Chosen project

24th November 09

After reflecting on our first post we have realized that we have become more analytical and can explain why we have chosen to do our project in a much more detailed way.

This project allows us to be extremely creative and as art students we feel this is best suited to us compared to the other briefs. It gives us a challenge and allows us to go down many different paths and develop not only our ideas but the audiences too. 

The project will allow us to portray our ideas and experiences through things we have researched and studied such as feminism and other different theories. The final cut will therefore be a product of our ideas and how we have related to the different theories and what we have learnt from them. It is ideally suited to us because we can be highly creative and execute a "piece of art" in itself. 

Furthermore we have a more in-depth knowledge of the music industry because of our previous project which was to create a music magazine. We have had an insight into the industry and what works and what doesn't. However because this is a video it gives us a new challenge and new ideas to work with. 

1st December

How important are your experiences to your creativity? 

Our experiences are extremely important because they influence our outlook on life and how we think about certain issues. Creativity can be affected by many different things, whether its influences, experiences or the media. We feel that our experiences are the main factor affecting our creative thoughts. We can reflect back on certain things that have affected us and how this made us feel. We can then adapt this to our video. 

Could you be specific?

For example when the girl in the video feels lonely. From past experiences when we have felt lonely or seen others who are lonely we can understand the emotions that go with this, the colors associated with that emotion and how it should be portrayed. 

As we have already discussed we are both art students and have a creative outlook on life. Our minds are creatively challenged everyday, not just in our work but in our experiences. So as this shows it is a cycle where both creativity and experiences influence and affect each other.  

Can people of your age be as creative as older people with more experiences?
Sometimes having more experiences can be limiting because it gives you an outlook on many things rather than using creative ideas which are new and fresh. Older people do have more worldliness than younger people however if everyone were to have had the same experiences then it would never work because our opinions and outlooks would all be the same. 

People of our age can be as creative as older people because their outlook is new and vibrant. However it does depend on the individual and all the factors that affect their lives everyday. 

Could you be very specific about how your AS project feeds into your A2 project?

Our previous AS project was to design a music magazine including the front cover, contents page and double page spread. It feeds straight into out A2 project because it influences our ideas on music magazines, the music industry and how the institutions feed music to the audiences. 

In particular it will help us to make the music advertisement and c.d. cover because we have looked at how magazines advertise products. The music video has been influenced because on our previous AS project we were the institution that music producers had advertise and link their work back to in order to sell music. 

Questionnaire Results

The results coincide with what we predicted, as the song is appropriate generally for all age groups, however, would only be understood by late teens and older. This age group is who we want to aim our music video at, as we feel it's best suited, because it's a difficult song to understand, and with the ideas of our music video being ironic and different, in co-ordination with the song tempo and atmosphere, we want to make sure that the viewers aren't confused or bewildered, but intrigued and excited.

This helps us because it tells us what the audience feels from the song, and how we can show these emotions in our video, using different forms of image, colour and narrative. By knowing the emotions the audience experiences from the song, we are able to adapt the video to these emotions in a style that is controversial.

The Plain White T's, Hey there Delilah video is in a similar style that we want to create, we felt it was necessary to question people about which emotions they felt after watching/listening to the video. The results show that the video's intentions were to create the feeling of loneliness, and the mass of the results show that our audience felt this. 

The genre we feel suits our chosen song, wouldn't necessarily fit into the genre "pop", so this was a suprise to us because from the other answers to our questions, the results weren't suprising at all. This probably shows us that the song we have chosen fits into a niche market that isn't necessarily liked and preferred by the general population. 

To show our use of technology, we decided to do a interview of our questionnaire and film it, then post it on youtube. This is what we got. 

Our Progress

At this stage, where our storyboards, shot list, prop list, textual analysis are all complete, we have influence from things such as feminism and academic texts that have accredited to our coursework and our idea for the final music video. We are ready to film! All we need to do is a risk assessment, and compile our results from our questionnaire, this will defer our audience and style.

Interpreting, Understanding and Applying an Academic Text

Being Discovered: The emergence of female address on MTV.

Lisa A. Lewis

Since MTV's inception in 1981, the issue of sexism has been a recurring and insistent theme in both popular and academic criticism. But the charge of sexism, while it importantly foregrounds issues of textual politics, too frequently treats MTV as a monolithic textual system, and sexism as a static and ahistorical mode of representation written into media textuality. Music video does bring together two cultural forms that have notorious histories as promulgators of female objectification - rock music and televisual imagery. And specific textual examples of women in chains, caged boxes and strewn across sets in skimpy leather outfits can certainly be called upon to justify such claims. But focusing exclusively on the sexist representations present in many male-addressed videos overshadows the emergence on MTV of an aggregate of videos produced to songs sung by female musicians, and their enormous popularity among female fans.

MTV's role in the rise of female musicianship

In the years leading up to the start of music video promotion, female rock musicians were struggling for recognition both as vocalist( the traditional female niche) and as instrumentalists and composers. The contemporary women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s provided momentum for change, as did the early punk movement in Britain at the end of the 1970s. Although punk emerged essentially as a working-class male subculture, Hebdige (1983) makes the point that punk included a minority of female participants who aggressively tried to carve out a specifically female form of expression, a sharp contrast to the usual subsuming of women by subcultural phallocentricism. 

Punk propelled girls onto the stage and once there, as musicians and singers, they systematically transgressed the codes governing female performance... These performers have opened up a new space for women as active participators in the production of popular music. (Hebdige 1983: 83-5)

In our group, we broke down this academic text, finding out words and phrases that we weren't familiar with, then we used google to define them for us. This then helped us to understand the text more.

Inception- The first part/beginning of a series of other things.

Monolithic- Massive or imposing in size.

Static- Unchanging.

Ahistorical- Unrelated to history.

Textuality- The attitudes that distinguish the text.

Promulgators- A public statement containing information.

Aggregate- Sum up the whole amount. 

Engaging with an academic text

Sound and Vision, Goodwin et al 1993.

Popular music and post-modernism in the 1980's, (Will Straw)

The thing that stands out about recent writings about music videos is the importance about the changes in subjects and their theories in cultures. 

Music videos are the latest of important examples of media texts that show how the media is developing. 

Music videos didn't fit with any existing academic area. 

Post structuralism is an era, where things don't fit into categories, music videos exemplifies that era. 

Music videos haven't been written about for very long, originally they came from the rock culture. 

Artists are scared because image is very important, more important than the music. It's to do with vanity and this threatens the music industry. 

The music video limits the listener in the imagination so they don't enjoy music as much. 

Engaging this academic text with reference to our coursework and blog

This text claims that music videos are influenced by the changes in different academic subjects, and that they are a convulsion of them and their different theories. For example, in our music video, image is extremely important, because we are representing a stereotype, and best trying to portray this with the use of image. We are influenced by being art students, where knowing the impact of line, color, form and texture, and see it as extremely important. These theories are important in concern of how we are reflective on ourselves and what we want to portray in our music video, based upon our experiences and theories/subjects in which we have been influenced by. 

Will Straw states that the production values of the developing media is indicative of the time that it is produced. The technology used and quality of picture, sound and editing show the audience what time this is produced in. A music video produced in the 80's would be entirely different to one produced in 2009, because of the development of technologies, ideas and theories, plus the broadening of subjects. Music videos are extremely focused, however, involve areas from subjects, that effect the audience on a personal level, for example, we are wanting to highlight feminism, prostitution, and relationships, which can come from subjects such as history, psychology and religious studies, also media, and music. Music videos are developing from the interaction and freedom of these different subjects, technology, theories, and creative ideas. They don't fit into an academic area, they interact with each other. The music video made, is indicative of the era that it is produced, the post structuralism of the recent times, where development of technology and ideas is at its upmost.

Straw's idea is that the history of music videos was created by the late capitalist societies, their culture and their ideas. He believes this began from influential rock and jazz cultures, and that their is an important link between these rebellious cultures and the music video and it's style. In our coursework, we support this idea by highlighting things that people wouldn't usually feel comfortable with seeing or talking about. We want to provoke an emotion from the audience so that is has an effect on the music itself, and highlight the song, in light of what they are being shown, because we understand the song can be interpreted in different ways, we want to show the audience our way of thinking. The emotion itself will be something they are not used to feel, as it is an uncomfortable subject that they are being shown, and it can provoke different emotions, but they will be intrigued and interested.

Image is highly important to us, however, what is image if the image isn't for your own benefits. This is where feminism comes into our category of prostitution. She sees it as a benefit for her, not for the men she sleeps with, it shows her doing something she likes for money, which could be seen as a benefit, and give her the upper hand, using men for their advantages. However different audiences see different. They could see the opposite, depending on their own experiences and life. 

How To Analyse A Music Video

A theory of how to analyse a music video, devised by Andrew Goodwin writing in "Dancing in the Distraction Factory" (Routledge 1992)

Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal video, dance routine for boy/girl band).

-Our planning for our music video doesn't demonstrate any of this, we would think an acoustic song would have the artist playing his/her guitar, a simple video. However, we have chosen to contradict this by making the video more interesting and dynamic. 

There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting).

-We believe that this is the main importance of a music video, otherwise, the two have little relevance with each other. We have analysed the lyrics in depth so that the lyrics and our story board are linked together, making it simple for the audience to understand, but still being ironic. The song we have chosen is the narrative to our music video, which is why we believe this point is necessary for a music video.

There is a relationship between music and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting)

-Our music video, which we have planned, will have quite a fast paced flow of shots, however we have chosen an acoustic song, which is quite slow and calming. This is where we have differed from the theory, as we wanted to create irony and make the filming different and alternative, rather than having a slow paced video, making a strong relationship with the music.

The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style). 

-Our music video doesn't include the artist, so this differs from this theory, and our story board doesn't outline any major close ups where you can see all of the actors face. We thought this would be better as it keeps the facial emotion minimal, and creates a mystery for the audience, not knowing entirely who they are watching. 

There is frequently reference to notion of looking (screes within screens, telescopes, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

-Our planning shows actions through mirrors,