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.