Questionnaire

These are 4 of the people we interviewed for our questionnaire. They are all part of our target audience, which is people who listen to indie rock music. We plan on using any feedback we get, by including their thoughts and ideas into our music video, magazine advert and digipak.
Bradley Norris

Digipak Picutres/Plan

Bradley Norris

Synaesthesia

In terms of music videos, when people listen to the music they may imagine certain people, places and things which will be unique to them. In our music video we played the song to several people and asked them to describe what they saw when they heard it. We took on board their answers, and tried our best to include them within our music video.

Bradley Norris

Green Day Digipak Image Analysis

This is my analysis of the images of the front and back pane of the album cover '21st Centuary Breakdown' by Green Day. Instead of analysing the entire digipak I thought it would be useful to analyse the colours and reasoning behind each aspect on both pages. By doing this, it allowed me to come up with some more creative ideas for my own digipak. For example I like the way they have layed out the track listing around the image. I'm going to use a similar technique on my digipak by having an image of a head of a guitar; and where the metal tuning tops are, I will use them as bullet points for each track.
Bradley Norris

Uses And Gratification Theory

Bradley Norris

Green Day Front and Back Cover Analysis - By Lewis Finney

Reception Theory

This is my video of me explaining what Reception Theory is.

During planning of our music video we decided to include reception theory by putting the message of "everyone has a bad day"

What would the dominant group think of the message we are going to get across in our music video?
A dominant group would immediately agree with this message and be more optimistic about it all. So they would see the music video as a form of escapism due to it being someone having a really bad day. What they would encode from the message is that they would see someone having a much worse day then they are having.

What would the negotiated group think of the message we are going to get across in our music video?
These people would have an opinion about this statement, but they can vary from agreeing to disagreeing. Also they wouldn't be very interested in the music video. This could be down to the fact that maybe it isn't their type of music.

What would the oppositional group think of the message we are going to get across in our music video?
These are the lot that can be split into to disagreeing factors. One being that no-one else has a bad day but they themselves do and that they are the only people to have bad days. Two being that not everyone has bad days because they don't as their lives are perfect. As you can guess, these people completely disagree with the message.

By Lewis Finney

Queer Theory

Queer theory came to life during the early 1990s during the time when Male Gaze was being studied more to understand more about it. Thus emerged the theorists of Queer theory. Some of whom are Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Gloria Anazaldua, David Halperin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Also you could class Laura Mulvey a theorist of Queer theory because without the in depth studying of the Male Gaze theory, Queer theory would’ve been unheard of. So in some respects, you could call all of these people the founders of Queer theory.

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant, the mainstream. There is nothing in particular to which is necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (David Halperin). I find this quote to perfectly sum up Queer theory as it focuses on what the word “queer” actually means. Me being a 17 year old teen, I have heard the word “queer” being used to refer to the word “gay”. As I have researched into this theory, actually found out that queer is just another word for strange. At first, when I was told I was going to be learning about Queer Theory I actually thought “So we are learning about gays?” only because of the way I heard queer being used. But as I started learning about it I found out that Queer theory isn’t all about gay, it isn’t saying this is gay and this isn’t. What Queer theory does is that it questions gender. It does this by using the audience perception of something, questioning their opinions. Say, within a music video, you see some guy followed by lots of girls adoring him yet he is wearing a girls dress. This brings up the question “How do we know what is or isn’t gay?”. This is because when you see a human wearing a dress you immediately assume that they are a female, so the audience would be thinking that the character is in fact a female. But then upon closer inspection the audience would notice that the character is in fact a male. This relates to the question because the audience would be thinking “he must be a drag because he is wearing a dress, which then makes him gay... But then there are girls following him and he is enjoying that, so is he straight?”. Now it is difficult to answer this question because 10 years ago, a guy wouldn’t be caught dead wearing pink, but know it is more socially acceptable and seen as trendy to wear pink. I’m using this as an example because it shows something that bended gender becoming accepted, and it sort of answers this question. The reason why I have chosen this example is because a decade ago wearing pink was a very feminine thing to do, but over the recent years it has become more and more popular within the male culture to do this.

With our music video we were thinking about how to apply Queer theory into our music video, but we struggled to think of a way to because of our music genre we have chosen. We are doing an indie-rock song, and through research into music videos of band of a similar nature we came upon the fact that they just show the males in a ‘hedonistic life-style’ way. That is if there is any narrative. Even when there is performance though, the band will be wearing clothing that represents the social group of which stereotypically would have a hedonistic life-style.

By Lewis Finney

Alternative Rock music genre

Research into alternative rock genre for planning our own music video and which will work best.

Alternative rock is a genre of rock music which emerged from independent music in the 1980’s and became widely popular by the 1990’s.

Most of the alternative rock subgenres had achieved minor mainstream notice, but most alternative bands commercial success was limited in comparison to other genres of rock and pop music at the time and most acts remained signed to independent labels and received relatively little attention from mainstream radio, TV or newspapers.

With the breakthrough of alternative rock band Nirvana and the popularity of the grunge and Britpop movements in the 199s, alternative rock entered the musical mainstream and many many alternative rock bands became successful, for example 30 seconds to mars which was a group formed in 1998 have released 3 studio albums.

30 Seconds to Mars' music has been associated mostly with progressive rock,  progressive metal  and post-grunge, but they have also included screamo,  emo,  space rock, synth rock and post-hardcore into their music. They have been compared to Pink Floyd (who were an influence on their work) and Tool because of their use of philosophical and spiritual lyrics, concept albums and their use of experimental music.

Today alternative rock bands are not popular in mainstream music, and therefore it is a possibility for us to be able to use this genre of music as we could find an unsigned artist and get their permission to use their song, however we have decided not to use alternative rock as our choice of band because there is such a niche target audience it would be difficult for the research and planning of our music video production.