Radar Love - Storyboard

Radar Love, Golden Earring

Over the last few weeks updating my blog has been taking secondary priority in order to produce a performance video to the first 31 seconds of Radar Love, Golden Earring. I have been working with Josh Leek from my class, going through all the stages we will have to when filming our own videos, including storyboarding, taking location photos and so forth. In a sense we have been producing a preliminary task like last year. Anyway, I am now going to post the various stages we have been through in filming and editing our video. If you are  not familiar with the track, here is the section we have been reproducing

Genre Conventions

This is a comparison of my AS level video and The Taking Of Pelham 123, films of the same genre. I produced this using Adobe Illustrator. As you can see it is not perfectly formatted as this was my first use of the program, which may well be required to help with the production of my ancillary tasks.

The comparison is a small one but practice for something I may need to do in the exam at the end of this year.

Jennifer Lopez, Papi

I saw this new pop video, Jennifer Lopez, Papi on MTV yesterday and thought that there were a number of codes in this video similar to other pop videos I have seen, suggesting that I have a knowledge of the conventions of a pop video should I decide to do a song from this genre.

The most obvious is the big, group theatrical production, like something out of a Michael Jackson video, the 'King of Pop'. Another is the setting. It's somewhere urban. Many pop videos seem to take place in more urban areas. I also picked up on some cultural codes, which I have also picked up on in pop videos studied previously in this blog. The one that popped into my head immediately was of the Lynx advertising campaign, where the male appears irresistible to women after spraying himself with deodorant. In this case the gender roles are reversed and the cookie is representative of the deodorant.

Video Sharing

One member of my class has been sharing videos with the rest of us at the start of each lesson, telling us about the particular aspect(s) of that video they like. This practice has been helping to develop my knowledge of a range of music genres and the codes typically found within their videos.

Tomorrow I will be sharing Ed Sheeran, You Need Me, I Don't Need You

I find this performance video to be fascinating viewing. The most outstanding and striking feature is that the performer is someone concerned only with fast hand movements, whilst Ed Sheeran does not actually appear on screen until the closing seconds of the video. The camera cuts away rarely to make some loose cultural references, though other than this the audience is shown just the performer from a few different angles. Normally I don't think such a production could work but the unique performance makes the audience interested in what is going on. Of course the video is also shot in black and white which offers connotations which have been discussed in previous posts.

Similar

I also want to make a quick comment on this video Will Young, Leave Right Now which my teacher shared with the class. The video is similar to Ed Sheeran's in that it is a performance featuring one main character on camera throughout. The difference between the videos though, is that it's what is going on behind Will Young in his video that captures the interest of the audience.

These are two different ways of filming a one-person performance and will be very useful going forward should I decide to produce such a video.

Audience Theory

Today my classmates and I considered various theories related to audience including: -

- Hypodermic Needle Theory

We are all affected by the media in the same way.

- Reception Theory

Text has no inherent meaning because meaning is created by the audience during consumption of a text.

- Two Step Flow Theory

'Opinion leaders' influence the thoughts and interpretations of media texts by others.

- Uses and Gratifications Theory

The audience is very much active and can determine their own interpretations of texts.

What I found interesting in relation to creating a music video, hence why I'm blogging about this, was Blulmer and Katz's four purposes that might make an audience consume a text. These are: -

- Diversion - to escape from everyday problems and/or routines.

- Personal Relationships - using a text for emotional and other types of interaction.

- Personal Identity - finding themselves reflected in texts, helping them to learn about their own behaviour and values.

- Surveillance - retrieving useful information such as weather updates and news bulletins.

I feel these four purposes could be particularly useful in the research and production stage of my music video. Taking these into consideration could help to determine the audience our video is aimed at, which in turn could help us come to decisions about the design of our ancillary tasks.