'Representations in media texts are often simplistic and reinforce dominant ideologies so that audiences can make sense of them.' Evaluate the ways you have used/challenged simplistic representations in one of the media products you have produced.

I am going to discuss my advanced portfolio in which I created a music video, to the acoustic rock song 'Better Together', in relation to representations of my male artist and female character.

We challenged the simplistic representation of the acoustic rock artist, in our video by having an artist who is of an Asian ethnic background. This is because most of the artists signed to Brushfire Records, are not of an ethnic background. However this new representation of our artist in that label, reaches out to a wider audience, as more of the ethnic minority may become interested in our artist, Nathan Vega. Representations which become familiar through constant re-use come to feel 'natural' and unmediated. This could be why existing audiences of this particular record label, may see our artist as unnatural becuase he is from an Asian ethnic background and is not a familiar representation.

Another way in which we challenged representation was by portraying our artist in a less dominant way than the stereotypical male. For example we can see this representation through the narrative in which the female character comes to the male artist in the relationship at the end of the video. This shows that our male artist isn't very dominant, and can be seen as less assertive than a stereotypical male. This may appeal to a feminist audience as our artist can be seen as less of a stereotypical male, therefore making him different. However using the plurality model, we can see how a male audience would view the representation of our artist. It could be argued that the male audience may discouraged of our artists character because he is less assertive.
Also the nature of the song, being about love and relationships, can be seen to reinforce that representation of a less dominant male, when seen from a male audience's view. Another way representation can be said to show our artist being less assertive is the way he is seen as not taking himself too seriously. We can see this in the video when we see various shots of the artist having fun and laughing. These are seen in the black and white shots, where we see the artist behind the scenes, of his video, having fun and another shot where he jumps up in front of the camera.

However one way we have used simplistic representations in the advanced portfolio is through the female character. In the music video we see her gaze at the photo of the male artist quite lovingly. This suggests, from a feminist perspective, that the female character depends on him for her happiness in life. A feminist audience may suggest that the girl needs to be more assertive throughout the video, and maybe show she can still be happy without him. This representation would support John Berger's quote, 'Men act and women appear' as the women in the video can be said to just appear with the artist at the end, whereas we can see the male artist performing throughout as if she will just 'appear' at the end.

Another simplistic representation we used in this media product is in the was we chose to portray our artist to the audience. We used acoustic rock conventions in terms of our artists appearance, and we stuck to the record labels representation of these type of artists. For example we focused on his guitar throughout the whole video, and considerably in the digipak and magazine advert. To portray him as a laid back individual we made sure he was dressed very casually to give this impression. The hat was also to indicate this specific genre as similar artists of this genre were seen in this type of costume. In a way we represented our artist in a stereotypical way in relation to our chosen genre. This would appeal to a specific audience or social group, as these conventions are clearly seen, which could show our genre and convey our intended message prominently.

Representations in media texts can often be simple so that audiences can make sense of them. However I feel in our music video we have engaged with the pluralistic model in relation to our audiences, as we have challenged as well as used simplistic representations. 

1B Audience Question

For this question I am going to discuss my advanced portfolio, in which I had to create a music video, digipak and magazine advertisement for my chosen artist. My chosen artist was Jack Johnson, after researching him we found that his target audience was both genders aged between 18-28 and his genre of music is acoustic rock. The song we chose was called 'Better Together', we gathered research on Jack Johnson and the album that this song featured on, so we could establish a target audience for this genre of music.

To attract an acoustic rock audience we needed an insight into what conventions portrayed the acoustic rock genre, that would then draw our audience in. We looked at similar artists to Jack Johnson such as, James Blunt, James Morrison and John Mayer, by doing this we found the conventions that fit our genre of acoustic rock. The key conventions we found within these artists showed they performed mostly with a guitar in most of the video, this implemented the acoustic aspect of the genre. We also found that the main part of their videos were close ups of them performing, however the narrative seemed to be a small part of the video, but a narrative was still included.

Denis McQuail's uses and gratification theory, would argue that our music video tells the audience about the world around us, as it encourages people to be environmentally friendly, because the artist himself is. Our music video also allows the audience to feel they have a personal relationship with the artist, because the narrative within the video is quite simple and the audience can easily relate to it. When researching Jack Johnson we found that all his album's have something to do with nature, and during a tour of one of his albums he began selling eco-friendly clothes and was promoting environmentally friendly behaviour to his fans.

Stuart Hall's theory on encoding and decoding would be useful to apply to our music video as we have encoded many messages for our audience. Some of the messages we encoded in our video were about the environment, we encoded this through the main location of our video. Another message we encoded was the genre of the song, which we did through using the conventions of acoustic rock, performing with a guitar and a lot of close ups whilst he performed. The audience are then able to decode the video how they want, taking away messages they have made, through watching the video. If we have encoded the messages successfully then the product would attract the right target audience for this specific genre.

However the hyperdermic needle model would not fit in with our music video as the audience would not be passive to the messages incorporated in the video. These messages would only appeal to a certain target audience, therefore our audience would have to be active rather than passive. This is because our audience would decode our messages and chose whether to react in a particular way rather than instinctivly taking in the messages. Our digipak and magazine advert also incorporate generic conventions of acoustic rock, because we photographed our artist with his guitar and chose to use the same location in which we shot the video. This was because we wanted to continue the message of an eco-friendly perosn and encourage this behaviour further. By doing this we hoped that our audience would recognise what type of artist he was and that this would appeal to the right type of audience.
By using Facebook and YouTube mainly, we were able to gather audience feedback to all our ancillary task as well as our video. This proved to be helpful in some ways as we could then modify our ancillary tasks to better fit the needs of our audience.

In conclusion, I believe that our audience is an active audience rather than passive, which allows them to decode their own messages from our music video and ancillary tasks, to then chose, whether it appeals to them or not.

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, a 2 minute thriller film opening to my advanced portfolio, in which we created a music video.

Final cut was the main programme, digital technology; we used to create both our advanced portfolio and my foundation portfolio. For our foundation portfolio we used the colour corrector to de saturate the colour of some of our shots, or enhance a specific colour within that shot. We chose to do this because we wanted to create a tense and thriller specific atmosphere to fit in with the conventions of our chosen genre, psychological thriller. In our advanced portfolio we used the colour corrector to enhance the feeling of the song in our music video; we added a sepia tone to the video as this linked with the lyrics of the song. We also brightened some specific shots because we felt this would enhance the genre and the character of our artist, which was very important to us, as appealed to our target audience.
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->
<!--[endif]-->

Photoshop was another piece of software we used in both advanced and foundation portfolio. During the making of our thriller film opening we decided to make a film poster to attract our target audience. Using a picture we had taken at one our shoots if the torture scene, which was also a shot in our film opening, we used photoshop to edit the picture and give it a sinister look to capture the genre of our opening. To do this we brightened up the main aspect of the picture, which was the victim, and darkened the background around him, and then we used bold white writing for the title and description. This allowed us to develop basic skills in photoshop which we could then advance further in our A2 production. The use of photoshop in the advanced portfolio was much greater than in the foundation portfolio as we had to use this software to create our ancillary tasks, digipak and a magazine advert. As we were already familiar with photoshop it made it easier to make our digipak in our A2 production. We started by using the basic tools we knew how to use from our AS production, we wanted our artist to be portrayed as an environmentally friendly person so we used the saturation to draw on that aspect. We increased the saturation to enhance the colour of the natural scenery around emphasis the environment around him; we also tried to use natural looking colours to reiterate the natural environment when deciding on our text colour. We made two different front and back covers for our digipak, this allowed us to develop our photoshop skills further and helped us in making our creative decisions, in which digipak portrayed our artist how we wanted him to be seen. We used the blur effect on the background of the picture of our digipak to make the legs of our artist and the guitar, stand out against the fence background, we also used the cut out tool to put an effect on the whole image. This represented the image we wanted for our artist as it showed him as an environmentally friendly person.

Web 2.0 was also very useful in our creative decision making as it allowed gaining feedback of various productions created using the photoshop and final cut software. For example once we had got a rough cut of our music video we were then able to upload it to Facebook and YouTube so others were able to see it and give us feedback which we could then use when creating our final cut of the video. We did not do this with our AS thriller opening sequence, we only uploaded it to YouTube for feedback, and had some of our peers to view it in school. Using new social networking sites made our creative decision making easier and more representative of our target audience. In our AS production we used blogger to document the whole of our production which proved to be useful as we were able to see the process of our production. We developed this skill in our A2 production because we were able to see what we should have done in terms of research and planning.

Overall, digital technology was a vital factor in allowing us to make good creative decisions in our A2 and AS productions as well as making our productions effective. 

'Media texts rely on cultural experiences in order for audiences to make sense of narratives.' Explain how you used conventional or experimental narrative approaches in one of your productions.

I am going to discuss my advanced portfolio in which I created a music video for the soft rock song, 'Better Together' By Jack Johnson, in relation to various theories of narratives. 

One theory of narrative that explains how we used conventional narrative approaches in our music video is Vernallis. Her theory focuses on 4 concepts that relate to the way a music video is constructed. Narrative is one of the 4 concepts, Vernallis looks at a range of points when considering the construction of a music video and its narrative. 

A theory of narrative which our music video seems to challenge is Todorov's narrative theory. Todorov separates music video's into different stages. There are 5 different stages which he believes contributes to his theory, that the narrative must undergo a transformation, therefore the characters featured must undergo this transformation by going through a disruption. 

According to Vernallis theory of narrative we have shown conventional approaches in our music videos. Vernallis says that a narrative may not always be complete, it may be fragmented, partial narrative. Our music video complies with this as our narrative for our video is fragmented. Throughout the video the audience see the main male character alone, however the female character fragments the narrative as we see her from time to time, cutting into the performance of the male artist. This is fragmented because it does not happen at specific points in the video. Also the videos do not correspond to the lyrics as the girl is not with the male artist until the end, signifying 'better together'. The structure of our music video is disjointed as we have included still pictures of the video which would not fit in with a experimental music video according to Vernallis. Our video does not always use the narrative to drive it forward, for example we used different shots of the male artist performing. We also used still images to drive the video forward. this is how our music video fits in with the conventional narrative approach of Vernallis' theory of narrative. 

However Todorov's theory would say our music video challenges his theory of narrative. Todorovs first stage is equilibrium, which is when everything is as it should be at the beginning. Our music video challenges this as we begin it with the male artist alone. As the song is about being better together our state of equilibrium would involve our male artist with a female throughout. But in our music video the supposed state equilibrium is fragmented, this challenges Todorovs theory. In our music video there is no form of disruption that occurs as we can see the male and female are both happy throughout the video. At the end of the music video the male and female character come together and show meaning of the song being better together. This could be seen as the stage of new equilibrium, however due to the fragmented narrative of the performance and still images we can see how it does not fit with Todorov's theory of narrative.

Our music video shows conventional narrative approaches when applied to Vernallis' theory of narrative. However it does not fit Todorov's theory narrative as you cannot see a form of transformation throughout our music video. 

Discuss how you used genre in one of your products

The product I am going to discuss in relation to genre is my foundation portfolio, in which I created a 2 minute thriller film opening. 
The genre of my film opening is obviously thriller, however our sub-genre's that we chose were revenge thriller and psychological thriller. Once we chose our sub-genre we had to begin to apply the generic conventions of a psychological/revenge thriller, by doing this it would be able to be recognised by our target/existing 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 dark settings and flash-forwards which show the antagonist preparing tools which would be used for a torture against the victim. The pattern of variation is seen where we included the abduction of our victim as well as showing the torture scene, we also let the audience see a glimpse of the antagonist, to encourage them to continue watching the movie. 
For our research into our thriller sub-genres we watched many thriller openings which had the same sub-genres as our thriller opening. We felt we needed to do this as genre is what attracts the desired audience as Christine Gledhill says, 'Different genres allow different audiences to be identified and catered to..' as our genre is revenge/ psychological thriller we made sure it appealed to the right age group, 15-24 year olds. By incorporating the right conventions to highlight out genre, we hoped that it attracted our desired audience, this is why we felt it was important to research our sub-genres and why we tried to stick to the conventions of our genre. We found that genre plays a big role in relating to a specific audience, which is why we used our producers and distributors to help us. In our thriller opening we used the producer name 'Perfect Dark' the reason we chose to use this name is because we felt it reflected our genre and would help us further in attracting the right audience. Denis McQuail refers to the commercial and industrial significance of genres, and stresses that it is important as it helps target audiences or producers capitalise on the success of the product. In order for our opening to be a success in reality we needed to use the genre as one of the main elements to attract our audience and potential producers. 
However we didn't stick to the conventions of a thriller exactly, as the first scenes with the victim walking are filmed in a bright setting. This would conflict with the common conventions of a thriller genre, this is because you wouldn't usually associate abductions in a thriller to occur in daylight. This particular setting and scene could make audiences question our genre and the target audience could change as it doesn't show repetition within a genre. This is the first scene in our opening, the audience also see the victim being abducted in daylight which can also been seen as a conflict in our specific thriller genre. 
Our thriller opening uses genre very clearly and efficiently, as it uses repetition in my conventions and settings. My advanced portfolio shows how the use of genre attracted my target audience and how the use of specific producers can also effect how the audience would perceive the genre. 

How might the influence of new media be said to strengthen or weaken the public sphere?

The public sphere is where people discuss and debate ideas this promotes democracy and the spread of ideas. New media has allowed more debates to emerge in the public sphere, which promotes democracy. New media has strengthened the public sphere by enabling people to access and upload footage, images and written accounts. This has been made easier by having greater access to the internet and the possession of mobile phones and small cameras.

For example, new media allowed the Syrian uprising to be viewed by the rest of the world. Syrians have shown the world what was going on through the use of amateur footage of protests and their violent aftermath. Mobile phones and small cameras were used to capture footage which was then uploaded by computers on a 3g mobile. this is important because people need to be informed to promote democracy. the public sphere is a central aspect of good governance. Without a functioning and democratic public sphere, government officials cannot be held accountable for their actions, and citizens will not be able to assert any influence over political decisions. 

However new media can encourage or allow misinformation where some people can be biased, and anonimity as some people can pretend to be someone they're not. This has weakened the public sphere as these issues can cause unwanted stress to the various consumers. 
For example, a Syrian 'lesbian blogger' was revealed to actually be a married American man living in Edinburugh. The blog released in the first place to explain what it was like to be a lesbian in Syria. The blog had many followers from Syria. There was a post in the name of Amina's cousin stating she had been snatched by armed men in the streets of Damascus. This news on her blog sparked internet campaigns to release her. this was until they found no evidence or key details that could be corroborated. This put some of the Syrian gay community's safety at risk and seriously harmed their cause. This was because they were openly campaigning for her release putting themselves at risk of getting 'snatched' also if they were found, which is more likely to happen whilst this campaign was happening.
This is important because anonimity can cause misinformation to occur and on a big scale, such as the Syrian lesbian, can be fatal. 
New media has anonimity within it as people cannot immediatly be discovered online therefore more people are likely to make extreme and irrelevant comments on an issue. This weakens the public sphere as we would question whether everything we read is true or not, or rather not question the information and be mislead. 


The public sphere has been strengthened by new media as it allows us to debate the news with a wide range of people. this has been made possible by allowing viewers/audiences/consumers to comment  on various pieces of news from around the worlds freely.
For example during the Syrian uprising journalism was banned. However new media allowed protestors to upload footage from the protests and even videos taken by members of the army, often mocking and abusing dead bodies were also leaked out. This allowed viewers from across the worlds to see the protests and how the army operated. This could then be debated online worldwide, Syria would have been seen in a bad light due to the exposure of these videos and the fact that people were able to debate it so openly with others. This is important because it makes people feel more free to express their opinion on matters in various places around the world. 
The public sphere is strengthened by this as it encourages people to debate the news and the public sphere is where people discuss ideas and views. Again, new media is promoting democracy within the public sphere by allowing people to debate the news with each other. I think that new media does more good than bad as it allows people with similar opinions/interests to communicate from all over the world, in a free and easy way. 


On the other hand, new media has weakened the public sphere as the validity of some of the information in the public sphere can be questioned, meaning that not all the information published to the public sphere can be trusted and taken as true all the time. 
For example, the case of the Syrian lesbian blogger who turned out to be a 40 year old man living in Edinburgh shows how some information cannot be valid and therefore not trustworthy for the consumers. Once there was evidence on the 40 year old man social websites such as twitter and blogger reacted in outrage to this. More information was being discovered on 'Amina's' supposed relationships with various women. Amina was who the Syrian lesbian blogger was known as. Direct emails with the Guardian and pictures, passed off as Amina, but were not available to comment. Those who were frustrated with this outcome were unable to  specifically comment on the supposed relationships Amina was having.
This is important as the validity of information can hinder the spread of democracy in the public sphere. This is because less people trust what they are consuming and therefore, are reluctant in participating in what could turn out to be a pointless discussion.


From these points discussed above I feel that new media does strengthen the public sphere far more that it weakens it. Even so, there are various issues surrounding the validity of the information and who is saying what in the public sphere. These points do no necessarily hinder the progression on democracy in the public sphere they simply point out the problems. Democracy is still able to spread and continue through the public sphere, this shows that these problems may not necessarily be a great issue as of yet. 

Are the media becoming more democratic?

Many new types of media have been launched such as new media which includes social and digital media, these types of media have altered the way we consume, produce and distribute media nowadays. Some would argue that these types of media is what has made media more democratic now, whereas mainstream media, as we can clearly see, is not democratic.

Social media are sites such as Facebook and Twitter, these social media sites allow many people to upload their content for other users to see and comment on. This shows the media in a democratic way as the 'audience' as we would see them traditionally, are able to upload their own information, along with uploading others are able to comment, like or dislike and share that information. The introduction of these site have allowed many people to have their say and contribute to various discussions in an online forum. 

However before new media, it was limited on how and what you could contribute to topical debates, in the past people would usually call in to radio chat shows and email them to get their view across. Even so not everyone would be able to do this or even be heard, now we can see new media allows anyone on the internet to continuously contribute to debates. 

David Gauntlett believes that media is becoming more democratic due to the expansion into web 2.0. He explains that web 2.0 which is sites such as YouTube and Blogger, create easier access for the 'audience' and also that we are now becoming a more active audience as we ourselves can produce and distribute media to these sites. Web 2.0 has an analogy of a garden to which many people contribute to, and this allows it to grow and be used as a tool to be heard. David Gauntlett supports the theory that media is becoming more democratic.

For example many newspapers have now launched themselves online and have encouraged readers to comment on stories. The daily mail has now become the biggest online newspaper, they're website allows readers to comment and discuss stories with others and people who work in the paper also. They also have a variety of blogs which readers can follow and read whenever they want. This promotes democracy within media as the audience are now active in the news and their views can be heard. 

These points discussed show that media is becoming more democratic and it also shows how much choice we have when we want to contribute to online debates. Almost anything can be discussed online and in web forums, I feel that media today is becoming more democratic.