Applying audience theory to one of your products.

The product I created during A2 was a music video of a pop female artist Taylor Swift, which I made with my partner Shannon. The target audience for our video was primarily aimed at young females between the ages of 13-21 years old. We chose this age group as we believed that the pop/country genre of our artist was most enjoyed by this audience, and as our artist was a young female artist we believed they would be able to relate to her.

Aspects of our video that were aimed at our target audience was the the use of costumes worn by our artist, which primarily consisted of feminine floral and nude pastel colours. The connotations of such outfits is a sense of innocents and youth we wished to portray our artists as possessing. These outfits are relevant to our young audience as they are meant to emulate the clothes they too will wear and a look they aspire to achieve.The male actor within our video was also intended to appear attractive to our target audience,  with the aid of his trendy smart outfit, depicting an aspirational relationship at the beginning of the video. 

The narrative storyline of our video is also intended to appeal to our audience, as it expands on the meaning of the song and provides a story the audience can empathise with and relate back to their own lives. Narratives are a common feature of modern day pop videos, and so we purposely included this convention to clearly express our genre and provide a video the audience expects to see. Within our narrative our artist is depicted breaking up and fighting with her boyfriend, a situation we believe would be apparent to young girls. I believe, as suggested by the effects model, the audience may have been influenced by feelings of empathy but can passively absorbed the music and pleasant mise en scene. Our audience is however not intended to be a passive audience but actively gratified by our work. For example The Uses and Gratification Model suggests that the audience is active and receives gratification from the viewing of mediums. I think a way this model can apply to our video, is with the concept that the combination of music and narrative can provide the audience with feelings of pleasure and escapism. By becoming absorbed by the simple narrative and catchy tune of our video, they may be able to temporarily forget about issues in their own life, find the tune uplifting and may even be reminded their own life isn't so bad e.g. they're in a happy relationship. The smiling and friendly face of our artists may even provided hope for an audience, as they see her strong response to the bad situation and aspire to be the same.

The intended reception of our video is for our audience to appreciate the video on two levels. The physical appearance of our artist, admiring her beauty and talent and the pleasant aspirational surroundings. The audience then sees the narrative and becomes emotionally engaged with our female actor, and may be reflected of their own relationships. However Morley's theory suggests that members of an audience will always interpret media texts in differing ways, with also a negotiated or oppositional view. A potential oppositional view of our video would be that the audience regard it to be amateurish and evoking no emotion. The storyline may be seen to be so simple it is not captivating at all, and could be seen to follow a predictable pattern to other videos of the same genre, a cliché. Or a negotiated perspective may appreciate our video represents a sad story and may empathise with the narrative however they may also have conflicting opinions that the story is very simplistic and lacks realism. The repetitive nature of some of the scenes may appear to highlight the fake quality. However the fact our video presents a fictional situation allows the escapism of our audience. 

The feedback we received from our target audience during the production of our video  allowed us to formulate a product tailored to that market. Some of the comments we gained on our first draft were that some of the settings appeared unrealistic, some shots were blurry and did not contain enough star image. By incorporating and correcting these suggestions e.g. improving the quality of mise en scene with better lighting & props, using an HD camera and including more close ups of our artists face, we created a video that more successfully gratified the requirements of our audience.  This in turn would allowed our audience to receive more pleasure and diversion from the video. 

Overall I believe our video  is appealing to an audience, as it takes the initial audio of our song and transforms it into a story that adds meaning and interest. The addition of the visuals provides the audience with a further medium to enjoy the song and engages their attention further. Our video is also applicable to most young girls and boys in many cultures across the world who will encounter similar situations in their own lives. Even to those who have differing values and relationship dynamics, the simple nature of the narrative makes it clear to understand. 

Mode of Address - Task 6

Audience Theory Booklet - Task 3

Audience Theory

The Effects Model; Mediums that have an effect on their audience. The audience is passively absorbing information and injected with an influence they cannot resist.

With our video I believe the audience may have been influenced by feelings of empathy and can passively absorbed the music and pleasant mise en scene. 

Reception Theory;
Preferred/Dominant Reading: I think the dominant reading of our video is that the audience appreciates the video on two levels. The physical appearance of our artist, appreciating her beauty and talent and the pleasant aspirational surroundings. The audience then sees the narrative and is left with feelings of empathy for our female actor, and may be reflected of their own relationships. 

Negotiated Reading: Although the audience can appreciate our video represents a sad story and may empathise with the narrative, they may also have conflicting opinions that the story is very simplistic and lacks realism. The repetitive nature of some of the scenes may appear to highlight the fake quality. 

Oppositional Reading: An oppositional view of our video would regard it to be amateurish and evoking no emotion. The storyline may be seen to be so simple it is not captivating at all, and could be seen to follow a predictable pattern to other videos of the same genre.

The Uses and Gratification Model; The belief that the audience is active and receives gratification from the viewing of mediums. They are provided with escapism, diversion, pleasure, and in some cases, information.

I think a way this model can apply to our video, is with the concept that the combination of music and narrative can provide the audience with feelings of pleasure and escapism. By becoming absorbed by the simple narrative and catchy tune of our video, they may be able to temporarily forget about issues in their own life, find the tune uplifting and may even be reminded their own life isn't so bad e.g. they're in a happy relationship. The smiling and friendly face of our artists may even provided hope for an audience, as they see her strong response to the bad situation and aspire to be the same.

Inglourious Basterds - Video

Narrative Theory

Inglourious Basterds - References

The title;

• When asked about the misspelled title, director Quentin Tarantino gave the following answer: "Here's the thing. I'm never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place."

•  It is also based on the 1978 Enzo G. Castellari WWII

Characters;
 Character, Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, is a homage to Mexican B-movie actor Hugo Stiglitz.
Mike Myers: Comedy Actor, American = Ironic
Hans landa: Hyper real, certain scenes such as his comical drinking of milk, and his oversized pipe, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. are excepted as normal because they are not extreme enough, yet are subtly exaggerated elements. "It's a bingo!" 

Lieutenant Aldo Raine: The name Aldo Raine is a homage to QTs favourite actors Aldo Ray and Maj. Charles Rain.He is the leader of the Basterds and is clearly from the American South, his accent is very pronouced and very contrasting to the others. His accent is also used as a comical element during the premiere as he fails to pass as Italian.

Archie Hilcox: Michael Fassbender's performance as Lt. Archie Hilcox is layered with irony due to his real life. Fassbender was born in Germany to German and Irish parents and raised in Ireland, now residing in London with fluency in German as his first language and English as his second, and a mastery of English accents and dialects. Here he plays an Englishman who goes undercover as a German, and who can speak German fluently, but cannot hide his accent. 

Post modern;

•  The music played as the credits run is 'The green leaves of summer' which features in the spaghetti western 'The Alamo' released in the 1960's; much later then the time Inglorious Basterds is set.
•  Tarantino's use of modern music could reflect Levi Strauss' theory of bricolage.
•  The text on screen reads 'Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France' reminiscent of a fairytale. Also highlighting that the film is not attempting to be accurate to reality.It is also a homage to Italian director Sergio Leone’s epic westerns, most obviously 1968′s Once Upon a Time in the West.
• Chapter one's setting references a similarly set film, The Sound of Music. This focuses on the process of transposition, taking familiar scenery from an originally heart-warming scene and transforming it to give a much more sinister feel; something considered postmodern.
• Use of chapters, not commonly seen within films, emphasis on story/fairytale like adaptation of war.

Hyper-reality

• Explicitly showing scenes are sets and not real places, with the use of overhead shots. This is Post modern = as it illustrates that the fake reality usually portrayed as being real is being portrayed as fake. It is both creating and destroying the sense of hyper-reality.
• This use of hyper reality is carried even further with the use of a real strangling and real fire. The audience is witnessing a real fire in a fake story pretending to be real.

Post-Modern

• No use of back story, creates a depthless story, yet depth is implied by the unfolding storyline of plots.
• Mutiple threads of the story that never overlap. 
• Roughly only 30% of the film is in spoken English, the language which dominates the film is either French or German, with a little Italian. Chapter Three of the film 'German Night in Paris' is completely devoid of any English. This is highly controversial for a Hollywood production.

Other film reference;

• The literary character Sherlock Holmes is referred to at least twice in the film. The first reference is Landa's smoking pipe, which is a Calabash Meerschaum, the exact same one that Holmes used. The other is Landa's line, "A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty."
• WILHELM SCREAM: The Scream appears during two deaths in the film. The first half-second of the sound clip appears about 90 minutes into the movie, and the remainder of the scream appears about 20 minutes later. In the film-within-the-film, "Nation's Pride", the Wilhelm Scream can be heard when a soldier is shot and falls from an upper window.
• A man and a woman lying dead next to each other is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and so again we see hypertextuality as Tarantino modifies a preceding text inrelation to his own.
• Genre Bending Kill Bill
• Glamour of Jackie Brown
• The gore of Reservoir Dogs
• Electrifying Dialogue of Pulp Fiction

Tarintino's Signature traits;

•  Tarantino's foot fetish can be seen throughout his other films and so issocially recognisable as a factor of him as a director. Thsi illustrates his further use of bricolage by placing something of himself.

Funny Scenes

• Aldo and Landa discussing game shows "Its a bingo!"

What does post modernism and references add to the film;

• Comedy
• New possibilities to storyline (Hitler dies.)
• Overlooked

How did the conventions of real media texts inspire you to use new media technology to create the style of product you achieved?

Across AS and A2, I used my research and planning to analyse real media texts and establish current conventions. Within the two years I have made a music magazine, music video and ancillary products. From the comparison of established brands I was able to grasps key concepts and elements that were constant across these products of a similar genre, and this provided me with a base for my own work.

For the production of my AS Music magazine I learnt from my analysis integral features of magazines. Such as large recognisable mastheads, cover photos covering most the page and a key heading for the main feature. In the production of my magazine I used an SLR camera to achieve the high definition and clarity of my mid-shot cover photo, this allowed me to stretch it to A4 size and still maintain the professional look. I could then manipulate all elements of my magazine through Photoshop  importing in my photos and tweaking elements such as exposure and saturation to compensate for the limited availability of lighting equipment during my shoot. I could also use the cloning tool to correct minor imperfections of my model and achieve the air brushed look that is a huge convention of most media texts.The type of music magazine I chose to make, was of a rock genre. To reflect this throughout my magazine I tried to emulate the style of current rock magazines such as Kerrang and Rolling Stone. I noticed that the conventions these magazines followed, was the use of bold colours, textured fonts, rough paint effects and busy elements. To achieve a similar appearance within my own magazine I relied on the use of new media technologies to create my vision. With the website DaFont.com I could download a font that would be distinct from other magazines, reflect the rock style and be recognisable as a logo for my brand. This website provided me with the textured weathered look I desired. With photoshop I also had access to various paint tools, playing around with the various options I found a brush that gave me thick rough strokes I could use as a background for my magazine contents and it provided me with the messy and rugged rock finish.

Within the production of our A2 music video, it would have been impossible to achieve without the aid of media technologies such as Final Cut Pro. Through research and planning we recognised the conventions of similar products such as the use of lip syching throughout, a narrative storyline and focus on star image. Our video was based on a pop/country song by a young female solo artist, we therefore compared the possibilities for our video against ones from similar artists such as Ellie Goulding and Kate Nash. The star image was very integral to these videos as it created great focus on the artist's beauty and branding. To achieve a quality look to our own video we relied on the use of an HD camcorder, to provide the clarity and most professional look we wanted. We were inspired by videos such as Kelly Clarksons 'Since you've been gone.' to create a fast cutting montage sequence within our video. We emphasised this further with the use of re-timing during our editing process. With the aid of Final cut pro we were able to use the 'Re-time' element to slow down the pace of some of our clips and add emphasis to the narrative storyline. Within current pop videos the use of a narrative is very prevalent to their style, and so by implementing this throughout, it reflected the genre and meaning of our song. Final Cut pro also proved invaluable when adding zoom and movement to shots in the post production period. One convention of nearly all videos is the element of movement seen throughout videos, especially important to keep interest during the use of star image close ups. It also allowed us to add transitions and effects to clips that made cuts more seamless and kept the video flowing.

To go alongside our video I we also created ancillary products, a poster and Digipak. Within real media texts I noticed that an artist will attempt to achieve continuity across all their products, so their appearance, brand and style is recognisable to the public. This inspired me to use the teddy bear within our video on my Digipak, as a means of creating links between the related elements. I was able to use Photoshop to import this photo and adjust the colouring so it would fit in with the colour scheme of red, black and white I had chosen for my ancillary products. Photoshop provided me with tools such as filters to change the saturation of my images and the magnetic lasso to keep the colour of a red rose in the same image. It also became clear that on most album covers of female pop artists, it will feature a close up of the artists face. I relied again on the use of an SLR camera to achieve a clear and flattering photo of our star, and also Photoshop to adjust lighting and mask minor imperfections with the cloning tool. One aspect of CD's is also that they are produced by a record company that is acknowledged on the back panel of a Digipak. This inspired us to use Photoshop to invent out own imaginary company logo that could be displayed on own Digipaks.

To conclude, the analysis of real media texts inspired me to create my own products by providing guidelines that focused my creation and formed a basis for the elements of my own work. Software such as Final Cut pro and Photoshop, allowed me to imitate the professional nature of current work, with the complex possibilities of manipulation and detailed adjustment. If I had relied on creating my magazine, for example, with only the use of pen and paper, I would have been restricted by time and the inability to quickly undo my mistakes. Real media texts are formed form multiple constituent elements that can be brought together with the aid of media technology and reflect the  style of a product by translating and repeating key logos and themes. 

Inglorious Basterds - Assignment

I will be producing my Study guide to Inglorious Basterds within a video formed with movie maker. I have decided to present it in this way, as I will be able to use clips from the film to support claims and illustrate information in an engaging format.