Purpose of a music video

A model of the media.

Audience Reception Theory

Reception Theory

1. Encode meaning- the meaning the producer of the text (you) puts in.
2. Decode meaning:

•   Preferred meaning (reading of text)-what the author intended.
•   Negotiated meaning (reading of text)- a mix preferred and oppositional. 
•   Oppositional meaning (reading of text) - the viewer puts his/her own interpretation to the text.

      3. Cultivation Theory- Long term effects of watching television - believe social reality portrayed on television.

Audience Reception Theory describes how audiences respond to certain texts. Each audience member will react to texts differently based on their age, cultural experiences, gender, sexual orientation, etc. A section of this theory is the 'Encoding Decoding Theory'. This theory, created by Stuart Hall, suggests that a text is 'encoded' with meaning by the producer, which is then 'decoded' by the audience. Texts can have multiple meaning that were encoded by the producer and different people can decode these messages in different ways. 

Stuart Halls theory is about produces encoding meaning/ideology into text, which the audience decode. Decoding can result in the audience to look at the preferred meaning, negotiated meaning and the opposite meaning, which they put their own interpretation to the text. This was David Morley theory in the way the audience responds to text. In addition text can be decoded through body language, to understand emotions and relationships.

An example of where three different interpretations can be used is in the "Batman v Superman" trailer. The intended message is that they both fight to save innocent people. The negotiated meaning is that they both fight for what they believe in. The oppositional meaning is that one has gone rogue and the other is trying to contain the other one.

Star Theory

Richard Dyer - Star Theory

Richard Dyers star theory is the idea that icons and celebrities are manufactured by institutions for financial gain. He believes that stars are constructed to represent 'real people' experiencing real emotions. Stars are manufactured by the music industry to serve a purpose; to make money out of audience, who respond to various elements of a star’s personality by buying records and becoming fans. 

His theory is split into three sections:

1. Audiences and Institutions 

2. Constitutions 

3. Hegemony

Audience and Institutions 

Stars are made for money purposes alone. Increasing the brand identity benefits the institution as they become a household name increasing sales in all of the media platforms they are in.  The institution then models the artist around the target audience they choose. For example Lady Gaga, according to Dyer, was modeled around fashion forward people so the audience can relate to her as a person and also her music. 

Britney spears

Britney Spears is a well known artist. She is an actress as well as a singer and since signing with Jive Records in 1997 she has been successful in the music industry internationally. In her early days of her music career she was represented as a girly artist. She wore pink, had her hair in pigtails and wore make up. In her video "Baby One More Time" her dance routine was choreographed in a way to make the audience desire to be in her gang. Her look was branded to suit the record label. The whole music video enhances the idea of innocence and purity.

However, she later changed her image to be a more sexualised singer, which was in order to please the record label and to enhance her image, supporting Richard Dyer's Star Theory.  An example of this sexualised version of Britney was "Oops!... I Did It Again", where she wore a full body suit of Red Spandex. This was a much more mature version of Britney, which was created in order to please the record label and to conform to Richard Dyer's Star Theory.

sexism in pop videos

Laura Mulvey's theory states that women are seen through the male gaze, this denies women human identity. The male gaze also ensure that women are seen through the perspective of men, as Laura Mulvey also stated the camera is another form of the male gaze. This then shows that women are treated as objects of erotic desire. In addition to this women have no agency in films, but are only used to represent the dominance in male characters. For example most women in films only show to have a sexual relationship with the lead male character.

Robin Thicke - 'Blurred Lines'

This was the infamous video that was banned from 20 University Student Unions for promoting the devious act of rape, with lyrics such as 'I know you want it...' and even the title of the song symbolizes the act of drugging women into sexual intercourse. The explicit video involves 3 female models completely topless, causing viewers to only focus on their bodies and portraying women to be cheap, amplifying the meaning of the song 'force women into sex even if they say no, they're only objects.' This was what created an uproar and made women of the public protest against the songs in certain universities.

Lily Allen - 'Hard Out Here'

This song was released as a direct response to the 'Blurred Lines' video by Robin Thicke. 

While the song's lyrics are completely feminist and against exposing women inappropriately, the actual video features multiple of the features the song is against. While this could be seen as an ironic view of the style and is making fun of it, this is not clear to the audience and therefore could be seen as more hypocritical. Despite the main message of the song is about how women trying to be thin to look good is wrong, she amplifies the message by adding examples of the good looking women.

Another song that is well known for degrading women is 'Booty' by Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea. This video represents women as objects and focuses mostly on their faces. Unlike "Hard Out Here" the song is not giving a message about women's inequality and injustice, but it is supporting it. The choreography in the music video and the cinematography of the video work in correlation as the features of the women are highlighted throughout the whole music video. Even though the video relegates women it is understandable. The lyrics of the song match with the type of music video that it is. It talks about sexy women and their features. It encourages women to feel good about how they look and their appearance. 

In conclusion, Laura Mulvey's theory still exists in modern day music videos.

Editing music video 2

Today we have most of our footage if not all of it and we will be adding them in. Today we edited in the rest of the empty spaces and the  band sequence part of our music video. When had synced up the lip syncing parts of the music video thoroughly as to make it seem that we were actually singing it. As of today the music video was finally fully finished with all the necessary details inside of the music video itself. Altogether the whole music video is over 3 minutes which is a standard screening time for a music video. Below are screenshots of what was mentioned above:

Making of digipak

To create our digipak we used Photoshop. In our digipak we went for a retro theme as the music video we chose to do had to do with things of the past, retro if you will. Each separate panel had a mixture of different retro themes. These are how each of the separate panels ended up:

For each of these separate panels we had to had to fiddle about with the different layers to make sure that all the images didn't overlap and that if we wanted them to overlap it would be in the order that we wished for. Photoshop allowed us the freedom to easily make a digipak that we wished for and we feel that the digipak came our quite well. Below is the layers of the digipak itself and the finished product: 

Blog 14-Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was known as the king of pop once he started his single career. During the early stages of his life he was in a group called the Jackson 5. During his music videos Michael Jackson uses them to show more than just his dancing, but to tell a stories an address import issues. By adding these aspect for his music videos it allowed him to get a better reception from the audience. 

"Rock with You" was the first song he sang as an individual. The song was released in 1979 and it was all about him. There were many close up and shots of him dancing with his shiny costume. The video was almost a message to the world that he was doing his own thing and he was unique. In Michael Jackson's early days he was always more focused on the music and the way he sung. You can see that he is truly enjoying his music as he dances to the song.                                      

Thriller

In 1983 he put out undoubtedly one of the most famous music videos of all time called "Thriller". 

Budget: $500,000
Jackson didn't have to pay for the video because he made a deal with MTV and Showtime which covered the costs. Showtime got to air a one hour special with the 'making of' documentary and the 14-minute film before it was broadcasted anywhere else. 

The video was so imaginative and creative that it won Best Performance Video, Best Choreography and Viewers Choice at the first MTV Music Awards in 1984. The tape became the best selling and was able to sell 9 million units. Tapes were in high demand and the video was released a few weeks before Christmas so the video were able to make a staggering amount of sales.

Case study 3-Alex Southam

Alex Southam

Alex Southam also freelanced for OB Management. He trained as a lawyer at first but then decided to go on and head in anew direction and worked in the film industry. He started by making music videos to learn 'the trade'.  He has worked for Agile Films who describe him on their website as: „Alex Southam is an exciting new talent, working in a dizzying variety of styles across live action and animation. Entirely self taught, his inventiveness and creativity have caught the eye with a series of diverse promos for the likes of the Walkmen, Alt+J and Lianne La Havas. Alex joined Agile in August 2012.‟ 

To begin with Southam undertook all the tasks on his videos such as : the camera, the lighting, editing and he now uses a director of photography. Southam likes the format of music videos as, 'you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom'. He is less keen on commercials as they allow 'much less freedom'. He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos -this is becoming  an increasingly important platform as it is considered to have 'higher status' than youtube.

Southam likes the format of music videos as,'you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom' He is less keen on commercials as they allow for 'much less freedom' He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos – this is becoming an increasingly important platform as it is considered to have 'higher status' than YouTube.

His breakthrough came with the video Tesselate for Alt J. This video had a budget of £10,000 and it took 1 day to shoot.

Album art exercise

This is my album art exercise we had to obtain a random band name,album title and a random background image. We then had to drop it onto photoshop and edit it on in the way we felt appropriate.

Music video rough draft

Here is our rough draft for our music video, main point to note is firstly it is evident that is was not finished. We received feedback from viewers, some positive and some negative. These were varying for we like how you set a playful mood throughout the whole video and the creative ideas used throughout such as using nature (the ducks at the start). Not to mention that they enjoyed the split-screens and they didn't feel that they were overused and the frame picture pauses were pretty nice. Downsides were of course that it wasn't finished, the lip syncing wasn't synced properly with the music itself and in the band room scenes you could she shadows. So altogether i feel that we are doing a pretty good job.