Online Age Advice Prezi

Audience Theory

Audience

Audience theory provides a starting point for many Media Studies tasks. Whether you are constructing a text or analysing one, you will need to consider the destination of that text (i.e. its target audience) and how that audience (or any other) will respond to that text.

Remember that a media text in itself has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience. 

For GCSE, you learned how audience is described and measured. Now you need a working knowledge of the theories which attempt to explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text. Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models, ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour. Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control. Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you must understand the following theories and how they may be used to deconstruct the relationship between audience and text.

1. The Hypodermic Needle Model

Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It is a crude model (see picture!) and suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. Don't forget that this theory was developed in an age when the mass media were still fairly new - radio and cinema were less than two decades old. Governments had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to try and sway populaces to their way of thinking. This was particularly rampant in Europe during the First World War (look at some posters here) and its aftermath.

Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciouness of the audience unmediated, ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive and heterogenous. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts (comics in the 1950s, rap music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.

2. Two-Step Flow

The Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

• The Two Step Flow Of Communication Theory - A short paper by Sarah Griswold
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-step_flow_of_communication
• https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/communication-theories/sorted-by-cluster/Mass%20Media/Two_Step_Flow_Theory-1/

3. Uses & Gratifications

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

• surveillance
• correlation
• entertainment
• cultural transmission

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals 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

Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet)

Audience Theory- Uses & Gratifications Theory

• The idea that media audiences make active use of what the media offer. The audience has a set of needs which the media meet, in one form or another.
• The audience are imagined to consciously use particular programmes, films or magazines to satisfy needs and interests.
• Rather than being duped, the audience is seen as made up of individuals free to reject, use or play with media meanings as they choose.
• This model emphasizes what audiences of media products do with them.
• "Power lies with the consumer"

The needs of the consumer follow Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

"The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "d-needs": esteem ,friendship and love, security, and physical needs. With the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) needs, if these "deficiency needs" are not met, the body gives no physical indication but the individual feels anxious and tense. Maslow's theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. " ~ Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Problems with the U&G theory

As a means of understanding the relationship between the audience and the creation of meaning it can appear rather simplistic and limited in relation to the complexity of how the audience or reader actually work with a text.

• This model assumes that the media somehow identify audience needs and then provide material to gratify them.
• We are more likely to want to identify ourselves as active readers rather than passive dupes.
• The audience is seen as playing an active role in the interpretation of meaning.

• Uses & Gratifications/Dependency Theory - E Rossi

4. Reception Theory

Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading.

This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

• Audience Research: Reception Theory — Museum of Broadcast Communications CLICK A and you'll get all audience materials
• Reception Studies and Classical Film Theory

OTHER THEORIES
Some good useful stuff on this site:
https://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/media-studies-level-revision

CULTIVATION THEORY 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_theory
https://revisionworld.com/a2-level-level-revision/media-studies-level-revision/cultivation-theory

GATEKEEPING THEORY
https://www.communicationtheory.org/gatekeeping-theory/
https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/communication-theories/sorted-by-cluster/Media%2C%20Culture%20and%20Society/gatekeeping/

A2 PROGRAM OF STUDY QUESTION 2 MEDIA IN THE ONLINE AGE

You will have a choice of doing ONE of two questions on "Media in the Online Age".
You need to look at TV AND MUSIC
What you need to revise and plan essays for are:

How production, distribution and exchange have been affected by Web 2.0
How has the relationship between institutions and audiences changed since Web 2.0?
What has the impact of Web 2.0 been on consumption?
How have audience behaviours changed through development of Web 2.0?

You need to look at these  PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE aspects of these issues, with a concentration on the present and future.

You need to refer to theorists (Tapscott & Williams, McLuhan, Gauntlett etc etc) in order to reinforce your arguments, especially in regards to specific trends and behaviours.

Use the Prezi on this, my Twitter feed articles, and the readlists to support your arguments.

THIS MUST NOT JUST BE AN ESSAY DISCUSSING ONLINE SERVICES FOR CONSUMING TV & MUSIC

A2 PROGRAM OF STUDY QUESTION 1B

There are 5 possible areas that can come up:

1.Genre
2.Narrative
3.Audience
4.Media Language
5.Representation

QUESTION 1 B REVISION. 

PAST QUESTIONS:

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre

Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to audience.

Apply theories of media language to one of your coursework productions.

You will notice that each of these questions is quite short and fits a common formula. You can be assured that the same thing will apply this summer. You will be asked to apply ONE concept to one of your productions. This is a quite different task from question 1a, where you write about all of your work and your skills, as this one involves some reference to theory and only the one piece of work, as well as 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’.

There are five possible concepts which can come up

Representation

Genre

Narrative

Audience

Media Language

If you look through those questions above, you will see that the first three have all already come up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that means that it must be one of the other two this time- exams don’t always work that predictably! It would be far too risky just to bank on that happening and not prepare for the others! In any case, preparing for them all will help you understand things better and there are areas of overlap which you can use across the concepts.

So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? First of all, you need to decide which project you would be most confident analysing in the exam. I believe that any of the five can be applied to moving image work, so if you did a film opening at AS, a music video, short film or trailer at A2, that would be the safest choice. Print work is more tricky to write about in relation to narrative, but the other four areas would all work well for it, so it is up to you, but to be honest, I’d prepare in advance of the exam as you don’t want to be deciding what to use during your precious half hour! What you certainly need is a copy of the project itself to look at as part of your revision, to remind yourself in detail of how it works.

Representation

If you take a video you have made for your coursework, you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic is representation, then your task is to look at how those representations work in your video. You could apply some of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here- how does your video construct a representation of gender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also to refer to some critics who have written about representation or theories of media representation and attempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who could you use? Interesting writers on representation and identity include Richard Dyer, and David Gauntlett. See what they say...

Genre

If you’ve made a music magazine at AS level, an analysis of the magazine would need to set it in relation to the forms and conventions shown in such magazines, particularly for specific types of music. But it would not simply comprise a list of those conventions. There are a whole host of theories of genre and writers with different approaches. Some of it could be used to inform your writing about your production piece. Some you could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- all are cited in the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_genre

Narrative

A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both depend upon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must set up some of the issues that the rest of the film’s narrative will deal with, but must not give too much away, since it is only an opening and you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise a trailer must draw upon some elements of the film’s imaginary complete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, again without giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will have been capturing a complete narrative, which gives you something complete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that it was more performance based, maybe interspersed with some fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough about narrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances are you have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative, but just in case, here’s http://www.slideshare.net/petefrasers/narrative-theory-hand-out-copy PDF by Andrea Joyce, which summarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov.

Audience

Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply. Here are some links to some starting points for theories:

general intro

presentation on reception theory

Media Language

A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might beRoland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image workBordwell and Thompson

So what do you do in the exam?

You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it

You then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout

Keep being specific in your use of examples from the project

Here is a link to a good answer to q1a and 1b from the January session.

A2 Program of Study for Question 1A

Try and spend at least one hour per day one Media, this way you will be in control of your revision and will be more productive.

The areas you need to study:

Question 1 (to be applied to ALL work from preliminary through to A2 main & ancillary)

1. Digital technology
2. Research and Planning
3. Conventions of Real Media
4. Post-Production
5. Creativity.

Sample Questions: 

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

Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time.

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.

You will notice that each of these begins by asking you to 'describe' and then goes on to ask you to reflect in some way: "evaluate", "how you used" "how your skills developed". herein lies the key to this part of the exam! You only have half an hour for the question and you really need to make the most of that time by quickly moving from description (so the reader knows what you did) to analysis/evaluation/reflection, so he/she starts to understand what you learnt from it.

If you look through those questions above, you will see that they all contain at least two of the five- creativity is mentioned (as 'creative decision making') in two of them alongside the main area (digital technology on one, research and planning skills in the other). In the third of those past questions , research is combined with conventions of real media. So as you can see, the question is likely to mix and match the five, so you HAVE to be able to think on your feet and answer the question that is there.

So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? I would suggest that you begin by setting out, on cards or post-its, a list of answers to these questions:

What production activities have you done?

This should include both the main task and preliminary task from AS and the main and ancillaries at A2 plus any non-assessed activities you have done as practice, and additionally anything you have done outside the course which you might want to refer to, such as films made for other courses or skateboard videos made with your mates if you think you can make them relevant to your answer.

What digital technology have you used?

This should not be too hard- include hardware (cameras, phones for pictures/audio, computers and anything else you used) software (on your computer) and online programs, such as blogger, youtube etc

In what ways can the work you have done be described as creative?

This is a difficult question and one that does not have a correct answer as such, but ought to give you food for thought.

What different forms of research did you do?

Again you will need to include a variety of examples- institutional research (such as on how titles work in film openings), audience research (before you made your products and after you finished for feedback), research into conventions of media texts (layout, fonts, camera shots, soundtracks, everything!) and finally logistical research- recce shots of your locations, research into costume, actors, etc


What conventions of real media did you need to know about?

For this, it is worth making a list for each project you have worked on and categorising them by medium so that you don’t repeat yourself

What do you understand by ‘post-production’ in your work?

This one, I’ll answer for you- for the purpose of this exam, it is defined as everything after planning and shooting or live recording. In other words, the stage of your work where you manipulated your raw material on the computer, maybe using photoshop, a video editing program or desktop publishing.


For each of these lists, your next stage is to produce a set of examples- so that when you make the point in the exam, you can then back it up with a concrete example. You need to be able to talk about specific things you did in post-production and why they were significant, just as you need to do more than just say ‘I looked on youtube’ for conventions of real media, but actually name specific videos you looked at, what you gained from them and how they influenced your work.

This question will be very much about looking at your skills development over time, the process which brought about this progress, most if not all the projects you worked on from that list above, and about reflection on how how you as a media student have developed. Unusually, this is an exam which rewards you for talking about yourself and the work you have done!

Final tips: you need some practice- this is very hard to do without it! I’d have a crack at trying to write an essay on each of the areas, or at the very least doing a detailed plan with lots of examples. The fact that it is a 30 minute essay makes it very unusual, so you need to be able to tailor your writing to that length- a tough task

GENRE

Genre is a way of categorising a text through style and form. It is vital to be able to categorise texts in this way - both for production and analysis. Most students associate genre with film, and indeed this is where categories can be most easily identified. There are a particular set of theories associated with film genre and you can read more about them here.

A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements which occur in that text and in others of the same genre. These elements may be referred to as paradigms, and range from costume to music to plot points to font (depending on the medium). Audiences recognise these paradigms, and bring a set of expectations to their reading of the text accordingly: the criminal will be brought to justice at the end of the police thriller. These paradigms may be grouped into those relating to iconography (ie the main signs and symbols that you see/hear),structure (the way a text is put together and the shape it takes) and theme (the issues and ideas it deals with).

Genre is important for both the readers and creators of texts (ie the audience and the producers).

Audiences

select texts on basis of genre, often because texts are arranged at retail outlets by genre (just pop along to HMV). Also, certain genres are considered appropriate to certain ages/genders in society, and choices are made accordingly eg teen movie, 'chick flicks' have systems of expectations about the content and style of a text, according to its genre. This enables them to take particular pleasures in the text, those of repetition, and of predicted resolution. Pleasure may also be drawn from differences. identify with repeated elements in generic texts and may shape their own identity in response (eg fans of a particular genre of music dress in a specific way - metalheads in their band t-shirts, for instance)

Producers

market texts according to genre because a niche audience has already been identified as taking pleasure in that type of text standardise production practices according to genre conventions, thus cutting costs subscribe to established conventions of versimilitude, thus reinforcing genre conventions, but also allowing creativity within a given format eg) it is an accepted convention in science fiction that spaceships make noises, which helps create excitement in battle scenes, but it is a scientific fact that no sound travels through the vacuum that is space.

Classification by genre is seen as both positive and negative by audiences, producers and theorists. On the one hand, rigorous conformity to established conventions while giving the audience what they want, can actually lead to stagnation and the eventual ossification of a genre as a "they're all the same" judgement is passed. This is what happened to the traditional Hollywood Western and Musical - once many profitable examples of these genres were pumped out by the studio each year, but the formats became stale through over-repetition and audiences lost interest. It is now only when a new Western or Musical that challenges the conventions and defies expectation (Brokeback Mountain or Moulin Rouge) comes along that non-niche audiences are willing to watch.

On the other hand, the genre of reality television has defied criticism that it is stale, contrived and predictable, and is now the basis of programming for entire networks. Although all possible variations of the same structure (contestants compete for a prize/live in the same house/go about a heightened version of their daily lives), iconography (surface realism and non-actors) and theme (aren't these people making idiots of themselves?) seem to have been run through in the space of a decade, it's still popular with audiences, who seem to enjoy the familiarity of the patterns presented onscreen.

Genre can provide structure and form which can allow a great deal of creativity and virtuosity, especially when a genuine reworking of generic conventions comes along (the Coen Brothers' reimagining of the Western in No Country For Old Men). Genre provides key elements for an audience to recognise, so that they may further appreciate the variation and originality surrounding the representation of those elements. When Scream was released in 1996, writer Kevin Williamson was praised for his fresh, ironic take on the conventional teenage slasher movie. He took the conventions (band of promiscuous teenagers picked off one by one by killer unknown) and turned them around, with the characters' self-awareness of their own predictability ("Oh, please don't kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!") used as a prime point of pleasure for the audience. However, by the time Scary Movie 4 was released in 2004, it was seen as "formulaic and predictable". Thus we can see that most genre paradigms form part of a fluid system - they are constantly changing and adapting according to audience tastes, individual entries into the genre and societal influences.

GREAT SITE THAT GIVES MORE DETAIL HERE:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html

Current state of genre theory

The definition of genre from dictionary.com is "a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, context, technique, or the like." Although it seems that genre should be easy to define, the finer points of textual categorization are not yet established.

Genres, according to Daniel Chandler, create order to simplify the mass of available information. Creating categories promotes organization instead of chaos. Jane Feuer has divided ways to categorize genres into three different groups. The first is aesthetic. By using this method one can organize according to certain sets of characteristics, and so the overall work of the artist is not disparaged by generalization. The second classification method is ritual. Ritual uses its own culture to help classify. If one performs a ritual associated with a system of ritual, one can be said to be practicing as a member of that system. The common taxonomical method is ideological. This occurs most often in the marketing of texts, music, and movies. The effectiveness of this type of categorization can be measured by how well the public accepts these categories as valid.

Amy J. Devitt focuses on rhetorical genre. Scholars generally recognize the restrictions placed on works that have been classified as a certain genre. However, viewing genre as a rhetorical device gives the author and the reader more freedom and "allows for choices." Genres are not free-standing entities, but are actually intimately connected and interactive amongst themselves. Rhetorical genre recognizes that genres are generated by authors, readers, publishers, and the entire array of social forces that act upon a work at every stage of its production.

This recognition does not make the taxonomy of texts easy. Chandler points out that very few works have all the characteristics of the genre in which they participate. Also, due to the interrelatedness of genres, none of them is clearly defined at the edges, but rather fade into one another. Genre works to promote organization, but there is no absolute way to classify works, and thus genre is still problematic and its theory still evolving.

Moreover, the metagenre as a concept has been an importaint point to study. According to Giltrow, metagenre is "situated language about situated language". Metagenres such as institutional guidelines can be "ruling out certain kinds of expression, endorsing others", constraining and enabling. The concept of metagenre also provides a valuable way to understand the dynamics of institutional interrelations between genres. In the mental health discourse, for example, has been demonstrated the metageneric function of the American Psychiatric Association's (DSM) for standardizing and mediating the localized epistemological communicative practices of psychiatrists.

Exam 1 b genre

Read the Powerpoint, the post below, the mark scheme and exemplar answer (not a very good one) and attempt the question after having made notes.

1B Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre    



Genre Powerpoint

 Candidates will need to choose one production from either Foundation Portfolio or
Advanced Portfolio.

•   Explanation/analysis/argument (10 marks) 
•   Use of examples (10 marks) 
•   Use of terminology (5 marks). 
  Examiners are reminded that candidates are asked to relate a media production to a theoretical concept and they are at liberty to either apply the concept to their production or explain how the concept is not useful in relation to their production. 

Mark Scheme June 2010

Level 1

Explanation/analysis/argument (0-3 marks)
Candidates at this level attempt to relate the production to the basic concept of representation, with limited clarity. The account may be incomplete or be only partly convincing.
Use of examples (0-3 marks)
Very few, if any, examples are offered from the chosen production.
Use of terminology (0-1 marks)
The answer offers minimal use of relevant basic conceptual terms.
Some simple ideas have been expressed. There will be some errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar which will be noticeable and intrusive. Writing may also lack legibility.
Level 2
Explanation/analysis/argument (4-5 marks)
Candidates offer a mainly descriptive, basic account of how their production can be understood in the basic theoretical context of representation.
Use of examples (4-5 marks)
A narrow range of examples are described, of which some are relevant.
Use of terminology (2 marks)
The answer makes basic use of relevant conceptual terms.
Some simple ideas have been expressed in an appropriate context. There are likely to be some errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar of which some may be noticeable and intrusive.
Level 3
Explanation/analysis/argument (6-7marks)
Candidates demonstrate the ability to relate their own creative outcomes to some ideas about media representation drawn from relevant media theory.
Use of examples (6-7 marks)
Some relevant and convincing examples from the production are offered and these are handled proficiently.
Use of terminology (3 marks)
The answer makes proficient use of relevant conceptual language.
Relatively straightforward ideas have been expressed with some clarity and fluency. Arguments are generally relevant, though may stray from the point of the question. There will be some errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar but these are unlikely to be intrusive or obscure meaning.

Level 4

Explanation/analysis/argument (8-10 marks)
Candidates demonstrate a clear understanding of representation and relevant media theory and can relate concepts articulately to the production outcome, describing specific elements in relation to theoretical ideas about how media texts represent the world and social life.
Use of examples (8-10 marks)
Candidates offer a broad range of specific, relevant, interesting and clear examples of how their product can be understood in relation to relevant theories of representation.
Use of terminology (4-5 marks)
The use of conceptual language is excellent.
Complex issues have been expressed clearly and fluently using a style of writing appropriate to the complex subject matter. Sentences and paragraphs, consistently relevant, have been well structured, using appropriate technical terminology. There may be few, if any, errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

EXEMPLAR ANSWERS

1b)
Genre is often used as a way of distinguishing one style from another; it categorises works so that the audience can more easily choose what they want to experience. For my music video, the genre of our music was a hybrid of electropop/rock/dance, which come mostly from the original song and from our personal tastes. Since our genre is modern and not common, we drew conventions from artists that had similar styles to ours. The conventions we found for music video for our genre are; editing often cuts to the beat; for female artists – costumes are bold, they wear high heels, ands the performances are strong and full of attitude. Examples of artists’ videos that do this are Beyonce (through her powerful dance routines and sexy costumes) and Lady GaGa (who wears extreme hair, costume and makeup).
My music video consisted of my group members (4 girls) giving powerful performances with sections of dance routine. We stuck to these conventions because we wanted the audience to recognise it as belonging to a genre and looking back at it now I think we succeeded. The genre has postmodern influences as does our video. It starts with a short narrative to no music, where a girl looks at a picture in a locket of her and a guy, slams it shut and looks in a mirror – which transports her into ‘subconscious mind’. We filmed the bulk of our video in an all-white studio and with our powerful costumes that intertextually referenced the deadly sins and Marie Antoinette the audience can quite clearly see that it is not reality.
You can see that our video promotes strong women by their feisty performance and this is emphasised by the use of a male, white headless, mannequin with a ‘perfect’ torso. In the video the sins are corrupting the girl (but they are all just facets of her personality) and they dominate the mannequin. This is in contrast with Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ whereby media is predominantly made with a male or masculine audience in mind. Our target audience is 14-25 year old women, and this is obvious because the audience immediately identify with the main girl since she is the focus of the narrative and on the mannequin’s torso is a kiss mark, showing the women ‘marking their territory’ on him. If we were targeting men we would’ve used a real man, but by our production decisions the target audience and genre is clear.
We followed the convention of cutting shots to the beat, however we challenged the convention of keeping lines of the song in one shot. We cut midway through words and phrases in order to quicken the pace, which is often fast for this genre. An aspect of the genre which we developed is comedy. In some of the music videos artists take themselves very seriously, however we combined the sexy performances with the comic editing and cut aways to five the characters a ‘human feel’ in the make believe

world. For example we used what was originally going to be an outtake, where one girl shakes her bum from side to side, and we matched it to the beat, giving it a comic edge.
You can apply Lyotard’s theory of mete-narratives to our video since it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy using the key signifier of a mirror in the opening narrative.
I think the my music video successfully conveys its genre while still maintaining enigma. The Reception Theory can be applied, since from feedback, many people had different interpretations, which is what this genre is all about. Looking at it objectively I would say that it is a fun, interesting video that invites playability and successfully promotes the song, which is the aim of a music video.
EAA 7 EG 8 T4 (19)

1b)
For my A2 production (Advanced Portfolio) I created a teaser trailer in the sub-genre of slasher from the genre of Horror. The synopsis of this teaser trailer is about a young couple (roughly 17-19 years of age) who are in love in the beginning but the relationship turns sore and they split up, the girls moves on with her life and the boy doesn’t like this and starts to follow her; The girl starts tutoring a guy in her class who is struggling but who is a complete binary opposition to her ex-boyfriend in the sense that he is a bit of a geeky character and her ex-boyfriend is a Jock (both of these characters you will find stereotypically in horror films) one by one the girls friends keep disappearing or are murdered and the suspision lies in the hands of the ex- boyfriend due to spite. But the question is does he really love her enough to not kill her? Throughout the trailer the audience thinks the ex-boyfriend si the killer but actually as it turns out it’s the geeky boy who has become very obsessive over the girl and wants her to himself.
The characters in this production are all very stereotypical of what you would find in an American ‘slasher/horro’ film. The two main female protagonists are ‘Carie’ and ‘Hannah’ Carie is your stereotypical ‘final girl’ which you would find in of not all, most horror films, this character is always brunette and seen to be ‘innocent’ we used this key code and convention of the genre horror from the film ‘Halloween’ staring ‘Jamie Lee Curtis’, As she is the ‘final girl’, she has brunette hair, the same as ‘Catie’ and she also wears the coulor blue as throughout our production ‘Catie’ is seen wearing the colour blue. For ‘Hannah’ she is our stereotypical ‘scream queen’ we looked at a film called ‘Hell Night’ and from seeing this their ‘scream queen’ was

wearing red, had red lipstick and had blonde hair, we chose our character of ‘hannah’ specifically so that she would have blonde hair and we also dressed her in a red costume and put red lipstick on her for her makeup. These two characters are complete binary opposites and are juxtaposed together.
From our research into ‘Horror’ teaser trailers we found that a common code and convention was a fast montage so we created a fast montage of all the killings throughout the film, however we also found that ‘slasher’ films portrayed someone else as the killer so that the audience don’t actually know who the killer is, or the suspect that the wrong person until is revealed at the end of the film; this is strereotypically done in horror films to create tension, suspense and even a narrative enigma.
On some shots of the killings eg. When the killer is following ‘Abby’ one the girls friends down into an underground tunnel, you have a point of view shot in the perspective of the killer walking behind Abby with the view of her back, we also tried to create yellow tinted lighting, using colour filters as we also found that this was a common code and convention of ‘horror’ also with the colour blue.
Through using these different lighting effects I have tried to anchor the preffered reading so the audience can tell what the genre of the film would be but also to connote that something bad is about to happen to that specific character.
There were many more signifiers throughout our media production that would have signified the genre to the audience however it was difficult with having to create a piece that lasted between 60-90 seconds and due to the fact that we are young film makers we don’t have big Hollywood film funding budgets. We only have small budgets to go on make-up and costumes. Had we had larger budgets though we would have been able to create a production a lot better. So there were limitations which could have had an effect on the genre.
EAA 6 EG 7 T3 (16) 

1b)
The media production I am going to write about in relation to genre is my favourite piece from the whole course which is my horror teaser trailer.
The genre of the trailer is obviously ‘horror’ and this in itself allowed us to be creative with narrative etc but limited us because we had to stick to a certain amount of generic conventions in order for it to be recognised by it’s existing target audience. Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which meant certain generic features had to be included and repeated which in my case was the use of a creepy location of the woods as well as hand held camera and restricted narration to cause disorientation and suspense within our trailer. However, the pattern of variation Neal describes also links to my horror teaser trailer because we were able to creatively push the boundaries by twisting some generic features in order to make the trailer interesting and therefore cause the audience to want to watch the full movie. For this my group chose use a female psycho killer I order to subvert the stereotypical male dominated role. This female identification through point of view shots etc captured our female audience because were providing them with power and this is unusual for the horror genre although it is known for its forward thinking approach as it often attempts to focus on subcultural views instead of targeting the mainstream. Genre encompasses many parts and the trailer links to it in more ways than one. Its use of enclosed location and the fact the woods attempts to reinforce our society’s fear of loneliness and isolation which the woods creates when the three friends get lost. In these sections of the trailer we used a lot of heavy cross cutting between the female victim who is running anxiously through the woods in order to find her friends and get home safely. We also used the Kuleshove and collision cutting methods as the pace began slow as the friends head our in the car unaware of the danger before them and once they are in the woods we deliberately quickened the pace of editing to cause tension and to show that something is not right, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.
Editing and mise-en-scene is really important to genre and reflects very quickly certain moods and atmospheres. Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes argued that the horror genre like many others used ‘binary oppositions’ in order to show the contrast between good and evil in order to force the audience to be constantly questioning the trailer for example; in my trailer I used light and dark to connote their happiness and carefree attitude in the daytime and the darkness to emphasise their fear and reliance

on their senses. This is particularly important to the horror genre as characters are often shown in high angle shots to appear vulnerable and therefore under threat.
Gore or ‘body horror’ is also a common generic convention used by most horror films that we studied including Dawn of the Dead by George A. Romero who used it to make the audience feel sick by forcing them to see extreme violence. In my own trailer we were inspired to use gore differently by showing a hanging scene in slow motion to create tension and the centoring in on the face and neck which had been broken and this was shown by the rope burn we had made from latex and the blood pouring down her chest. This shot moves clockwise and slowly zooms in to force the audience to see what the hang (woman) has done. In our final two shots we finish the trailer with the male anti hero being lifted off the ground with blood pouring out of his mouth which causes the audience to assume no one survives because the final girl is stabbed by her friend accidentally which quickens the pace and adds tension but she is the survivor who as Carol Clover suggests will be terrorised throughout the film and finally overcome the monster. This plays with the audiences emotions and links back to the horror genre well by creating our own style of horror. Andrew Sarris argues because it encompasses so much and is key to explaining a film. Genre is the ideas that collectively make a particular recognisable style that draws in its existing target audience. My horror trailer had expressionist camera angles as the female victim desperately trips over the camera and we see her running above it as well as close ups of her facial expression that causes us to identify with her fear and therefore makes us scared. This meant the audience also were forced to objectify the female victim from the high angle camera shot down her top in which we can see her breasts slightly after watching other Hitchcock movies which use the male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey to force us to take a male’s viewpoint.
In my trailer we also used an iconic symbol of the noose because obviously as a hangwoman she needed the prop but also as a female the circular shape suggested female power and this is something the horror genre often does but for male characters using guns etc as phallic symbols which we also used as the male anti hero takes out a knife and stabs his friend frantically when she walks up behind him. The horror trailer was made much darker in Final Cut Pro using the brightness and contrast menu and also dragged the saturated colours towards the blue in order to create a dark, dusky night time atmosphere a generic convention of horror trailers. The generic conventions we chose to use were all important to the success of our product and since distributing it on YouTube we have over 4000 which I am really pleased with and gives me the confidence that we obviously stuck to the genre enough to capture our intended target audience but were creative enough to make people want to keep watching the trailer and virally sharing it with others.
Genre places a media text into a grouping giving it an identity which can be recognised by the mainstream society and I believe my product is successfully fitted to the horror genre using the narrative that todorov argued was important to the horror genre by following an equilibrium at the beginning then a problem which in our case was the male anti hero playing a joke on the soon to be female victim making jump running after him causing their separation then a pathway to resolution – as they attempt to find each other and then a new equilibrium at the end which we deliberately left as an open ending to capture our audience effectively.
EAA 10 EG 10 Term 5