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.