Wednesday 21 March 2012

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

I am going to discuss how my advanced portfolio portrayed our use of conventional and experimental devices. Our advanced portfolio was the music video cover of Rizzle Kicks - I'm 17.

Myself, Matthew and Josh began our research process by watching a variety of videos from the song's genre. As the song itself didn't have an original video, we decided to research into songs which was aimed at similar audiences to ours. As our chosen song's genre was a mixture of Indie mixed with Rap and Pop we found it challenging to find a huge amount of similar media as this genre mixed into one was fairly recent. We searched artists that were signed to Rizzle Kicks' record label in an attempt to find similar artists and were successful in doing so. This gave us an idea of how to film our music video and which conventions we needed to use. Ed Sheeran and Wretch 32 were a select few of the artists that we found who could be related to our artist. We also did various analysis of videos according to Andrew Goodwin's theory. From this we found that nearly all of modern videos now have a connection with the visuals and lyrics, which is a concept that Andrew Goodwin explains.

From this Matthew and myself decided to go through the lyrics in an attempt to come up with possible shots and ideas of a possible narrative to go with the lyrics of our song. The lyrics of our song were based around the lifestyle of a mature teenager varying from the ages of 15-21. Our song was about partying, under age drinking, having fun, and college life. As a result of this we decided to film scenes which featured the following, college life, partying, under age drinking and being mischievous to satisfy the typical stereotype of a 17 year old. This is evident in our final video as when Josh is performing the lyric 'when I walk into college with my headphones on..' we see our artist Josh wearing his headphones and walking into college. This bodes well with Andrew Goodwin's theory and how a key factor of a music video should have the lyrics match up to the visuals.

Our narrative in our video pleases the audience as our audience can relate to some of the scenes that are featured in our film. We piled out research into our target audience and into what they would like to see in a music video, and as we and our peers our in the perfect age range for our target audience this piece of research was invaluable. Many of our peers claimed that they would like to see a music video with quick editing as opposed to a slowly building one. Our scenes were cut to give our narrative that extra edge by being cut sooner, quicker and on the beat.

Our main character in the music video played by Josh or 'Iceburg' is used in our narrative to portray the teenage lifestyle that the average 17 year old goes through. Our narrative shows our artist drinking at a party partaking in a various amount of humorous shots ranging from a beer box over his head to him lying drunk. This shows our character being able to relate to some of our target audience as we found that people in our target audience's age range like to go out to drink and to come back drunk. Although this doesn't portray the most positive image to our artist, it does however give a sense of his character to us. We can infer that he likes to party and have fun according to our narrative shown in our music video.

From our advanced portfolio project it is evident how we used conventional forms of narrative in our music video as we followed some of Andrew Goodwin's points from his theory in the forms of matching the visuals to the lyrics. We also experimented in our narrative by portraying our character in a negative way by showing him drinking and being drunk, however, this view is challenged by the amount of 'fun' our character is having and our target audience as our research found that people in that age range can relate to these things.

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