who represents a Australian teenager and gap year student. Comic stereotyping is the key to understanding representation in our AS film because it uses stereotypes almost as a sitcom does to short cut to audience understanding: we sympathise with the young Australian Dani because of the customers that she has to handle.
For example, our representations include two loutish, ill-mannered, heavy-metal biker boys who behave as if they are Ozzy Osborne and who scorn etiquette. They sneer at the menu ("Why are there are no bats on the menu?") as if they are prepared to show off doing outrageous things like their heavy metal super hero Ozzy, who reputedly bit the head off a live bat on stage. They put their feet up on the table, ignoring polite manners. For Dick Hebdige, clothing and music codes signal membership of specific subcultures (such as the Mods and Rockers); our two biker boys wear specific clothing codes such black leather jackets, heavy square-toed boots and neck tattoos with Chinese symbols.The tattoos are supposed to be threatening: they are intended to evoke gangland membership such as the criminal underworld of Chinese gangs, just the sort of decoration that these two boys would have wanted in order to seem more aggressive and hard than they actually are.
They are represented as rather star-struck when they comment " Well, Freddie Star ate a hamster", an intertextual reference to the singer and comedian who made the headlines when he reputedly teased his shocked girlfriend. This incident conferred life-long notoriety on Freddie Starr. We use it to support our representation of two boys who embody Andy Warhol's prediction about society'sobsession with celebrity culture that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
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Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making.
Before starting our productions I made a preliminary video to become more familiar with the equipment needed to film and edit, such as the Canon camera, tripods, use of lighting, and editing in iMovie.
At AS I made a lighthearted restaurant comedy film opening called Zest.
At A2 I made a music video using the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' song, Californication.
Blogger + Presentational tools an essential part of the production process as I researched, planned, recorded and sought feedback for my production using tools such as Pinterest, Tumblr and ScoopIt! to collate research which shaped my decision making and helped me organise my creative decisions efficiently, especially the access to professional examples that I intended to emulate. Communication tools were already part of my everyday working methods (Facebook, Evernote, Skype, email, BBM, Instagram) so that I could work effectively with my group and these I developed and extended during the 18 months to include Twitter as a research tool (following Allan Rusbridger’s advice that Twitter as a search engine rivals Google, and acts as a news aggregator for relevant information). In order to create evidence supporting the creative decisions that lay behind my productions at AS, I used digital presentational tools like Slideshare and Prezi embedded in my blog and by A2, I was using New Hive (an interactive infographic) to collate my work.
From the start, I used digital equipment to film my movie work using a Digital camera, Canon 550D, to make Cherie (a practice film opening) and my prelim. I also made ancillary products: at AS, I made a set of marketing tools to promote my film using digital camera (film poster, webpage design) and online digital tools such as Facebook and Twitter to market and distribute my film. I created an audience profile in Photoshop based on NME’s.
To edit my film work, I have used Apple Macs both at school and at home. I quickly became very competent editing in Adobe Premiere (for prelim & comedy), learning to make our comedy opening using green screen, audio, soundtrack, colour correction, etc. I am particularly pleased about learning to use After Effects to make….
Later I moved to iMovie to edit my music video where laying down the soundtrack was easy but the lip-synching in the editing was much more challenging as it was very precise work with a huge number of edits and transitions. As Heidi Peters asserts, music video is all about spectacle, so linear narrative gives way to a succession of visual codes, leading to the interweaving of genre conventions (such as performance, close-ups of the star, some illustration of the lyrics) with spectacle that is cut to the beat. This meant a huge skills development for me as I sought to depart from the simple narrative structure of my comedy film opening, which was more or less a series of brief scenes with a voiceover, music and titles punctuating the visuals, to an explosion of visual spectacle that should withstand repeated viewings.
Another challenge was creating a unified whole out of three different products: I had to incorporate visual elements of the music video into the digipack design which in turn had to feature on the magazine advertisement in order for the three to work as a synergistic whole promoting the album.
Using Photoshop, I designed the layout of the digipack and magazine advert, bearing in mind the need for clear visual codes, as I had learned from Roland Barthes.
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