Evaluation: Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Section one: How I have utilized generic conventions within the main production

(music video)

Genre characteristics within aspects of mise-en-scene: locations

The locations within my production were used to generically signify two recurring conventions of music videos. As I constructed my production in the style of a montage, the locations contrast frequently creating a binary opposition. There is a recurring theme of locations within nature (or at least where nature still is paramount over urbaneness) which was an attempt to create for the audience a sense of freedom for the character, where he is free to reflect on the past. Here are some examples

from my Productions which illustrate this:

• A music video which inspired the recurring theme of nature is ‘Minor Cause’ by ‘Emancipator’. The video shows a man in solitude in nature, but the visuals along with a thought provoking instrumental give the audience the ability to identify with the artists trail of thought. This is a theme I wished to recreate in my production, combining montage style visuals, with the hypnotic instrumental to create a visual archetype for free thought.

Generic conventions of real media products: absurdist

• As Wikipedia shows; “"the Absurd" refers to the conflict between (a) the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and (b) the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean "logically impossible", but rather "humanly impossible".[1]

The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make certainty impossible”

• Conventions of this theme can be seen throughout history, in the literature of Samuel Becket and Virginia Wolf, and throughout the philosophical writings of Soren Kierkegaard

• The absurdist movement is both one of the most comical and mundane artistic and philosophical movements. After World War I, people started realizing that the institutions and beliefs that they put their faith in - the government, the church, the military, technology, society, etc. - were not intrinsically right. The only reason they had any power or sway is because people let them have power and sway. In short, people started to realize that the foundations they had built their life upon had no foundations themselves. This led to the modernist movement.

True art is incomprehensible• Common tropes of the absurdist movement is the idea that

"True Art" must of necessity be incomprehensible, or at best, only comprehensible by the "right people."

• "I shudder if the majority of people look at my brush work and say it is pretty, for then I know it is ordinary and I have failed. If they say they do not understand it, or even that it is ugly, I am happy, for I have succeeded." — An anonymous artist

We live in a “crap sack world”• A common trope of Absurdism is the idea we live in a Crapsack World is a horrible

setting where the pessimistic notion of "anything that can go wrong will go horribly wrong" almost always applies, and it corrupts its inhabitants into perpetuating that nastiness against each other. More succinctly, trying to survive in one of these places is gonna suck.

• "The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears it is true." — James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

• (information taken from: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld

• My music video attempts to recreate this theme, while challenging it. Flash backs show a slightly positive look on the past, but the binary opposition between that and the how the real world is depicted shows the pessimism is evident. The contrast between real time and the past is contrasted so as to highlight (the past) the human search for meaning in life. However contrasted with real time, to show the human inability to in the end find that meaning, and the naivety that they can.

Past

present

Inter-textual reference to Victorian poetry

• Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach inspired my use of water, and montage in order to depict “ the ebb and flow of human misery”

• “Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the A gaean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea.”

• I used montaged clips of flowing water in order to portray this in order to give a allegorical meaning of how human misery begins and ceases, in the end it balances out, ad therefore adds an alternative interpretation from the absurdist pessimism .

Conventions of use and gratification of music videos.

• The 1960s was a time where generations were beginning to grow up in a time where they had been able to watch TV since they were young. It became clear to media theorists that audiences were far from passive and chose how they interpret TV and media. Audiences consisted of individuals who actively consumed texts for various reasons and in various ways. Lasswell in 1948 suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: cultural transmission, surveillance, correlation and entertainment. Although Blulmer and Katz developed this theory and argued in 1974, that viewer’s might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications): Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine. Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life. Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts. Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains .

Conventions of use and gratification of music videos.

• I accounted this in planning my production and decided I wish to portray the use of my production to the audience to be a search for Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts. As well as this my production’s purpose is also to act as a Diversion for the audience, giving them a text they can use to escape from everyday problems and routine.

Link between visuals and impressionist movement

• I was very much inspired by the impressionist work of artists such as Monet. Impressionism has played a significant role in the history of painting, because it characterizes a spirit of innovation. It focuses on depicting the environment that surrounded them with particular attention to light and its ephemeral, changing qualities on the landscape.

• My production was influenced by this idea, and challenges audiences typical take on landscapes in a few ways. Landscapes were used to highlight not only the changing qualities of landscape but also to highlight the changing quality of the actors, this was achieved by a contrast between past and present. I challenge the convention however as I flip around clips in order to give environments and completely different look than before, for example:

Monet and my own production

Joseph Mallord William Turner

• Joseph Mallord William Turner a British water colourist, and romantic landscape painter (1775-1851) and is arguably one of the first impressionist artists way before his time. He was deemed mad by some for his paintings dreamlike ad expressionist qualities, at a time when the public wanted art that accurately reflected real life perceptions. This inspired my use clips of the sun and landscapes, which are cross faded and over imposed using crossfades so that the film gives normal perception similar dreamlike impressionist qualities, unfortunately I feel my lack of camera skills and time constraint meant I did not achieve it to its fullest, but this is the reasoning for it.

Turned and his influence on my own production:

• I tried to utilise Turner’s use of lighting which is imposed on everything. Montaged clips of the sun were inspired by impressionism such as this, and from that I tried to create impressionism within film, rather than painting.

Impressionist artists and my production

• Unfortunately I feel I was unable to portray using a camera that which could be achieved with an artists hand and paint, however I feel it gave my production more imaginative qualities, which deviated from the norms of typical performance music videos.

Challenging voyeuristic representation of women in music video

• A common convention of music video is the voyeuristic representation or treatment of women. I think this can lead to irrational views of women and regressive stereotypes which view women as sex objects. Therefore I attempted to challenge this convention by portraying gender’s equally and representing the female as independent and as a means in themselves, rather an end to a means.

• The ‘male gaze theory’ is applied to music video’s in order to maintain male viewer’s interest and to attract more people into the audience. (According to Wikipedia: Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object.) In terms of media it refers to how an audience views people being presented. Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘Male Gaze’ in 1975 claiming that in film, audiences have to ‘view’ characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. This Relegates women to the status of objects. Sexualisation of the female body even in situations where female sexiness has nothing to do with the product being advertised is used in order to widen audiences and gain “fans” through the women within the video rather than purely the music. This convention is used briefly in the opening scene of this music video in order to initially captivate male viewers.

• Although this argues that utilizing the ‘male gaze’ theory may bring in a wider audience and allow more people to identify with the production. The fact that I challenge this convention would bring its own audience in itself, those sophisticated enough to stand for equality and who stands opposed to regressive representations of women, or people in fact, would identify with the video for not including such demoralizing representations. Therefore it could be argued that some audiences look for the convention of challenging such representations, making it a convention of real media products in itself.

‘Male gaze’ continued…

• This image illustrates how I have represented gender equally. A typical stereotypical gender roles of women in sedentary society is that they are the nurturers ad preparers of food. This image shows us both preparing a drink together, and challenges the stereotypical view that it is a female role to prepare food and drinks for the males.

Narrative structure: Flashback’s within production• Flashback are interjected clips/ frames that takes the narrative back in time previous to when

the current frames are set, and can be crucial to give the viewer the back story in some situations. Flashbacks can also take narrative somewhere outside of time all together, by acting as an individuals internal image of the past as they are imagining it, acting as a visual representation of the stream of consciousness (see next slides).

• Flashbacks must be made clear to the audience so that they do not get the narratives chronology mixed up, this has been achieved in many ways throughout various media texts . For example, the edges of the picture may be deliberately blurred, photography may be jarring or choppy, or unusual coloration or sepia tone, or monochrome when most of the story is in full colour, may be used.

• In my production full colour image represents the present time, and black and white represents the flash backs, although this is still more complex than it first seems. The full colour images, contrasting the black and white clips are part of a battle in the characters stream of consciousness between the past (delusion) and the present (reality), this was done in order to relate to the title of the song, nostalgia, although I wanted to leave the true meaning ambiguous to the audience. I also flipped the image on the majority of the black and white clips in order to highlight that it deviated from reality, and is a visual representation of that realisation

Past

present

• My use of black and white clips in order to signify a deviation from the present moment/ reality, was inspired by Wim Wender’s film ‘Wings Of Desire’ (1987) in which the film is shown from the perspective of an angel who is unable to physical interact with the world, and can only interact within individuals unconsciousness’s, and this is shown through the use of almost noir black and white film. However it inspired me as the angel the film follows breaks free from his immortality and breaks into the physical reality, at this point the film becomes full of high contrast colour, which looks fantastic, and lead to attempting to try something similar in my own context within my own production. Using binary opposition to create a contrast and conflict visually between reality, and an delusional reality within my own production

Narrative structure: Flashback’s within production

Narrative conventions: montage• The narrative structure of my production is rather complex and

utilizes a montage technique, fading/ cutting with the beat, creating a link between the music and the visuals, which is important for the stream of consciousness technique I attempted to utilize to. Eisenstein describes montage as an alternative form of form of “continuity editing”. That is putting together a number of frames to create meaning, one frame informs the other.

• I therefore used this convention of narrative structure to put clip together which on their own have little meaning, to create a continual flow of images which are meant to be representative of the character thoughts and feels (see next slides).

A montage technique is a commonn convention in music videos, especially those without performers or lyricists. Music video ‘Minor Cause’ by Emancipator that has been mentioned earlier uses a montage technique for example, and gave me the idea of using a montage, to make something more ambigious.

Narrative conventions: stream of consciousness

• Stream of consciousness is a term first developed by theologian and psychologist William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) referring to the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts and feeling in the waking mind.

• (According to: A Glossary of Literary Terms – M.H. Abrams) Stream of consciousness is a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations.

• The concept has been adopted as a literary narrative structure since by many writers such as Virginia Woolf, who developed it heavily in her novel, ’ To The Lighthouse’. Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. So the events that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her; what mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentarily impressions presented as a continuous flux.

My production and the stream of consciousness

• A quote from Virginia Woolf from her book ‘In Modern Fiction 'which greatly inspired my use of internal dialogue representing the characters feelings and flow of perceptions and interpretations within my production. The approach had such a vast influence on my production that it even led to me attempting to create the production without making it generic and without utilising repeated formulaic conventions.:

• “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came to here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street sailors would have it.”

• Although internal monologue and the stream of consciousness was originally a literary narrative mode, I felt that it could be just as easily be conceptualised using film and music, rather than words, to represent the characters continuous flow of emotions and thoughts, which without narration or lyrics, the meaning is left ambiguous and can be interpreted by the audience however they wish to. I feel I successfully intertextually references this mode of narrative structure, and feel audiences would identify with the rawness of it, despite it not being made especially with audience in mind, purely as the production had to be raw with itself, rather than a recreation of a formula of repeated conventions. Another reason for this is that I feel “what is common is of little value” and therefore I had to make my production unique.

• Everything in the music video is allegorical and ambiguous, the thematic are introspective, searching the essence of human being, its darkest secrets, in a journey of no return, where the music accompanies us without limits or boundaries, simply flowing free and unstoppable, shaking the minds of listeners.

Section two: How I have utilized generic conventions within the ancillary production

(digi pack and magazine advert)

Relation between front panel and real cd products.

• The background image for my album cover, as well as inside panels were inspired by various art movements, as well as an aim to promote the music, removed from promoting a sellable persona of the artist. The impressionist movement, as spoken about above influenced my album cover equally to my main production, with the expressive use of colour. However artist Leonid Afremov (work shown below) was my biggest influence. I attempted to utilize paint and colour like this, and did so by creating my own paint of wooden block (which is what my front cover image is made from (see print production posts for evidence)) however I am not talented with a paint brush and needed to show technical skills within my production. I therefore inspired by impressionism and Afremov to take a photo of my paint on wooden block and then further manipulate the image on Photoshop to crate layers and colours and things that were not in the original image, making it rather unique, which I feel is an important selling point of the album cover.

How real media products influenced my use of font

• The font I used is used in various real media texts, although I first saw it on ‘We Love Life’ by Pulp, in which I felt it was very concise and makes the text seem over imposed over the image as if it had been printed on. I felt the text is aesthetically pleasing, clear and yet generically is ambiguous so as to leave music and interpretation of album open for the consumer.

How real magazine adverts influenced the layout of my own

Researching magazine adverts I realised a recurring theme whatever it is promoting; magazine adverts have to stand out. Therefore my magazine advert background is the paint concept I developed earlier inspired by the expressionism and Absurdism art movement, I wanted it to look like something, but still nothing that can be rational conceived so as to get people to look closer where the clear font draws them to the artist. I also made it clear to ensure that the male and females n it were equal in height to as to ensure not regressive interpretations of women, so as to appeal to my sophisticated audience who stand for equality.