Applying narrative to your text - Music video
The song from the music video lyrically tells a narrative, which in this case is centred around the subject of love. The audience is placed in a position in which they are led to admire the singer, as the video consists of continuos images on her and the camera barely comes away from her. This automatically leads the audience to look at her, relate to her both in character and personality.
The narrative is organised and structed in time with the song as her expressions throughout the video compliment the music, making the lyrics one of the main focuses in the song, which reflects the artist professionally as it is the lyrics she wants people to connect with.
In AS I wanted my audience to connect with my artist both musically and in personality. This way I'm able to reach my target audience. I achieved this aim by constructing my character in a way that suited both audiences, for example the confident, assertive hip hop artist with the fashionista, stylistic girly girl side. This leads the audience to not stereotypically take upon their cultured view of a natural hip hop artist and to in fact, connect with the artist more and therefore be intrigued to know more.
In order to portray the narrative of the lyrics effectively I had to ensure I incorporated sound/music, mise en scene, editing and other technical features. Sound/music was literally just the music which consisted of different tempos, fast and slow parts, loud and quiet and a variety of instruments each which supported the lyrics in portraying the narrative and correct meaning. Mise en scene - reflects character. Editing - close up shots throughout, shots of Eve singing lyrics.
Closed narrative - end of lyrics, end of story.
In terms of lyrics, some link to the setting, with the water and the magical feel created within the music. Some lyrics were emphasised such as the high frequent word 'animal' but the main focus was placed upon the artist to create the 'star image'.
Mise en scene
The studio setting may aspire to the audience as they want to be 'like her' and be well known - like most people want to be, however this effect wasn't created purposely, it's merely there to emphasise that Eve T is upcoming and professional; therefore people should take her, and her music seriously without stereotyping.
The lake setting suggests innocence and puts the artist in a vulnerable position as we connote the outdoors with words such as freedom and innocence; however Eve is out on her own, which puts across this vulnerable image of a girl and perhaps reflects the industry she's in and how difficult it is - may reflect her journey into becoming a star - Roland Barthes 'The semantic code' - audience combines the location, artist and song together to create a batch of feelings and perhaps an emotional attachment to the artist even though Eve doesn't actually ask for help, the audience wants to. - Andrew Goodwin - mixture of amplification and disjuncture. - Steve Archer 'Videos tend to only suggest story lines and focus on fragments of the lyrics'.
Objective character identity - one characters point of view and story is shown...if the audience wants to know more about her...listen and watch more of her songs/music videos.
-Narrator and protagonist - she tells the lyrics and story in a way that she is leading and she is dominant - she is the main focus and she will tell her own point of view - reflects her strong character.
-Narrative and perhaps conceptual (Firth 1988)
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Mise-en-scène
Mise-en-scène (French pronunciation: [mizɑ̃sɛn] "placing on stage") is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction. Mise-en-scène has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term".[1]
When applied to the cinema, mise-en-scène refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting.[2] Mise-en-scène also includes the positioning and movement of actors on the set, which is called blocking. These are all the areas overseen by the director, and thus, in French film credits, the director's title is metteur en scène, "placer on scene."
Key aspects of Mise-en-scène:
- Set design
- An important element of "putting in the scene" is set design—the setting of a scene and the objects (props) they're in. Set design can be used to amplify character emotion or the dominant mood of a film, or to establish aspects of the character.
- Lighting
- The intensity, direction, and quality of lighting have a profound effect on the way an image is perceived. Light (and shade) can emphasize texture, shape, distance, mood, time of day or night, season, glamour; it affects the way colors are rendered, both in terms of hue and depth, and can focus attention on particular elements of the composition.
- Space
- The representation of space affects the reading of a film. Depth, proximity, size and proportions of the places and objects in a film can be manipulated through camera placement and lenses, lighting, set design, effectively determining mood or relationships between elements in the story world.
- Costume
- Costume simply refers to the clothes that characters wear. Using certain colors or designs, costumes in narrative cinema are used to signify characters or to make clear distinctions between characters.
- Acting
- There is enormous historical and cultural variation in performance styles in the cinema. Early melodramatic styles, clearly indebted to the 19th century theater, gave way in Western cinema to a relatively naturalistic style.
Audience Theory
Audience Theory
Click on the image above for a very useful site on audience theory.
This is from Pete Fraser: Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply.
Friday, 11 May 2012
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
‘Media is communication’. Discuss the ways that you have used media language to create meanings in one of your media products.
My ancillary product poster can be interpreted in many ways by an audience; however I feel that I have conveyed by desired meaning successfully and have led my audience to interpret the poster in an effective and correct way through the use of signs, a discrete unit of meaning. In my poster both the text and images are signs.
John Fiske’s theory (1982) ‘denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed’ applies specifically to my work and it is the connotations that have allowed me to create the correct meaning. The poster denotes a young girl posing confidently for a picture and her name is clearly centred horizontally across the page. The background is white, with a dull tone to it that is slowly being uncovered by a light from the top left hand corner. Also her clothing links directly with the text colour following the three colour scheme pallet. I feel that by incorporating all these denotes together allows the audience to then connote a lot more about the artist. For example the studio connotes professionalism, perhaps suggesting the artist is successful to have had a professional photo taken. As she is the main focus in the layout of the poster it suggests that she is important and popular. The burnt orange, gold and black colours could connote a hip hop/dance genre as they follow the stereotypical constructions of hip hop posters by being bold and bright. In turn, this with her confident pose again fits with the hip hop/dance genre and suggests aspects of her personality as well as her music. However in terms of mise en scene, her clothing portrays the artist as quite the fashionista as they are up to date and admirable as her clothes could suit a models outfit for a clothes advert. This again portrays different aspects of her personality. Aside from this the colours of them are still associated with the negotiated meaning of hip hop/dance. This mix suggests the artist’s character is slightly different than those stereotypical interpretations of a hip hop/dance character, suggesting that her style of music may too, reflect this and in turn this helps to reach a much wider audience. Also the light in the top left hand corner of the poster perhaps connotes the idea of being on stage, in the lights, performing, raising the question of whether she’s touring soon. It also may reflect that she’s something special and upcoming and is currently moving forward which creates the feeling of excitement. The artist’s body language is confident, but the smile makes her more likeable and welcoming as the audience don’t feel intimidated by her ‘star image’ that’s been created.
Considering anchorage, the chosen words construct specific meanings and I purposely chose them to communicate the main points of the poster. The word ‘Animal’ denotes a mammal; however it is also the name of the album and this is made clear to the audience as the artist’s name is placed underneath which follows an audience’s cultural knowledge of music posters layouts. As well as this it also connotes the style of character that the artist is and also the approach of her choice of music. Each exclamatory sentence on the left hand side connotes positive aspects of Eve’s character and music which again leads the audience to believe she is successful. Nothing on my poster actual says to the audience ‘This is a music artist’, it is in fact, the connotations the audience retrieves from the words on the page that tell the audience that she is. The list of music magazines, the album name and the record company all connote that she is a music artist. Additionally on the bottom left hand corner of the poster there is an apple which denotes merely that object; however our cultural and social knowledge of popular brand name ‘apple’ and ‘iTunes’ allow us to make cross links and be lead to understand it’s a music advertisement. All the words I have included on the poster have ideological meanings in its connotations and this has allowed me to successfully portray the correct meanings to the audience. As an example the colours orange, gold and grey could connote many other things and are polysemic; however due to our developed and agreed language culture with the specific words on the page allow the audience to make a judgement that the genre is hip hop/dance.
Considering Stuart Hall, ‘texts can be encoded by producers and meaning is decoded by audiences’, I feel this theory applies to my work as I have aimed to lead the audience to understand my intended meanings. However the way the audience decodes my text may differ despite my attempts to make the decodes specific and lead the audience. In some cases my intended decodes may overall be unsuccessful as it is each individuals own opinion and perspective that they create of the poster that make them decide whether they like the artist or not.
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