Anthony Giddens

Modernity and self-identity

This basically means in societies where modernity is developed we will create some form of identity, whether we intend to or not as in some cases people believe they have done nothing to create an identity still have through what they wear, how they talk, where they live and what music they listen to. However as it was not always like this many societies used to tell people how to act and what to be thus being they are defined which I believe is one of the reasons there are such strong stereotypes of people today such as that women are to be a house wife, cook and clean etc this can also be best exampled in Beyonce’s music video ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’. I think this video can show both old and new identities which women are supposed to have as Beyonce is wearing multiple ’slutty’ outfits but also doing the housework meaning she is making other young girls believe that they should follow this identity as they would want to be like her. I must take this into consideration when doing my own music video because if my band were to be a success then members of my target audience may look up to them and create an identity similar to my bands/ artist therefore I must consider the way in which they are presented and represented in my music video.

Through the early day and age Giddens himself said ‘What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity- and ones on which some level or another all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behavior’ This is because he can see connections between ‘micro’ aspects of society and the big ‘macro’ picture of the state meaning he sees a relation between identity, capitalist corporations and/or globalization, which I believe means corporations are the reason for many individuals identities today especially corporations such as MTV and EMI who produce and advertise today’s celebrities and ‘want to be women/ men’ as their target audience (teens and young adults) are always wishing to meet someone who looks like them or wishes to look like that themselves. Having said that it makes me wonder whether many identities are the same with only minor differences to make us unique as everyone is exposed to the same influences of identity. These ideas have been brought about in my opinion through the social changes of how individuals view life and what they believe to be socially acceptable and what is not, which is why many people do not mind seeing celebrities such as Rhianna without many clothes on as we find it to be the ‘norm’ and are therefore desensitized to it.

How Will I incorporate this into in own music video?

I will use Giddens theory within my own music video by thinking about my own self- identity and how I would want to be represented within a music video, for example I may wish to be represented as cute and innocent or loud and fun, although I think that as self- identity is best shown within stereotypes I believe it would be best for my group to look and as many possible genre’s for our music video as possible so we are able to see how artists of that genre are represented and how their target audience could then be represented. For example looking at the Pop industry and Katy Perry, her identity in the music video ‘Teenage Dream’ is to be fun, young and in love therefore her target audience (which I believe to be teenage girls) will have an identity when listening to that music as being quite mainstream but also fun and young. Therefore Genre can also play a big part in ones identity meaning that my group and I must not only look at genre but also society and our own self-identities with the music we listen to as we can then get a rough understanding of how our band will want to make their target audience feel towards them but also what the band is like towards their audience.

By Laura Thorpe

Evaluation: Adele “Someone Like you” Music video

For my task of sweding a music video I chose to do it with Adele’s song “Someone Like you”.  This is a narrative music video and involves Adele walking a singing throughout the majority of the video. The girl in this video is Laura, who I worked with to make the entire video. The reason I chose to do this song is because it seemed simple and relatively easy to replicate. The video does lack a lot of technical features, such as a variety of camera shots, different lighting and the use of props and costume. Therefore when it comes to making my final music video I may consider this genre of music because by having to worry less about these aspects, it will allow me more time to work on other parts of manufacturing the video, such as editing each frame to look more suited to the specified genre I have chosen.

When making my music video the thing I struggled most with, was when I was using final cut express to try and make the miming of the lyrics parallel with the song. This is because it has to be correct to the second, otherwise the miming looks out of sync. Even though it’s not essential to get the timing perfect, as a result it made the video look more aesthetically pleasing, so it was worth spending more time to make it perfect, therefore, now I know that my final music video will look better if I make the timings perfect to the second. To make it easier I played the song while filming so that the person miming could sing along to it, therefore I will use this strategy when it comes to filming my actual music video. However the video itself still had to match the official video, therefore each frame had to be cropped down, and this is what made matching the timings difficult. Another aspect I found difficult was making each frame flow perfectly. This is because almost the entire video involves the person (Laura), walking, so the position of her body and legs at the end of one frame, had to be exactly the same as the beginning of the next frame. Therefore when it comes to my actual video I will allow more time to film, as I now know how difficult it is.

As the narrative in this music video was not very complex it didn’t require a large amount of time to produce the actual filming of it. Overall it took an hour and a half to film the entire video with a few extra takes on various frames. We gave ourselves a maximum of 3 hours that day so we finished with plenty of time.

The thing I liked about this music video is the use of crabbing shots throughout it. These complimented the video as the main focus was always on Adele so the use of this camera movement allowed the audience to see her at the same angle for longer periods of time. Therefore when it comes to my final music video I will use crabbing shots when I want to keep the camera fixed at a certain angle for longer periods of time. As my genre is likely to involve more than one band member this will be an effective shot for showing all the band members at the same angle.

By Bradley Norris

Adele Swede

Bradley Norris

Role Models

Bradley Norris

The Beauty Myth

Bradley Norris

Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Male Gaze)

This theory mainly focuses on male gaze within films, but can also be applied to music videos as well. In both cases they are the exact same as most girls tend to “strutt their stuff”, a great example of this is any of Rihanna’s videos. She has been portrayed as a slut for many years now, and this is not by her choice. Her record lable has manufactured her this way to gain a large male audience instead of just a female audience. If Rihanna didn’t pose as a slut in her music videos, the male audience would not watch as it’ll be “too girly” for their manhood. This brings us nicely to the Male Gaze theory which was introduced by Laura Mulvey.

Mulvey stated that “Films fascinates us through images and spectacle” meaning that whatever we are watching, it has been put there for the meer purpose to entertain us. Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema have been manipulating our visual pleasure by ‘coding the erotic into language of the dominant patriarchal order’ for decades now.
This also brings us onto ‘Scopophilia’ which means ‘pleasure in looking’, and according to this theory, the most pleasurable looking is looking at the human form and the human face. Bringing this to the male gaze theory, woman are the image that men are the bearers of the look. Throughout many films, women are constantly connoted as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ meaning that they are only there purely to work against the development of a story-line, and be there for the male to look upon. A good example of a film in this case would be “Transformers”. You never see Megan Fox in the action, always outside of it. She is there just to attract an older male audience to give them something ‘pleasurable’ to look at, as transformers was originally a kiddys programme on day-time TV. This makes women an ‘object of fantasy’ by functioning them as both an erotic object for the characters within the film (Sam from Transformers fantasises about Mikalea) and an erotic object for the male audience whom are consuming the film. Keeping the main example as Transformers, this brings us onto the fact that women can also be seen as a threat if they are given a powerful role. In Transformers 3, you see a scene where Carly leaves Sam. This puts the woman in a more powerful postition as she is leaving the male behind, also making the male look weaker. But to counteract this, the director gives the women a teddy bear, thus making her look less dominant and more girly as teddy bears arn’t a very powerful object, but they are a symbol of love.

Because a director of a film is stereotypically a male, women are forced to also see other women in a male gaze. But as you rarely see a ‘Female gaze’ men don’t tend to look at men in a female gaze. This brings us to the topic of the female gaze, and is there really one? In my personal opinion there is a huge female gaze out there, but within it are male gazes to keep it manly. If we are still talking about films, the female gaze would also be known as a Romantic film. And since the male gaze theory was founded within films, it would make sense to argue female gaze with films. You rarely ever see a dominant female gaze within a action or a comedy film as these are largely male gaze films, but equally you will rarely find a dominant male gaze in a romantic film as this is largely female gaze films. But still within the romantic film you will see slight hints of a male gaze to make it socially acceptable for a man to walk out of a romantic film with his partner. And, more modernly, you have seen hints of female gaze within an action film when the protagonist has their top off. I believe that this is a start to try and bring in the female gaze, and make it socially acceptable for a male to look through a female gaze, just as it is for a female to look through a male gaze.

Bringing this all back to music videos, it can easily be said that music videos are dominantly male gaze, such as any of Rihanna/Katy Perry/Lady Gaga/Nicki Minaj’s videos where they all strutt their stuff about. But you can say that there are female gaze videos out there, such as Take That’s song “prey” where they just walk about with their tops off, attracting a lot of screamin girls but not attracting many males.

The genre we are looking into doing for our music video is rock, and upon studying this we came across that there isn’t really either a set male or a female gaze. But if you really break into the subcategories they generally have a emo/goth gaze. Take My Chemical Romance, most of their songs sing about death (i.e Welcome to the Black Parade). Emo and Goths are both sterotypically seen as people who welcome death at their doorstep. Then again, if you break down a Greenday music video, you will find that the gaze is set to people who hate politics. So you won’t find a typical male/female gaze within a rock video. We plan to use this within our music video, and relate the gaze with the song lyrics.

By Lewis Finney

Representation

What is representation?

Oxford dictionary defines representation as ‘the act of representing. The state of being represented. The expression or designation by some term, character, symbol, or the like. The action or speech on behalf of a person, group, business, house, state or the like by an agent, deputy or representative. The state or fact of being so represented: to demand representation on a board of directors.’

However I believe representation to be re-creating ones self or another to the light of someone else (in music video cases how the artist/ band represents themselves to the spectators I.e. their target audience). This can be changed dramatically over time through image and music genre, take Rihanna and her both dramatic and drastic image change for example, she started out wearing jeans with a crop top and trainers, which may be showing skin but nothing to exposed and with the context being in a club we as an audience do not see anything wrong with the way she is dressing, she is also shown wearing a blue dress where all her body except her legs are covered making her seem represented as an average teenager as at this time she is only 17 meaning her representation is to be fun and chilled out in some ways because other young girls are able to relate to her. Where as in a more recent music video such as Rude Body she again wears multiple costumes for example the very first outfit we see her in is a Jamaican skirt where we can see her bum, a black what seems to be sports bra and leopard print socks with high heels thus making her represented now as a sex symbol to men that women should inspire to be like, but also when listening to the lyrics she is also making herself seem sex addicted because that would be all the song is about.

After studying what representation is and looking at an artist such as Rihanna with her changing image I believe that when conducting my own music video I must look at both what my band/artist will be wearing and other mise-en-scene but also how the song they are singing will represent them to our target audience as if our target audience is young boys then we do not necessarily have to meet the male gaze but merely make it entertaining for them to watch through possibly having an abstract or narrative music video as they will then be represented as fun and easy going which the audience can relate to. For a clear an acceptable representation to occur in my music video to my target audience I think it would be best for me to look at stereotypes as then I will be able to know exactly what the audience expects from my band/artist. Although I could either challenge or create a new representation of the stereotypes by doing a video which is not expected of a rock band for example, this could include having a hybrid type video of teenage girls falling in love with a boy to a song such as Liquid Confidence by You Me At Six as it could then attract other audiences through word of mouth and thus more people will know of my band/ artist meaning the representation of them in the music video can help promote them at the same time.

By Laura Thorpe

Adele Someone Like you Swede Evaluation

We decided to look at Adele’s Someone Like You music video because it was simple and as this was our first time sweding we felt it would be best to choose a music video that was easy to copy exactly. What I liked about the music video was that it was mostly performance which meant that we were able to establish how specific moment and lip syncing is needed/ used in the music video. I also liked the background of the music video because it was simple but there was enough going on for the director to play with, this is something I would take into consideration when making my own music video because we could potentially create a hybrid for our music video of performance and narrative taking place that corresponds with the video. However what I did not like about Adele’s music video was that there were not many camera angles or shots which I think made the music video very boring therefore when creating my own music video I must make sure several camera shots and angles are used to keep it interesting to my target audience.

My group and I felt that this also needed to be taken into account when sweding this video because otherwise we would be unable to take a lot from the video as there was not much going on within it. What I have learnt from sweding is that timing is one of the most important aspects of creating a music video as to make it look realistic it must come across as a specific time of day as that can determine meaning. I have also learnt about editing a music video because my group and I had to make everything in sync with each other. The lip syncing was seen to be very difficult because sometimes the timings were not always the same causing us to have to re-film. Unfortuneately while editing our swede we realized that we had a section of the video miossing and therefore had to refilm it during school time meaning our setting was slightly different, however to avoid the clip looking too drastically different we chose to have the same costume and a close up on our actors face with a light background to resemble the sun. I believe that this clip works well because you cannot specifically see where the new clip has been inserted.

Mise-en-scene also had to be taken into account when looking at this video so when watching Someone Like you we wrote down everything you can see Adele wearing and how we can duplicate that, for example she wears a plain dark coat which we assume is black, but as the video is in black and white we established that it could just be a dark colour therefore we make sure that when our actor was in costume her coat was dark so it looked black when we changed the colour. We noticed that Adele’s hair is slightly pinned back and also as her hair is in almost loose curls therefore we had an actor who’s hair was long and not straight as we would just have to pin it back and thus have a very similar hair style to Adele. I realise that the reason Adele is dressed/ looks this way is to create a certain image to her target audience, which I believe to be that she is almost holding in her emotion slightly which is why she is walking but also in all dark clothing. I must take this into consideration when filming my band/ artist as they must present themselves in a way which will be approved by the target audience but also compliment the song.

By Laura Thorpe