Final Group Artefacts

Poster





















Website

http://sidneysanderson.moonfruit.com/


Video

Individual Evaluation

Throughout this coursework I have worked in a group of 4 to produce a music video for "As Long As You Love Me" by Justin Bieber. I found that working in a group was effective because each person could be set different tasks based around what they were already good at. For example Jacob was set with the task of creating the website because he had [revious experience in this area in which the rest of the group did not. Therefore we found this was a valid choice and was best for the group if we wanted to get a higher standard website created.

My role in the group was to film parts outside of sixth form along with blog posts reflecting on progress and some elements of the research that we completed. I found that I completed my role well and the posts that I uploaded were valid and helped the group with the research and planning of the video that we created.

If I was not in a group I would not have produced what I did in a group mainly because I would not have picked this song or one similar, however I would have gone about it the same way in terms of my research and planning where I would have spent a lot of time looking at the genre in itself and looking at videos from it, comparing the similarities and looking for noticeable differences in terms of the style of the videos. However, if I had completed this task individually I do not think I would have met the standard or deadlines because of the amount of work that has been put into the video because it was a massive help being able to split the workload between us, as an individual I do not have the skills that we did as a group so some of the aspects of the coursework would have suffered because of this.

If I wasnt working as a group I would have chosen a more basic song so that I would be able to complete the task by myself without struggling too much with ideas and filming schedules, I am proud of the work that the group has produced as there was a lot of detailed criteria to be met and I felt that we met that as a group and came out with a good result from it.

I felt that although working in a group was good, I missed out on learning about different technologies because certain tasks were set to people with expperience so I found that I missed out on oppourtunities to become more aware of technolgies and missed an oppourtunity to gain skills in new areas that I may have picked up on if I worked as an individual.
 

First Draft

This is our group's first draft of our music video. We have uploaded it onto YouTube and are currently waiting on audience feedback to see what we can do to the video to make it more suitable for its genre and purpose.

Please leave any comments below!

Group Reflections

All of our clips have been filmed and uploaded into iMovie and we have completed a majority of the editing of our music video. It is going well at the moment and we are not really struggling with any timing issues. We are looking at completing the editing and having our final video finished by the end of the day.

Artist Poster

This poster for our artist was created using our favourite photo from our shoot with Sidney Sanderson. We completed our shoot whilst we were out filming for our music video. This was created to advertise Sidney's big new single and it was created using the influences from posters from similar artists such as Justin Bieber. Our shoot was successful and we managed to capture some good photos of the artist but we felt that this was most appropriate for our poster.

Filming Progress

Today we continued filming for our music video. We managed to get the majority of our first verse done including the intro. We have improvised on our footage as we have gone along and have decided to film our first verse as a video inside a video where we will show footage of our video being shot from another perspective. We began to get this footage together today and will use cuts throughout the verses between our actual video and the making of footage to keep the video moving. We are likely to continue with this format throughout the video to keep the style the same.
Most of our first verse is shot in front of a green screen because we are making it look like it has been shot in a studio where later on we will use outdoor footage to show progression and to make more of a story from what we are filming. The green screen effects will only be used on out main footage because the behind the scene footage will look better if it shows the green screen not in use.
We are going to continue filming through half term and begin editing within the next couple of weeks so that we can start putting out final piece together.

Theory Application

The Verve - Drugs Don't Work

This is the lyrics video for Drugs Don't Work by The Verve. This song is about Richard Ashcroft's dad who at the time was in hospital being treated for cancer. although this is the meaning of the video, when you apply the reception theory to the video and based on what people take away from this video, some audiences see this song as a warning against drugs by saying that they do not help in certain situations where the opposition of this would say that it encourages drug use during bad times.
The Blumler and Katz theory can also be applied to this video based on the uses and gratifications of the audience where people who take the same opinion on the song can discuss it in detail and can apply it to their own lives, particularly people who are going through the same situation as the one being described throughout the song. This has helped with the ideas of our group music video because we do not have to make the video relate directly to the lyrics in the song to make the video come out at a high standard and also make sense. 

Effects Debate

The effects debate says what effect media has on its audience and how it can influence readers. This is why there is media regulation because media has the potential to influence people in negative ways so there is a need to 'protect' audiences from some of the content that media carries. There tend to be three voices in this debate:

- Those who articulate their concerns about the effects of the media without any actual evidence.

- Those who have conducted research into media effects and whether the effects are positive and negative.

- Those who are subject to the debate, usually children or teenagers consuming new forms of media which the 'adult culture' are worrying about.

This theory is widely taken on board and is shown by media being given ratings to describe what audiences are suitable to view the different texts that are available to society. The biggest form of this is age ratings which are seen in everyday life. Censorship is also a big part of the media that restricts the content being shown to audiences. This theory is backed up strongly because of the laws that have been put in place that follow the morals of this theory.


This is the What it Feels Like for a Girl music video by Madonna. Throughout the video Madonna is seen to be doing things that are stereotypical of a "Bad Boy" image. This goes against conventions and gives the audience of the video different ideas and perspectives of the conventions that it represents and makes people think differently as opposed to living by stereotypes.

Reception Theory

The reception theory is a version of the reader's response literary theory that emphasises the reader's reception of literary text. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that the "text" is not passively accepted by an audience, but it is interpreted based on their individual cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.
There are three types of reception models:

Dominant - The reader fully shares the text's code and accept and reproduces the preferred reading.

Negotiated - The reader partially shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests. 

Oppositional - The reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading.

An example of this could be "The Funeral" by Band of Horses  where audiences could initially see the song as being about the loss of someone close to one of the band members. The actual meaning of the song is about the children that the lead singer has lost due to his partner having miscarriages. However, people could take the message of this song and apply it to their own situation where the meaning would change based around their lives and experiences, showing how audiences can interpret media and create their own meanings.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. The signals which are broadcast from the media are equal to each recipient, the effect level differs though because each of us respond to the text in different ways to each other. This theory is sometimes referred to as the bullet theory where the "media gun" fired information directly into the reader's head. This theory basically says that the audiences of media do not have a choice on what they believe because the media must always be right, however information can change and people begin to disbelieve when they come across opposing information.

This is the video for Born Free by Mia. this video is incredibly controversial as it is about the hatred towards people with ginger hair. This video opposes the Hypodermic Needle Theory because although the video represents this hatred, this sort of activity does not occur in real life and is not something that could possibly happen.

Blumler and Katz

The Blumler and Katz theory is a theory about what audiences do for the media rather than what the media do for audiences. It is a popular approach to understanding mass communication. It assumes that members of the audeince are not passive, but take an active role in media to meet their needs. When we take a piece of media, Blumler and Katz says that we have to fulfil one of the following to interact with the media:

Identify - Being able to recognise the product or person in front of you, role models that reflect similar values to yours, aspiration to be someone else.

Educate - Being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding.

Entertain - What you are consuming should give you enjoyment and also some form of 'escapism' enabling us to forget our worries temporarily.

Social Interaction - The ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between other people, sparks debates. (ex. Who is left on X-Factor)

This theory is criticised because a lot of people say that as an audience we do not have power over what the media creates but the media create what people want to see/hear so that the media itself becomes more popular. Also, because the theory states that people can see the media in their own way, this can infuse negative influences on audiences and can encourage people to take media too seriously or in some cases not serious enough. 
I have applied this theory to my own group's music video because we have filmed a video being filmed inside a video which will give the audience another perspective and a different type of interaction into music videos but because of the ideology the audience will still recognise that it is a music video.

This is the music video for Eminem's Just Lose it. I have used this video to represent this theory because audiences could watch this video to be entertained because the video has been created with light hearted parody. This video is funny because of the controversial subjects that are seen throughout the video and Blumler and Katz believes that people would enjoy this video for the entertainment factor of the content.

Group Blog Update

As our group we have not filmed footage in a while because we have been completing further research to ensure that any filming that we carry on with remains relevant to our chosen style. Whilst completing our research on the video we have also looked into the background of our artist and have looked at the sorts of merchandise that we could create. To do this we have created a logo for our artist that will appear on the merchandise and on our album cover.  We have also completed a risk assessment where we looked at the possible issues that we could come across while filming that we would have to be careful of. We did this so that we were aware of anything that we should look out for whilst we are out filming both inside and out. 

After completing this research we are ready to go out and get more footage and then we will begin to edit our video so that we can see if we need to add any sort of parts to it. 

Group Blog Update

In our last lesson as a group, we continued with the storyboard planning of our music video. On our group blog we have added a post with the timings for each line in the song. We did this so that we could decide on what shots we want to use to represent lyrics and so that we had an idea of how much time we would have for each clip in our video. After producing these timings we are going to cut through clips after every couple of lines to keep the song flowing. We decided to do this because if we cut after every line then the song would appear too fragmented and therefore it would be hard for an audience to follow in depth. We also decided that it would be easier to put together if we used longer clips because we would not have to cut as much and we could put more of a narrative together to go with the song.

Personalities

In lesson we looked at personality features and what makes a good team leader. We looked at this short presentation to look at different features of our own personalities and used this as a guide into picking the roles for each member of our group. We looked at each other's strong points to find out which roles each of us would suit for this coursework. From looking at this presentation we all had a mix of features from each of the boxes so we had to put our features together. In the end we decided to go with Graeme as our team leader because overall he had the best leadership qualities and he has good time management skills. Me, Liam and Jacob all have responsibilities of getting ideas together and analysing the music and lyrics in the song. So far we have gathered a range of ideas that could potentially be used in our video and we are beginning to filter our ideas to get rid of ideas that we think the video could be better off without. Our ideas have changed a lot already and we are still in the early stages, this is because when we come up with ideas individually and then have a group discussion we tend to develop and change a lot of the ideas that we have come up with. 

Group Blog Update

In today's lesson we spent more time on our group blog to get our posts up to date. We put posts up showing our progress in our research and planning. We also changed the look of our blog so that when people view our blog it instantly relates to what we are doing for our course. We have added a background of the artist whose song we are using, this will eventually be changed to a picture of our own artist so that all of our coursework links in and makes everything stand out more. We are going to spend more time on our group blog because we need to get ready for filming which means that our research and planning needs to be completed. We have completed our research so far by looking at different songs that we could use and looking at the ideas and meanings behind lyrics to see what we can do to represent the lyrics in our video.

Music Video Research

Previous A2 Music Videos
In today's lesson I spent my time on YouTube looking through videos from the past couple of years for the course that I am doing. I looked at other videos to see how other people approached this task and so that I can become aware of the mistakes and problems that people came across when they did this task.

Carol Vernallis Music Video Analysis

• Carol Vernallis Theory
• Carol Vernallis' theory is based on the editing of a music video. She bases her theory on four key concepts of the editing, this is the narrative, editing, camera movement and framing and the deigesis. She suggests that a music video is a visual response to the narrative, therefore whatever is happening on screen is a representation of the lyrics chosen by the artist. Vernallis also says that the narrative may not be completed and the video does not always show this. This is because of the editing of videos where the video appears partial and fragmented. Artists will sometimes choose to leave the video unfinished which leads the audience to question the narrative of a song. Vernallis also says that music videos may disrupt or break the conventions of continuity editing. The editing may also become visible and obvious, again breaking the continuity convention by making the editing stand out. A few examples of this are jump cuts, breaks of the 30 degree rule, cutting with the lyrics, extreme changes in pace, juxtaposed frames and graphic matches. She also says that establishing shots are one of the main features of a music video and are used frequently throughout a music video. The style of framing of the video is quite distinctive of the video and the camera may also move with the lyrics. Extreme/master shots are also common. The actions in the video won't always be completed and may be disrupted and there will be many repetitions throughout the video and some frames will appear more important than others due to the way they have been shot/framed.
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This video represents this theory well because the video fragments the song and uses clips in between to represent the lyrics of the song and almost narrates the listener through the meaning and lyrics of the song. A lot of jump cuts are used through the video to constantly change what is going on so the video is explained to the audience.

Group Blog

This is a link to our group blog. This blog has been set up to show the research that my group are completing directly relating to the song that we have chosen. On the blog we will have a questionnaire aimed towards various audiences so that we can find out what different people are looking for from a music video from that particular genre of music. We will include group discussions and mind maps on the blog to show our progress leading up to the filming and editing of our video, we will also post pictures from our filming sessions to show the progress that we are making on this project. The song that we as a group have chosen is Justin Bieber's "As Long As You Love Me" acoustic.

Music Video Directors

Michel Gondry

In class today we were looking at the different styles of music videos based around which director it was from. We looked at two videos at the start of the lesson, one from Kylie and one from Chemical Brothers. Both videos were from a director named Michel Gondry. We compared the two videos and looked at the how the particular style of the director had been used to represent the meaning of the songs.



This is the video for Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World




This is the video for The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be


Chris Cunningham

We then looked at Madonna - Frozen which was directed by Chris Cunningham who has also directed the videos Come To Daddy and Windowlicker by Aphex Twin. Although the videos are quite different, there are similarities that can relate them. This comes in the form of in the Madonna video, a crow is used to represent the song and the video is quite dark and sinister. The video for the song Come To Daddy is also quite dark and sinister with an aggressive dog being used in the video. This is the sort of style of this director and although the videos look noticeably different, the ideas behind the videos are very similar.






This is the video for Madonna - Frozen






This is the video for Aphex Twin - Frozen

Semiotic Theory - Music Video

There are three stages of the semiotic theory:

Perception
The person becomes aware of a sign.

Manipulation
The person interprets the sign and decides how to respond to it.

Consummation
The person responds.

Album Covers

The semiotic theory can be represented in music through album covers and music videos. The connotation of an article is what the article would mean to a member of the audience, this makes music more personal whereas the denotation of an article is what it was intended to mean. This is the meaning that the musician has given a song. They often represent this through use of their music videos.

This is a Little Mix album cover, their target audience is young girls and I think that this album cover is appropriate for this target audience because it shows the artists on the cover and the fonts used are bold and clear so they stand out. The colours are also light and feminine which again relates well to the target audience. The way the cover has been put together makes it obvious who the target audience is. This is what semiotic theory is all about because it stands out to a target audience because of what they expect from this sort of artist.