Media language Essay

Apply the concept of media language to one of your media productions.

For my music video in year 13 I used an indie rock song. We wanted to create a bold image for are artist and continue that throughout our music video and ancillary texts. To do this we used media language such as camera, editing, sound and mise en scene. We created synergy across our music video and other media texts which allowed us to establish our target artist and branding image.

Mise en scene was important for my music video because it created a link through our media texts. The outfits which were worn throughout our music video continued the colour scheme throughout, even during outfit changes within the video the colour scheme of the outfits remained the same we focused on the colours denim, red and black these colours can also be seen throughout our ancillary texts; The colours used gave connotations, of boldness. Red signifying danger, love and passion iced with the colour black  giving connotations of power and mystery combined with denim and blue which symbolises wisdom. These colours combined show connotations of strength something which we wanted our artist to represent. We used outfits which were casual however still produced a bold image. We pulled away from theorists such as Laura Mulvey who suggested women were objectified in the media. We did not sexualise our artist and ensured our clothing was not revealing, we wanted our artists to remain relatable and to set an example similarly to the connotations our chosen colour scheme represented for our chosen audience; older teens. We used the outdoors as our setting as this provided a lot of natural lighting meaning we did not need to use any artificial lighting, this gave the effect of the music video being natural rather than artificial again making our artist look more relatable. The outdoors setting can be seen throughout all of our ancillary texts this heightens our synergetic impact on our audience making our cross media appear as one brand. The colour red became an icon throughout our coursework this can be seen in costume and make up as well as in motifs used within our music video such as red roses again giving suggestions of power, love and desire which would appeal to our audience. 

We wanted our music video to show the target genre but also show our artist as a bold relatable character. We showed this through our camera work. We used pan shots to show the artist and the scenery this was a useful establishing shot of the outdoors again linking out music video to the rest of our texts. We recognised Steve Neal’s theory and kept our camera work and shots different as we did not want to make it repetitive or appear boring. Steve Neal suggests genre is determined by two things how much It conforms and subverts to its genre how much it repeats and changes compared to others alike in the genre. 

We used editing to engage our audience and heighten the impact of our chosen genre; indie rock. We did this by using effects such as our use of linear wipe when adding our artists name to the beginning of the video this made it look more appealing and also match the beat of our song.  We changed the brightness and colour throughout the video on our clips so that they matched especially when shots were filmed at different ties. Changing the brightness and contrast also made the video seem more aesthetic matching our target visuals as we did not want it to bright but not dark either.  We used a warp stabiliser on some panning shots of location so that they fit into the editing making the shots more interesting than just a simple pan, these shots we good as they allowed us to establish our setting to our audience the effect enhanced the shot to match our target image for our video.  We used dust and scratches effect throughout the video to edit the grain of the visuals again this enhanced our genre and meant that we could achieve our target visuals to match our song and the image we wanted for our music video as slightly more grungy and indi rather than clear the way a pop video might appear.

We used Goodwins theory and used the tempo of the sound and matched that visually, we used editing to link the visuals and the sound. This was done by the use of ……. effect. We did not use any extra sound and only incorporated the sound on the top of our music video this was non-diegetic, we matched out lip-sync from the video clips of our music with the lyrics of the song so that it appeared that out actor/ artist was singing the song.

Audience essay

Apply the concept of audience to one of your media productions.

All media types have consumers. The group of consumers will be varied depending on the type of media and the age groups, social class, life style and interests of the consumer. Hereinafter I will explore the consumption of my media texts both my ancillary texts including my digipak and website and my indie-rock music video created for my year 13 coursework.

Once deciding our genre and themes for our music video we had to target an audience for the consumption of our music video. To find our target audience we looked at different age groups and what types of media different age groups consume, we then tailored our advertisement and video to these types of media which would be consumed by our age group which we decided would be older teens. An audience consumes texts in various ways depending on their age group and their exposure to media types. Our target audience of older teens have a large exposure to social media and online digital technology we used this as below the line marketing of our brand. Social media was an easy to use but effective way to communicate with our audience. We made all of our advertisement and also our final product available digital on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter and YouTube as we found these were the most used social medias. 

An audience will choose to consume certain text depending on their age, gender, interests and various amounts of other exogenous factors, a key feature to look at when exploring texts consumed by an audience is the hypodermic model which involves ‘injecting’ information into the audience which directly received and accepted by the target audience, we did not use this theory as our media product was solely for entertainment purposes.

Uses and gratifications theory looks at why an audience seek out specific medias to satisfy certain needs, we used this theory to our advantage. Our music video was created for entertainment purposes and targeted an audience which Would seek out medias for their entertainment needs. Music videos follow three types of narrative, a narrative and story, a performance video or concept video. Our music video is mainly based on performance and therefor holds no real meaning other than aesthetics and entertainment whilst listening to our artists music. Consumers of music videos are interested to see the imagery that goes with the music video and the artist they are typically interested in; our music video follows this idea that our consumers would watch the video to see aesthetics and also to follow our constructed artist. our music video brand clearly matches our artist branding and the synergy for the rest of our products meaning fans of Isla who is our constructed artist will find entertainment in watching our music video and looking at our ancillary texts finding more about our artists music and personality for their entertainment.

The reception theory is the idea that a text is not accepted by an audience on the topics and texts itself but is constructed up within the relationship to how the audience receives the text depending on an individual’s background and life experiences. This theory did not greatly apply to my music video as there was no hidden meaning or narrative it was mainly performance although the reception theory may vary the audience type which likes our kind of video there isn’t many ways in which our video can be taken, it is bold and the aesthetics are decretive, we constructed our video to look aesthetically  pleasing to our audience rather than to be factual or to leave a lasting impact o our audience in a way that would provoke different views.

Narrative essay

Apply the concept of narrative to one of your media productions.

For my AS coursework I created a film opening. I looked at other conventions and use of narrative. My film opening was called ‘because of them’ it was a period drama, the use of the two characters in different generations was important to our narrative to that we could show side by side comparisons of the two women’s lives and how they were different. Because we showed the two generations this meant that our narrative was non-linear throughout as we swapped and changed the era that was shown on screen.

We looked at Strauss theory of binary opposites and used editing to clear portray our narrative and our two characters in relation to this theory. We used a black and white edit to show the older generation of our suffragette character, this was in contrast to our modern day character who we kept in colour. These colour contrasts added to the contrast and differences between the generations of our characters. Although our narrative is non-linear and jumps between times we used continuity editing as anything unnatural would not have fit our genre and would have impacted the audience making it confusing, the use of continuity editing enabled us to keep our audience engaged. Our editing allowed us to use and show Strauss theory of binary opposites between our two characters, the time they lived in and their beliefs on women voting.

We used sound to heighten the genre and keep the focus on what was happening on screen, we used a song overlay of music which we serotyped to our genre period-drama.  We used minimal dialogue as we wanted to establish the scene in our opening rather than focusing on a script.

We used mise- en- scene to reinforce our genre., our settings included a large house, and large acreage this is something with we stereotyped to a historical drama. We used a museum to film which gave the appearance of a large house this was a advantage a the arrangement of props made the house appear historical such as a grandfather clock, a large stair case, and wooden chairs all which we used in our aesthetics of our film opening.

Barthes was another theorist we looked at who influenced the creation of our film opening. We used narrative enigma to keep our audience wanting to watch more, this was shown by our modern day character realising that her ancestors were suffragettes and that it’s important for women to vote, our opening ends with her realising this leaving the audience wondering what will happen next. We also used semantic code; the idea that a narrative has more than one meaning. At first our film opening may just appear as a period drama but by the end of a film would leave an audience impacted realising the importance of women voting and encourage modern day women to use their vote which other women fought so hard to get them. Our narrative unravels to show that our ancestors play an important role in our lives today even if we don’t realise it this uses bathes cultural code questioning the audience’s cultural knowledge of how we came to have the rights we do today.

Our narrative is clearly portrayed to our audience this is most clearly shown through our use of mise- en- scene and our editing. Our narrative was successfully created by following ideas of theorist and conventions to create a film opening with reaches our goal of highlighting the importance of women voting.