Genre (Needs to be finished)

I am going to discuss theories of genre in relation to my advanced portfolio whereby I produced a music video for Matthew Perryman Jones alternative pop song ‘Save You.’ The music video is a period piece set In the 1940’s and is based on a couple separated as the male character leaves for war, therefore follows conventions of a romantic narrative.

As Daniel Chandler once stated “genre is too restricting and presents audiences with a creative ‘straightjacket.’” Although genre is a helpful way to define different methods of communicating to audiences and creating boundaries and guidelines there is a lot of criticism that surrounds genre. Genres can create difficulties for those who want to experiment outside of the rigid boxes, yet without genre to conform to it would be hard to fund and sell your product. I don’t believe that genre was too restricting with our music however; therefore it challenges chandler’s theory. Our narrative falls under the romantic genre but both conform and subvert the ideas of romance. Our music video reveals a couple through flashbacks showing portions of happiness and love, yet the tragic nature of the video subverts generic conventions. Unlike in other romantic narrative music video’s such as ‘High Hopes’ by kodaline and ‘The one that got away’ by Katy Perry where the death of the male character proves to be tragic yet end on a positive resolution, our music video focuses upon the sadness and vulnerability of the female character and does not end positively. Due to the fact that the music video doesn’t conform strictly to the genre of romance, the genre was not ‘restricting’ like how chandler suggested. Like Jane Feuer mentioned ‘it is hard for genre to be defined as they’re abstract.’

Warren Buckland suggested ‘Genre creates expectations that condition our responses. The familiarity of the genre enables each spectator to anticipate and predict what will appear in them. Genre sets up hopes and promises and brings pleasure if these hopes and promises are fulfilled.” I believe that the high emotional response to our music video is evoked from the intertwining of tragedy and romance. The fact that our video subverts the romantic genre by not having a return to equilibrium creates a high emotional response because the genre which ‘sets up  hopes and promises’ doesn’t bring pleasure because these are not fulfilled due to the tragic death of the male character. Rarely music videos don’t have a return to a state of equilibrium, however one of the main inspiration for our music video ‘Thinking of you’ by Katy Perry ends similarly to our music video. Perry’s music video is a romantic genre like ours yet challenges it slightly by not fulfilling generic hopes.  

Rick Altman

Narrative

I am going to discuss theories of narrative in relation to my advanced portfolio whereby I produced a music video for Matthew Perryman Jones alternative pop song ‘Save You.’ The music video is a period piece set In the 1940’s and is based on a couple separated as the male character leaves for war.

The narrative for our music video is very interesting as on reflection I noted that it conforms to various theories of narrative. The structure of our narrative is Non linear leaving the audience to conclude the narrative by themselves. The narrative is structured using in Media- Res and a variety of flashbacks which drop subtle hints throughout the video before the closed structure which reveals the tragic end. Boardwell and Thompson once mentioned “the relationship between charcters is shaped by structure of the text.” This can be seen throughout the video due to specific editing techniques and ordering of clips, for example flash backs and slow motion. Our video conforms to this statement as the close relationship of the pair is revealed through a stream of flashbacks which push the narrative forwards and allows the audience to begin to puzzle the narrative together through a variety of codea. Roland Barthes theorised the 5 code rule of narrative, and our music video conforms to this theory. There are many symbolic codes that hint the male characters death throughout the narrative without being explicit. Solving the narrative conforms to the enigma code whilst The semantic code comes into place as the female character prepares for a funeral, the objects surrounding her such as the funeral fascinator give speculation towards a funeral. The female character is filmed walking through a graveyard into a church; the church is a figure of representation of death. The female reads a letter and the camera focuses on the words ‘KILLED IN ACTION’ which applies to the action code due to the specific words. The fact that the video is set during the second world war and the male is going off to war already suggests to the audience that death is an inevitable tragedy due to the negative connotations of war, this makes connections with the word outside of our music video (cultural code.)  The reason we chose to use a non linear narrative was to create audience speculation keeping them intrigued while also allowing them to  unfold the narrative providing emotional responses. Katy Perrys music video for ‘Thinking of You’ was a huge influence to our music video following a similar non chronological structure however was more explicit as it showed the death of her partner unlike ours making her video conform further to a closed structure.

The theory of binary opposition founded by Levi strauss is conformed to within our music video but also challenged due to the fact the video is through a female perspective yet the song is sung by a male. The reasons that the theory of binary opposition is applied in our narrative is the fact that the male is leaving to fight in the war, signifying strength and dominance yet the woman is left at home feeling weak and vulnerable. The theory of binary opposition is challenged in modern society due to the uprising of feminism, for example in the video ‘Stupid Girls’ by pink there are themes of empowerment through the binary oppositions of two types of women rather than a male and female and suggests females should be strong and powerful .Our music video conforms to the theory of binary opposition as it is the perspective of a female therefore audience are passively made to sympathise with her and her loss, this in turn hyperbolises her vulnerability.

Andrew Goodwin theorised five key aspects; The protagonist being the centre of attention, a relationship between the song and visuals, thought through beat, narrative and performance of the song and technical aspects of the video. Our video both conforms to and subverts this theory. The female protagonist is the camera focus, and there is a relationship between the songs meaning and the visuals presented in the music video. Thought through beat is signified in our video as the lyrics create a story and the narrative of our video reveals a story. For example the lyrics of the song goes ‘too many years of dying’ as the camera focuses on a picture of the deceased male character. The way in which we challenge Goodwins theory is we do not represent the artist within the video and the protagonist is not the artist singing. This is because the song is sung by a male and our main character is female. Within real media texts this is also found such as In Ed Sheerans ‘Lego House’ music video where the protagonist is an actor hired to play the artist.  Once again we conform to Goodwins final aspect which suggests that lighting and colour contribute to the mood of the video categorising the narrative. The use of mise- en- scene allows the audience to make presumptions of how the narrative will unfold.

The music video completely disregards Todorov’s theory of equilibrium. This is due to its non chronological structure. The narrative ends negatively, and this does create a higher emotional response.  The music video subverts Todorov’s theory of equilibrium because we used in-media -res and therefore the narrative doesn’t follow a solid structure like how todorov theorised.

To conclude I believe that the most influential theories in the construction of our narrative were Andrew Goodwin and Roland Barthes.

Digital Technolgy (unfinished)

For my media foundation portfolio I first created a magazine cover for a school magazine before moving onto my main task which consisted of creating a Music Magazine cover, contents page and double page spread. During A2 I was tasked with creating a preliminary music video prior to my main task which was to construct a full length music video and subsidiary product (digipak). My skills have developed within digital technology over the course due to my exploration of various hardwares and softwares I explored at A2 in comparison to As which subsequently improved my research, planning, post- production, construction and final outcome.

During AS I had a lack of audience feedback because of my lack of software exploration. I depended solely on my blog to receive feedback, and creating an audience survey on a programme called survey monkey. Not having strong audience feedback to work from prevented me from being able to alter my product to audience preference. Along with my lack of audience feedback I also didn’t research existing product perhaps in depth as I could have done. For example, with the preliminary school magazine I tested fonts on Microsoft word, this limited me hugely to mainstream fonts that lacked professionalism and unique style. When moving onto my Music magazine I downloaded a font called ‘Indie Summer’ which associated with the genre of the magazine being indie/alternative. I created my preliminary task on a programme called ‘Pages’ which allowed me to construct my product like existing media products with the use of professional layout. Whereas for my main product at AS I used InDesign which is a professionally used publication designer. I found this easier to navigate and created a higher standard finished product. When manipulating photographs for the magazine I used Photoshop. I was able to use various tools such as colour corrections and Marquee (magic wand) tool. I feel that using the marquee tool put my work at a disadvantage because of my inexperience with photoshop. On our contents page main photograph I edited the photo in black and white then used the marquee tool crop the two models and put them against a solid white background. At AS I feel as though we didn’t communicate properly as a group therefore shoots were disorganised. We communicated via email and in hindsight it would have been more efficient to communicate over instant messenger such as facebook.

With regards to A2 I had now become more confident with using IMacs and adobe programmes. I learned from AS that is was important to ensure I used a range of different software’s to ensure that I maintained professionalism and be more efficient with planning and research. For our preliminary music video we used Imovie. Imovie allowed us to import digital video footage to edit and organise.