Henry Jenkins

1. What are Henry Jenkins’ ideas about how the media landscape is changing?

Jenkins states that there is definitely a transition where an old media system is dying and a new media system is being born. An era where spectatorial culture is giving way to participatory culture. Where a society based on a small number of companies controlling the story telling apparatus giving way to a much more complex media scape where average citizens have the ability to seize control of the media system

2. What is ‘convergence culture’?

3. How are Jenkins’ ideas similar to those of David Gauntlett and Michael Wesch?

4. How might we disagree with Jenkins’ utopian ideas about the media?

Online Age

1. According to this video, what was the music industry like in the 90s and how has it changed more recently?
Mass drivers such as music channels (MTV) and radio were powerful and more and more artists were being signed. Now there are more and more artists coming up, however it does mean that independent labels can't compete with the mainstream labels. There is now a bigger connection across music. It enables artists to do their own thing as they don't necessarily have to follow what everyone wants to hear as there is such a vast amount of artists out there. However it is often that only the artists who are signed to the big labels will get mass publicity. 

2. What are curators (such as Pitchfork and Hypemachine)? What is their role? Why are they important?

Curators such as Pitchfork and Hypemachine are music reviewing tools for customers for them to differentiate between the so called 'good' and 'bad' music. It also gives music and artist news with commentaries too. Pitchfork Media particularly focusses on independent and underground music, mainly from the indie-rock genre. The Hype Machine is an MP3 blog aggregator which allows people to listen and find music that their friends are listening to and more importantly people who aren't their friends so they get a wider spectrum of what to listen to. 

3. How can you link what this video says about creativity (in video-making, in particular) to David Gauntlett's ideas and to the theory of the long tail?

Due to the rise in technology, artists are now able to create more original and creative products which could lead to a new type of audience which isn't the mainstream. Although these fan bases may not be of a large scale, these small fan bases show that due to the increase in music production it is now evident that niche audiences can be formed due to this.

Audience 1B

The project which I am going to be referring to my advanced portfolio where my group and I created a music video for the song 'I'm 17 - Rizzle Kicks', a digipak and a magazine advert. After researching our artist, we found that 'Rizzle Kicks' appealed to a number of teens varying from the ages between 15-19. As our artist was quite unheard of during our course, our audience consisted of fans, mainly who were in further education with an urban background. However, as the instrumental of the song 'I'm 17' was the same as Arctic Monkey's song 'Old Yellow Bricks' we had another type of audience which was fans of the indie and rock genre with a larger age range from 14-25. Due to this we were able to experiment and vary what we could feature in the video because our audience was somewhat diverse.

Our research consisted of looking into similar products to our artist. As our artist was a hybrid between pop/indie and rap it was difficult to find many artists who were similar. The closest artist we could find to ours was The Streets, Ed Sheeran and Wretch 32. All of these artists had elements of rap and singing in their songs much like Rizzle Kicks. As Ed Sheeran and Wretch 32 are also fairly new to the mainstream side of music, it was helpful to look for similar products as both of those artists had just been releasing their first studio albums. This meant that we could watch videos of their upcoming singles to gain knowledge of what their fans like. It was also convenient for us that both artists were also promoting the release of their album through newspapers.

According to Andrew Goodwin's theory, music videos should represent a connection between the lyrics and the visuals. This was evident in Wretch 32's video 'Don't Go' - a song about a girl leaving her boyfriend - as the girl is walking away from her boyfriend. We decided to think of certain scenarios which replicated our lyrics to fit in with Goodwin's theory. Also, from watching Wretch 32's 'Don't Go' we found that another feature that many artists include in their videos is themselves performing into the camera be it via rap, singing or dancing.

The Uses and Gratification approach can be applied to our media product as we feel that our audience was an active one as our audience may take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. In reference to our music video, our audience will be able to relate to our video 'I'm 17' where our artist is taking part in activities you'd stereotypically associate with a 17 year old or anyone around that age. Our audience may watch the video and replicate some of the things that they have come across in the video rather than being passive. McQuail would see this as a 'personal identity' being created from our video as it portrays our artist and his fans in this way.

However, as our video may not necessarily portray positive scenes to our audience, we decided to add in humour and make the so called negative into a positive. Our target audience were happy with what was shown and weren't shocked by the under age drinking that was included as nearly everyone in our audience can relate to it. Older audiences may be disturbed claiming that it may encourage under age drinking isn't an issue as we believe that as we have shown things in a humoured way which emphasises how it isn't real.

Our final media product was aimed at 15-19 year olds who were in or going into further education. We feel that we have portrayed our artist in a comedic and light hearted way to boost his music career as it is our artist's breakthrough single. We also feel that we have shown stereotypes of our audience age range precisely to some extent as our general feedback was positive.

Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

I will discuss how my skills in using digital technology contributed to my creative decision making from my foundation portfolio, where we created a two minute thriller film opening and our advanced portfolio where we created a music video of our choice.

Final Cut Express was the main programme that we used to aid us in our foundation and advanced portfolio. The programme allowed us to edit, cut, slow down, speed up and much more to our footage. At first, we had slight difficulties in getting to grips with the programme as we had never used Macs before but after a variety of filming tasks, our experience with the software was slowly increasing. In reference to our foundation portfolio, final cut express helped us to switch around the colour schemes in designated shots. This helped us vastly for our film opening as in doing so, we were able to create a dark and gloomy atmosphere which reflected our sub genre which was a psychological thriller.

Inevitably we were much more confident in using Final Cut Express during our advanced portfolio. This helped us to create out music video as we were exploiting some of the more complex and professional tools that Final Cut was offering. For instance, we created a blur effect which emphasised how drunk the artist was in our video. We did this by overlapping the chosen scene with the same one and starting it by half a second later. We found that this created an effective approach in making our artist look like he was walking while he was drunk as the camera was slightly jerky and was aided by the blur effect which we included.

In our advanced portfolio we also had to complete the ancillary tasks. For this task we had to create a digipak and a magazine advert. We evaluated all of the options to us and concluded that Adobe Photoshop would be the most appropriate programme to use in order to maintain a 'professional' look. We all know how complicated and frustrating Photoshop can be at times but we still decided to go with it. We used online tutorials to guide us in the right direction on how to apply affects and use certain tools. One particular tutorial we watched was explaining how to give your specified image a 'spotlight effect' where it looks as if a shining bright light is shining onto our image (our artist) to emphasise its importance.

Although we still had troubles in using the software in our advanced portfolio it was still a vast improvement from how we used the programme during our foundation portfolio. In our foundation portfolio we decided to use Photoshop to create our film poster to go with our film opening. We took a movie still from our thriller opening and pasted it into Photoshop, there we edited it to give it a more sinister and darker feel to it to put across our sub genre. We did this by making the object in the image brighter and the background darker as we felt that this looked more professional.

Another form of technology that we used was our cameras. We shot both our foundation and advanced portfolio in high-definition. We felt that the cameras helped us as they were easy to use, clear in quality in picking up footage and sound. We felt that these cameras that we used were appropriate as opposed to non-HD cameras as most films are now shot in HD and it also gives us a crisper and more professional look to our foundation and advanced portfolios.

Web 2.0 was integral in our course in decision making, as it allowed us to promote and gain feedback from our peers in large numbers. We found that asking people to watch our video wasn't enough, and decided to post our videos to a numerous amount of social networking sites through YouTube in order to gain feedback and publicity. For our advanced portfolio, we regularly uploaded our music video to YouTube a numerous amount of times as a work in progress to easily post through sites such as Twitter and Facebook in order to receive feedback to make our final product even better. However, during our foundation portfolio it has to be said that we didn't utilise our possession of Web 2.0 as we weren't fully aware of it's capabilities and heavily relied on questionnaires and small scale feedback from close peers. 

Overall, my group and I feel that our experience in using digital technology has vastly improved in making creative decisions as we all feel that our advanced portfolio is better than our foundation portfolio simply due to our experience and knowledge of how to utilise the programmes that we were able to use.