Wednesday 28 March 2012

Discuss how you used genre in one of your products

I am going to discuss genre in relation to my foundation portfolio for which I had to create a three minute thriller film opening. Genre is a way of categorizing media texts according to its style/content, enabling the audience to easily choose what they want to experience. 

The genre for our group was ‘thriller’ with which we researched several of its subgenres and chose to look at ‘psychological’ in particular. To gain an understanding of the conventions of this particular genre, I and my group began to research several real media texts of this genre, looking at films such as ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Se7en’ which all had running themes of psychology and mystery.

A theorist called Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which meant certain generic features had to be included and repeated. While analysing these texts, some of the conventions we found were the use of low lighting, deserted and isolated locations and point of view/ close-up shots. 

Our psychological thriller opening sequence was called ‘captivity’ for which our storyline was a boy who was obsessed with seeking revenge on his wife’s killer. We recreated the generic conventions and set our opening in two locations. We used two locations as we wanted to create an anachronic type of narrative, which meant our opening narrative did not have a clear flow with constant cross-cutting between the locations and uses of flash-forward’s. This anachronic type of narrative was created by a theorist called Allan Cameron. This pattern of variation that Neal talks about is seen in our opening scene where we included two locations, one of a victim being tortured and the other scene of him being captured. We decided to do this to keep our audience captivated, wanting to know who and why the victim was being tortured. This related to Barthes’ enigma code which is a theory that suggests a text portrays a mystery to draw an audience in and pose questions. 

However our opening sequence may have gone against some conventions as when our victim was being abducted it occurred during broad daylight. Many thriller films are set when it is fairly dark or use low lighting. On the other hand, in a sense this uses ‘binary oppositions’, a theory which was looked at by Levi Strauss. The two scenes showed a contrast between good and evil. One of our scenes in which the victim was walking, not knowing what was going to occur, was shot in daylight, whereas the torture scene was shot with use of low lighting in an isolated room, which portrays violence and evil. For the scene in which the victim was casually walking we tended to shoot more Point of view and establishing shots whereas in the ‘torture scenes’ close-ups were used more, which captured the severity of the situation.

Each genre has its own identity which can be recognised by the mainstream society. I believe that the genre of our thriller opening sequence was successful in being able to be recognised and fitted the conventions of its genre.

Thursday 22 March 2012

‘Media texts rely on cultural experiences in order for audiences to easily make sense of narratives’ Explain how you used conventions or experiments narrative approaches in one of your production pieces.

I am going to discuss theories of narrative in relation to my advanced portfolio. We created a music video for Jack Johnson’s acoustic rock song ‘Better Together’.
We drew conventions from real media texted to ours, to understand ways in which they conveyed certain concepts to their audiences. Me and my partner looked at James Morrison’s music video for ‘You make it real for me’, which is about someone losing faith in himself and about how one person can bring it all back to him and make it all better. To look at the video in depth, I compared it to Vernallis’ theory of how music videos are constructed around four concepts – Narrative, Editing Camera Movement, and Diegesis. The video complies with bits of Vernallis’ theory of however does also challenge it. We really liked the way the video was fragmented, but still had a sense of flow and the shots that were used which we decided to incorporate in our own music video.
While creating our version of ‘Better Together’ we looked at Vernallis also. Once analysing the lyrics of the song, we found that it was about a couple being apart and realizing it’s always better when their together. Therefore we decided to create a narrative of the artist and his girlfriend being apart in two different locations and then coming together. The narrative in our video was fragmented, keeping the structure of the video disjointed which supported Vernallis’ theory that ‘the narrative is not always complete’. This is because throughout our video we had photographs of the production of the filming. It also complied with Vernallis’ theory that ‘there is not necessarily a balance between narrative and performance’, as we spent more time on the performance of the artist, but still tried to keep an element of narrative. This was a convention of acoustic rocks music videos, which we decided to stick to as we wanted our audience to recognise it belonging to a genre.
We also looked at a theorist called Andrew Goodwin who believed there was a relationship between the music and visuals. However our video challenges most of our video was of the artist performance and the parts of the video that were narrative did not illustrate what the visuals apart from at the end of the video where the couple are both together and the lyrics ‘we’re better together’.
On the other hand, although we did not have did not have much narrative in our music video, the different shots of the artist performing and the photographs of the production were still able to drive the music video forward. This supports Vernallis’ theory that ‘Something drives the video forward, but often it is not the narrative.’
Our narrative went against Todorov’s five stage narrative structure. His first stage is ‘equilibrium’ which is essentially where everything is good, however our music video starts with the artist being alone, without his girlfriend, challenging what Todorov says. He then goes on to say that there is a something happens that ‘disrupts the equilibrium’.   Our music video does not involve any kind of disruption, but a solution to the artist being alone – the female. However the narrative does have ‘a reinstatement of the equilibrium’ at the end of our video where the artist and his girlfriend are together.
To conclude, we were able to create a music video which was primarily performance based, however still involving elements of narrative. Our video supported most of Vernallis’ theory on narrative, but went against Todorov’s theory on narrative structure. I am pleased with our final product and would not have been possible without looking at real media texts to gain the main conventions of the genre.

Wednesday 14 March 2012

BBC iPlayer

Sunday 4 March 2012

Michael Wesch’s Theory

1. Sum up Michael Wesch’s main point about the web (or YouTube in particular) in one paragraph.
Michael Wesch provides a Utopian view of the web stating that it is a way of linking and connecting people globally through sharing, trading and collaborating. He describes it as an ‘integrated mediascape’ of social media and networking sites, with us in the middle of the sphere. In particular he talks about YouTube and how it is a new type of platform where people are able to view and share videos.  He talks about how his video gained over a thousand views, three days after uploading it, and once investigating how it gained so many views, found that it was due to ‘user-generated filtering’ and ‘user-generated distribution’.
    2. Write down your understanding of the following terms used by Wesch:
    Networked individualism – is a phenomenon created by Berry Wellman. It means how we are increasingly networked, and in turn people are becoming increasingly individual/independent and longing for communities and stronger relationships, which is called a culture conversion.

    The invisible audience phenomenon – when people record themselves, they are essentially talking to a webcam, not directly to an individual(s). We cannot see who are audiences are, therefore you do not know who you are talking to. However everybody is watching what you’re saying, once you’ve posted it, but while filming it, it may feel like nobody’s watching it. 

    Context Collapse – is the idea that we wherever we go we never known where a camera is going to be and if and when the footage is to be uploaded to YouTube.

    Connection without constraint – people crave connection but also feel constraint. YouTube enables people to connect with people without having to see/get a reaction from their audience.
      
    4. On the whole do you agree or disagree with Wesch’s ideas? Why?
    I agree with Wesch to an extent, as the web has enabled people to connect globally and to create communities and a public sphere, as in the past this would not have been possible. YouTube has provided entertain for people and enabled them to express themselves in videos without having to get the reaction of their audiences. However enabling people to have perform these acts may not always be a positive thing as it can create conflict and misunderstanding such as the story of Lonelygirl15 who was a fake created by people to ‘tell a very real and fictional story’. 


    5. How might Wesch’s ideas be applied to the music industry (or atleast the production of music)?
    Wesch describes YouTube as creating global connections between people, by creating and sharing videos. Nowadays there are many videos on YouTube of people sharing their musical talents with the world, enabling people to comment on their videos, gaining feedback and reactions from their audiences. Some of these people are recognised by music producers and artists, for example Justin Bieber became recognised by famous artists such as Usher and Justin Timberlake, by posting videos of himself singing on YouTube. It has become a platform for ordinary people to share their talents with people globally and also become recognised and signed by music companies.