What Makes Us British?

Here are a few signifiers that I believe indicates our creates collective identity of Britishness:
-Royal Family
-London/Blackpool/Oxford/Cambridge
-Flags (St George)
-Landmarks such as Buckingham Palace, London Eye and Big Ben
-The Beckhams, Mr Bean, Kate Winslett
-Tea
-Fish and Chips
-DM Boots
-Dr Who
-Working Title Film
-Beatles
-Terraced Houses
-James Bond 007
-Farmers
-Red Letter Boxes
-Harry Potter
-Heinz Beans
-Brit Pop
-The "V" Sign
-Bonfire Night
-SGT Pepper
-Rolls Royce
-London Underground
-Peak District
-Sherlock Holmes
-Monty Python
-Hunting (foxes)
-Glastonbury
-Sports Teams and Leagues, Wimbledon
-Eastenders
-Stone Henge
-Shakespeare
-Pubs
-Black Cabs
-BBC

Question 4: How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

New media technologies are those that have been mainly introduced from the later years of the 20th century, therefore meaning such technologies as computers, internet, cameras, and CD/DVD’s. Being a student of this era, all of these technologies I have had access to in creating my media products.

In the construction stage of my magazine advert, that solely relied on digital technologies such as computers, software (photoshop), the internet and websites to discover and apply new fonts, and cameras to upload photography. Photoshop I have used to merge my photography together and manipulate it by cropping and erasing to gain my final product. This new media has allowed me to acquire polished digital images that can be printed and converted into a hard copy product, and by keeping them digital jpeg files, convertible into creating a video of my final work. Multi-skill tools such as these have allowed my work to be convertible into different formats to serve different purposes (distributable online as images or videos) as well as printable, allowing me to gain audience feedback and distribute in different ways to maximize my audience. Another multi-skilled software program I have used in the production of my music video this time is Audacity. I have learnt sound manipulation skills from my studies of music technology, and therefore am familiar with such skills as normalising, cutting, and editing frequencies to make the sound appear smoother and as if it has not been manipulated at all. I have been able to take the original sound file and cut out segments of the track and quietening frequencies to gradually fade the song back in smoothly once cutting some frequencies out, to shorten the song to fit the time brief and suit the amount of visual footage I have shot for the video. Without these tools to manipulate the track smoothly the quality of the soundtrack would have been changed poorly and would have decreased the quality of the sound file, or if it wasn’t manipulated at all, the song could have been too long to fit the brief. The sound file was flexible and easily imported into premiere elements. This has allowed me to merge the sound track to visual footage to create a video, something without the software would have been unachievable and difficult to convincingly use the lip sync technique with visual and music track, unless the sound track was played during the shooting of the footage, which by keeping the sync of the music track and fluidity of the music track over many shots very difficult.
All this new media technology together definitely shows amateurism, by spending minimum amounts of money to gain industry standard equipment or subsidiary equipment that allows me to be creative and shoot my own productions, edit them, and broadcast the final product. This can also be empowering for a consumer like myself, as it allows freedom to go and recreate real media texts, and voice their own opinions and beliefs by challenging existing conventions of media texts, and broadcasting them to an audience. This is placing empowerment onto the media audiences and providing them with tools to be creative and multi-skilled with the combination of technology to shoot, edit, broadcast and document. One of the ways it could get broadcasted is via the internet.

The internet can be exploited as a community, which I found useful during the evaluation stage when gaining audience feedback on my media products. This allowed me to publish my work and pinpoint my target audience, who can make their comments about what they see. This approach has a sense of the “broadcast yourself” slogan used by Youtube, which in itself does exactly what it says. By gaining audience feedback, my target audiences (by whom I could selectively identify through social networking sites on individual values of my ideal target audience, and was recreated through this) have informed me of what worked well in my music video and what I need to improve on. Now I know that the narrative of the music video makes sense, but to shorten the length of some shots to keep the tempo consistent.
I have become part of this online community by creating a blog page. This is where I have been documenting my work throughout the year. I have found exploiting this new media advantageous during the research and planning stages as just like social networking, opinions can be shared on the work I have done, but also is a convenient place to store all my work and amend it later on. The planning I have done can be viewed in a logical order, and I can show progression of my thoughts and how each stage of planning affects one another in the build up to creating each media project. Technology, such as scanners have helped this planning stage by converting my drawings of storyboards into jpeg files to make illustrations referable to what I have explained through text to back up my ideas. Being part of this community has helped my research by being able to view others bloggers’ pages and being able to take inspiration and comment their posts, and also insert passages from real media texts into my own blog posts, such as images and uploading videos.

Question 1: In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms And Conventions of Real Media Texts?

I have formed my media texts around genre, other real media texts and conventions used within these, and deciding whether to use them, challenge them, or develop them further.

I have used genre by taking two individual genres and used elements both to condense my genre down into a sub-genre of alternative rock, and acoustic. By doing this, it has made it simpler to merge conventions of each genre together to allow flexibility in the narrative and representation of my video for inserting ideas that have influenced me from real media texts. Also by doing this I will hopefully expand my target audience as there will be similarities between these two genres that will attract both audiences to my texts.
Acoustic and alternative rock share similar codes and representations. Through instrumentation, they are alike in guitars and pianos, and by dress sense they both wear jeans, shirts and jackets..
I have found this is the case by taking reference from the music video by ‘OneRepublic – All The Right Moves’. This video does verge more towards the alternative rock side of my sub-genre I created, but does share similarities with the acoustic genre. Aspects that makes ‘All The Right Moves’ more alternative rock is that it features piano and stringed instruments within the music, and in dress sense the artists of the band wear jeans and a jacket, just like how I costumed my characters in my music video to connect to our audience that will have similar dress senses and connect to them through familiarity and identity in this way. However, the similarities with the acoustic genre are the use of instrumentation again being a piano and especially guitars as I used a guitar in our music video. This shows I have used genre in my music video through instrumentation and clothes to build a connection and familiarity of identity to my audience, which I believe to be conventional which should increase the strength of the music video as they may see my music video as shooting their reality and my music video should appear appealing and more successful with my target audience.
In the way that OneRepublic shot this video, I took note of performance shots that might be typical to this genre of music.. So such close up diagonal shots of the guitar looking from the arm of the guitar whilst on stage and I proceeded to use in our music video, to be conventional to this sub-genre.
To further research into conventional shot angles and performance shots of this genre I referenced ‘City and Colour – Comin’ Home’.. This video uses close up shots of the artist’s mouth and acoustic guitar and the diagonal shot of the guitarsimilar to which is used by OneRepublic. This further establishes that these uses of performance shots are conventional to my sub-genre, and that the use of instrumentation and making the instrument a key focus within this is also conventional.
Just like in my music video, it uses colour to show the mood of the situation and characters. City and Colour use black and white when the couple are apart, and switch focus between each of the characters, and use of black and white shows a negative mood and divide between the characters,which I used for my music video to conventionally use lack of colour as showing the divide of the relationship and emptiness each character feels without the other and when the relationship is dysfunctional. When listening closely to the lyrics “Will it be my heart or will it be his?” this is placing the power of decision into the hands of the female character, which I have done in our music video by making the female character return to the artist to make or break the relationship. Therefore it could be conventional to place the power of a relationship into the hands of the female character in a music video of this genre, assuming it is the male character who has made the mistake and singing for another chance, which in my music video the male character is. This shows I have further enhanced genre in my music video and making my music video more conventional by using shot types that are used in real media texts with the hope of making my video just as attractive as current media texts and keeping it interesting for my audience to watch. Using colour and lack of colour to form connotations appears conventional and subtle enough to blend well and work with the messages I am sending through my video of the health of my characters’ relationship.

Another media text I referenced was the CD cover of Snow Patrol – Eyes Open. This CD cover also has aspects of the sub-genre I have created and aspects that I have taken inspiration from. In regards to genre, the design is artistic with use of colour, pattern, and silhouette..The silhouette itself is linked to the single that features on the CD called ‘Eyes Open’, and this shows how the silhouette of the couple is the key focus of the CD cover. Therefore I felt as the lyrics to ‘If You Only Knew’ revolved around the same theme of a couple and love, yet also I feel that the use of a silhouette takes the identity out of the people who the couple consists of. So the approach I took to create my digipak was to use the use of lyrics and key lighting of the guitar to try and use the silhouette of the guitar and use key lighting to emphasise this as how the guitar has the orientation of the audience, and posing an enigma of how they personalise this and relate it to themselves, like how the silhouette of a couple representing love by contrasting colour highlights the silhouette just like key lighting, and poses the same enigma to their audience.

To help plot the narrative of our music video, I referenced a music video that contained the music of my sub-genre and was set how our linear narrative would be intended. ‘This video was Death Cab For Cutie – Meet Me On The Equinox’.
Aspects of the video that I felt worked well and drew inspiration from were how originally the music video was shot to promote a film. This meant that they edited the content together in the video progressively and story like leading up to the point where a new equilibrium is formed or where the story takes a turning point. This I felt suits the narrative of my story identically, and just like this music video, I followed the story from one characters perspective and point of view, yet switching between character to show change and progression. This music video focuses on the female character and reverts back to the male character at the point where he steps out into the sun;the characters meet at this point of the video. In our music video, where the two characters meet in the video is also at the ending. This shows that this use of narrative is conventional to the genre how we intended it to be.

How Do We Create Our Identity?

http://www.findyourtribe.co.uk is a website where you answer questions about yourself and any interests you have, and the website will place you under a social group or "tribe". I found this website intersting as the questions that it asked you are Britishly orientated, asking for example if you listen or watch the BBC, asking what british ethnic group you are from, asking your favourite celebrity (all that are stated are British), and cycles through typical British culture and hobbies revolving the internet, education, sport, music and tv, going out, drugs, magazines to name a few. I believe this website has British beliefs and politics to shape a British identity, and help me to understand sub cultures within Britishness to which we identify with and idolise to build our own individuality and unique qualities. I visited the website twice and got mosher the first time and townie the second.

So how do we personalise our humanity? The following are a few aspects that I believe we build our identity through:
-Status/Class
-Culture
-Childhood
-Friends/Family
-Life Experiences
-Fashion (clothes, hair etc)
-Ethnicity and their core values and cultures
-Technology (Mobiles, iPod, PC, video games)
-Assets (Cars, Jewellery, House)
-Media Interests
-Books/Magazines
-Social scenes and town/village you're from
-Colours
-Language/Lingo/Accents
-Religion
-Sexual Orientation
-Education
-Money/Wealth
-Shops

It is worth considering how the media communicate these values, and merge them into collective identity. For example, this can revolve around music genres and the lifestyles individuals lead within them and who others draw inspiration to within this genre, what values do they convey that influence others to be alike?
To put a spin on Britishness, what values does the media target to restore national pride, disgust, antagonism or ambivalence? And thinking about how a protagonist being either an insider or outsider of these communities react to such representations.

Collective Identity and Britishness

Collective identity is about how contemporary media represent nations, regions, ethnic/social collective groups in different ways.
For example this could be how 'This is England' represents Britishness and the condition of England at that time. However, the film was set further in the past than when it was shot. It would have been shot based around past beliefs of that era, however it would of been shot also with a modern day understanding of those beliefs. In shooting the past you are shooting the present. Therefore it is important to understand what has changed over time in England, understanding what it means to be British and how we create our collective identity; so identifying what makes us individual and unique from others and how do we do this, but most importantly what unites us as a country?
It could be important to compare past media text to the new wave. For example what had changed from such a film as 'Saturday Night Sunday Morning', to 'This is England' but what has also stayed the same.
Possible angles that could be approached to compare these texts could be through representations of youth, social class, gender, ethnicity, community, education, family, wealth, and symbolism and signifiers of Britishness and culture.

Narrative Theory and Theorists

Narrative is all about the order in which a story is told or how a plot unwinds.
There are different types of narrative; linear, circular, loop, flashback and point of view to name a few.
The style of the narrative is important, whether it contains use of archetypes and representations. All together narrative helps to keep an audience alert during the ongoing of a media text.
(Reference-Memento and 24)

Take the human mind for example. It needs narrative to put the components into order, and make sense of them, to connect aspects and make interpretations, and seek a beginning, middle, and ending.
Constructing meaning within a narrative is designed on making a connection to the audience. Narratives can be based on such things as experiences, reality and previous texts, and ordered in a way that they expand from a previous text and to create the next. This creates intertextuality and creates a link to the audience.

Equilibrium is about how the narrative order and balance fluxuates and changes.
Tzvetan Todorov had a theory connected with equilibrium. He believed that every media text must have an equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium.
(Reference-The Third Man)

Vladimir Propp identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions. These characters can be applied to many narratives through TV and film (often linked with heroes and villains).

Levi Strauss introduced the theory of binary opposition. Binary opposition are sets of opposite values that guide the structure of a media text.
Here are some examples:
Known : Unknown
Good : Evil
Past : Present
Therefore it would appear that the ending can only exist when the conflict between the two values are resolved and one reigns superior versus the other.

Roland Barthes came up with a theory about how audiences bring different psychological, sociological and cultural baggage to a media text. It would be through this baggage that would determine if the audience would make a connection to a media text and their ability to follow this narrative and plot in certain ways.

Audience Research Assessment Sheet

This is the assessment sheet for my audience research: The music industry from an audience's mperspective. The conclusions I drew from this project helped me vastly in the planning for my music video.

Independant research into an aspect of the music industry: Assessment Sheet

This is the Assessment Sheet of my work that I completed into my independant research into an aspect of the music industry, of which I chose to investigate how Apple is expanding to meet the changing demands of the music industry.

Original Photography

This posts shows the original photography i used to create my Digipak.
I held a 20 minute session in the CNS auditorium with a technician and the artist, to take photos within a setting exactly as an auditorium to give the feel the artist was playing towards an audience, with musical features within the composition of the shots such as a piano and guitar (elements of the music track).
The use of a warm colour pallet and key lighting helped recreate a similar feel that I would be using in my sketchbook approach to my digipak. It allowed the key lighting to focus on key elements such as himself and the guitar, whilst also giving the illusion he is playing directly to the audience, just like the effect of the digipak and the audience directly reading the messages inside like a book from the artist.
The style of clothing that the artist was wearing is similar to those of the male character in the music video, thus fitting in nicely into the social class of my target audience who would wear similar clothing to this, and allowing consistency between each of the media texts.

Shooting Schedule

Audience Research

Audience Research Presentation

Ancillary Tasks Video

This post shows you a video composed together of my digipak featuring graphics of each pane and a short clip showing how the digipak is opened. Also in the video is my magazine advert. I have included in this post photos of the hardcopy of the digipak how it looks as the finished product.


FINAL PRINT VIDEO
I revised the previous video after audience feedback to make it clearer on what my CD pane includes as my audience were uncertain why this pane appeared almost blank. Also, I have changed my wording on the biography pane to promote my artist and give a little more background information about him.