Section A (a) skills development CREATIVITY
Charlie, Jonny, Will
For my AS Foundation Production, I shot a thriller film opening called 'The Black Rose' featuring a distubed young woman Natalie who had been released from a secure psychiatric unit into the community and was currently working in a florist's. However, the doctor's voice-over set the story in retrospect and the audience understood that he was giving an account of the back story leading up to fresh evidence that Natalie was still a grave danger to children. This combination of past (edited in black and white) and present (using realistic but often subdued lighting) creatively conveyed the flashbacks and current danger to the audience. I also used mise-en-scene creatively, for example, I juxtaposed establishing shots of Natalie working surrounded by the calm order and beauty of flowers with CUs of her privately tearing petals off a lily as her underlying violent feelings could not be controlled. Equally, I used a flashback sequence of monochrome canted angles with overlapping transitions tracking up a narrow stairwell in POV shots to suggest that Natalie's troubled past caused her traumas.Something about the attic of her childhood had deeply disturbed her. I used mournful piano music with loops to suggest Natalie's recurring melancholy madness. My filming was creative in that it required me to learn how to frame shots creatively & use continuity editing so that narrative meaning was delivered through imaginative use of shot sequences and sound codes.At A2, I created a music promo pack for the unsigned indie pop/ rap Fij, consisting of a music video, digipack and magazine advertisement. I developed design ideas for the digipack: the album artwork, font, layout & construction. The design combined layers of original photos made in film stock with stills which were then layered in PhotoShop with text. The grainy, original quality is entirely in keeping with the indie feel of our band. I signalled the genre urban rap clearly through the backdrop of the wall against which Fij is positioned that also appears in the magazine advert. The singer features prominently and visual 'noise' lends him character and attitude, a key code in the video, as he strikes a defiant pose, ready to leave home after 'one more year' (the name of the track). I used an appropriate font: bold, strong & uncompromising. The colour palette of reds, greys, terracotta, with white & black accents, links to the mag advert. I particularly like developing the 'artistic' feel that conveys the world of science labs & youthful experimentation, with the film layers featuring watermarks, drips and blobs.
I believe that creating a brand image across print and video platforms for Fij called on more than PhotoShop technical skills: it required me to combine digital technology with
At AS, I had developed skills in PhotoShop to create audience profiles, a mock thriller film website, film advertising poster and the mise-en-scene for one film set, which involved children's drawings apparently created by my psychopathic heroine.
As well as this, I have advanced my skills using PhotoShop...
My music video built on my filming and editing skills...
Section A (b) analyse one production in relation to GENRE
Look at your own answer to Evaluation q.1 on codes and conventions
Pete Fraser :'This one involves some reference to theory and only one piece of work, asking you to step back from it and think about it almost as if someone else had made it- what is known as critical distance.'
Karen, Piers
My
A2 Production was a cross-media product composed of a music video of
the track Good Life for the American pop rock band One Republic
to sell their album. As part of this task, I also produced a
carefully tailored digipack design for the album and a magazine advert
which would create awareness of the product. In short, I used codes that
would maximize all parts of the production as a promotional tool to
sell the album and promote the band: exactly what the music industry
expects.
Although
these three components have different genre conventions, I never forgot
that audiences need to see the each part of the package as part of a
synergistic whole, so that the advert attracts and
addresses audiences with bold graphics and clear text, stating when the
album will be released and featuring the band prominently, while the music video
will employ a variety of genre codes to spark new audience interest,
reassure committed fans and withstand repeated viewings. Finally, the digipack should
have very clear links to the music video with the stars prominent, the
style and overall feel of the layout reflecting the band's identity and
reinforcing its brand through the appropriate choice of image, colour,
font, layout and general design.
My music video treatment reflects both research into genre conventions and visual codes that
reflect the band's identity. For me, of overriding importance was the
need to convey to audiences the band's genre: One Republic are
distinctively American with universal appeal: they set out to relate to people across the globe and in performance they customize their lyrics such as "To my friends in New York.." which becomes whatever city they are playing in. In music video they deliver an upbeat, sun-soaked, outdoors performance with fast-paced drumming and prominent whistling, celebrating everyday joie de vivre.
They have have mainstream appeal based on easy listening, undemanding lyrics, dance appeal and long chill-out instrumental and whistling sections. Therefore,our treatment reflected this. For example, we observe the genre convention of cutting the visuals to the beat, in particular during the repeated chorus of
'It's a good life' which has a upbeat optimistic feel. Here, we
also make the visuals spell out the words of the chorus quite literally,
using the letters of the words in colourful placards. Equally, we feature the band watching themselves on their own phone screen, an example of 'notions of looking' and a piece of intriguing visual spectacle, as the lyrics...
This is a clear example of the convention of illustrating the lyrics with the visuals. As we used CGI to create this, I would say that it also reflects the increasing trend of using CGI in music videos which have become increasingly sophisticated visually with spectacle highly valued. When I compare my genre treatment with earlier examples, say Robert Palmer's 'Simply Irresistible', it is so much more dynamic, busy and arresting: Palmer offers audience a very static set piece with few surprises. Such a treatment would not sell the product nowadays. We opened with an outdoors set where we stayed throughout: the band play in the fresh air in a variety of relaxed outdoor sets, sometimes seated leaning against tree trunks, sometimes strolling towards the camera smiling; the grass is sunlit green, the sky very blue and sunny, the colours all densely saturated even the clothing.
Andrew Goodwin observes ('Dancing In The Distraction Factory') that the visuals may provide illustration or amplification of the lyrics, or there may be disjuncture. As our band is pop rock, we wanted to illustrate the lyrics with a maninstream, conventional approach: our lyrics don't really offer the possibility of literal treatment for every line, but they do make certain really key statements that their young audiences would relate to, in particular, a confident optimism. We wanted to show the 'inner' or private life and friendships of the band with the equally important need to showcase the band's success and polished performances.
In other words, we included both front stage and backstage footage: we observed the convention of polished public stage performance, complete with close-ups on the guitarists and lead vocalist, which is essential in building the brand and promoting the star (Richard Dyer), providing authentication of skill through lip synching and the chance for keen fans to see their stars in close-up, building relationships, and allowing them to engage with their heroes. In these scenes, we followed genre conventions of bright stage lights, some canted angles to suggest movement and dynamism, and a lot of cutting between performers to convey exuberance and cohesion: the band as a successful group.
However, we also intercut the performance shots with the back stage story (Erving Goffman's model of front and back stage behaviours here interpreted quite literally). Here, the audience sees the band going on holiday, planning the train journey at the station, chatting excitedly like any other young person. The lighting is consistently bright (for Barthes, this code would convey the optimism of the spirits), there is the use of hand-held and also GoPro lens, all to suggest the diary-like record of the band in real life, providing a flatteringly intimate insight for the audience, who are invited in to share. The band is known for its rapport with audiences and this section of the treatment builds on the intimacy created by front man Ryan Tedder's consistent use of eye contact, smiling and direct address to camera delivered during lines such as "To my friends in New York..."
Therefore, this narrative was very different - if you can call it narrative, because I would support Heidi Peeters' view that narrative in music video is much more about building the emotional environment surrounding the band or star and thereby making connections with the audience than about plot or interpreting lyrics. For Peeters, this ability to connect the band to the audience is the KEY GENRE CONVENTION: 'One would be surprised at how the majority of theorists still consider music videos to be visualizations of a song. While they may seem discontinuous .., the shots (in music videos)are highly connected through the image of the star.” “The star promotes the phenomenon of identification, a process by which viewers become attached to a star, ranging from emotional affinity limited to the context of the movie theatre to projection, by which fans try to become their idols through imitating speech, movements and consumer patterns.'
To complete my analysis, I must explain that my digipack used genre conventions of photos of the band taken from the music video as well as details of the album tracks. Whereas in the video I could develop both the brightly coloured upbeat side of the band's experience as well as reveal the more intimate struggles, I chose a mix of bright, densely saturated colour and watermark layout and patterning for the digipack: these design elements appear in the video in the chorus treatment and are very eye-catching, therefore suitable for standing out on the shelf in a shop and attracting attention when featured on the magazine advert, a genre convention that I observed, along with institutional information, bar codes and in the case of the advert, release date.
To conclude, I made a conventional treatment. That is, I showed both the public and private face of the band to be one seamless whole. Both narrative treatment and cinematography show this: I created a Utopian world of which the star seems to be the instigator, as claimed by Richard Dyer's Entertainment and Utopia. The world of the band, the place where they hang out, practise, play and chill out, is depicted as a video diary of friends enjoying working and playing together. I agree with Peeters that “Narrativity does not seem to be an absolute necessity within the medium. The fact that music videos in this sense are primarily poetic does not mean that clips never contain narrativity. Most music videos do develop a storyline, embedded within its poetic structure and some clips even contain introductory story sequences or non-musical narrative sequences inserted within the video number but "outside" its musical score. Narrative in clips becomes a device to structure the poetic clip world and make it more accessible and recognizable to the viewer.”
What I did is create an emotional connection with my band through a series of poetic montages.
REPRESENTATION
Representation: typing and stereotyping
According to Benshoff and Griffin, representation can be defined as a “process of presenting
an image of something in order to communicate ideas or tell a story” (2004). Going even
further, a representation may be said to have a twofold purpose: it plays the role of the message in a communication process and it is also a construction that tries to express reality with the help of determined codes of meaning. Media needs to resort constantly to representations to express reality. Branston and Stafford asserted that “however realistic media images may seem, they never simply present the world direct. They are always a construction, a re-presentation, rather than a transparent window onto the real.” (2006). For Taylor and Willis (1999), representations are combinations of signs that help us make complex abstract concepts significant and understandable. For this reason they can be considered fundamental strategies related to the cognitive processes in our mind
(Taylor and Willis 1999). Tied to perception and cognition, we find types and stereotypes, two of the
most recurrent strategies that the media use to represent reality. Types are necessary mental
constructs that help us understand the world around us (Taylor and Willis 1999). Cognitive scholars have remarked that our mind is ordered according to categorizations that help analyze and understand reality (Lakoff 1990; Green 1996; Dirven and Verspoor 2000).Stereotypes also contribute to the task of categorizing reality but they usually have other implications as well. Branston and Stafford have listed four characteristics of stereotypes (2006). For them stereotyping is a process of categorization that in most cases implies a negative evaluation of the group that is being analyzed. In YOUR OWN PRODUCTION HERE I used both types and stereotypes of the main characters. This task of encoding and decoding meanings, types and stereotypes so as to create representations of reality has a lot to do with the process of communication. Hall pointed out that the code is fundamental so that the receiver can decode the message in the same way that the sender had created it (1997). These codes of encoding/decoding highly depend on cultural issues.
For example, in my AS thriller opening (Jonny, Will and Charlie) featuring a disturbed young woman psychopath who had been released into society under psychiatric supervision but who was clearly ready to strike again. I used several visual and sound codes to present the young woman and the psychiatrist, as well as the climate of anxiety and obsession that was her mental world, such as.....
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