Question - unfinished

The three main texts all hold importance in the industry. I will explore these individuals and what they have done to change the course of the mainstream music industry/distribution and the success socially within the media – how music began to travel on screen.

My first text Nirvana created a new genre within the history of music. Creating ‘Grunge’ the group fused pop, punk and rock together. This allowed the band to target a mainstream audience; gathering people away from the pop artists who were major stars at the same time as nirvana were first starting out.  Signed to a major label called ‘Geffen’ (which was a previous label ‘sub-pop’) which was a huge record label with big investments, from this they had mass opportunities to be put on screen and be previewed by a mass audience.  Their first album ‘bleach’ (since its release in 1989) has sold over 1.7 million units in the United States alone.

The second text I’ll be looking at is Radiohead.  Their international success stemmed from Thom Yorke’s independency. Lead singer Yorke didn’t conform to the everyday band around in the 80’s+. They did this by first by not having a record label to manage and distribute their music and merchandise.  Radiohead introduced digital distribution, a whole new movement that brought the band success. The album ‘in rainbows’ was released digitally as an mp3 on their website with the price at ‘Pay what you want’. This scheme allowed the band to gather publicity and to interact with their fan base. They gained success and free advertisement with talk shows discussing the bands actions, whether this was intended or a natural innocence it gained them a wider popularity.

My final text Lady Gaga is a pop who targets mainstream audience. Gaga created this type of pop culture that insists of being individual. Signed to Interscope  (part of the Universal group) Her album ‘born this way’ .

Radiohead first released 'Creep', their debut single, in 1992 and performed it regularly until 1998. They then dropped it from their set until 2001 and played it sporadically until Reading Festival in 2009, the song's last outing.

Radiohead – 400,000 copies of king of limbs. Didn’t get to number 1 but they still made more money because no label

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Research for production

Opening sequence: (Notes to self)

-Orange Is The New Black (link to opening scene of orange is the new black)
-New Detective (link to opening scene of new detective)

 I like how the text floats downwards, need to look at different editing effects to achieve this.

 The layering of images looks really effective aesthetically, need to specify and relate to my plot.

 Experimental type shot, use of layering with colour palette in mind.

 Plot is introduced, musical influence. Close ups of guitar look really effective and moody in this.

 Silhouettes, creates enigmas and allows audience to question things. Mysterious feel?

 Using elements to make shots look dramatic, Fire/Water would relate well to a character showing      and revealing an unsteady state of mind.

 Detailed shot of an important event that takes place. Shapes the narrative, include this in mine.

 Close ups of features dramatize the shot, strong visible dents/dimples and ruptures on the face.

 Coloured text lapping on a simple establishing shot, giving a sense of the area and environment.

 Catch light in the eye, easy to achieve with a single light, simple continuous shots look great, worrying reaction from audience and again, dramatizes the scene, different filter varies the moods.

Audience Appeal In My 3 Main Texts

Within the three main texts they present to us a variety of conventions and representations which appeal to their targeted audiences in a number of different ways. The two main types of audiences are the mainstream market that aims to please a larger audience and the niche, targeting a minute scale that will only appeal to a selected amount.

The first text I’ll be looking at is a series called Mad Men. This series was made to target a selective type of audience; they do this by not conforming to things that the audience expect to view such as non-diegetic sound in a tense scene. Mad Men shows accurate representations of an office life with well thought about mise en scene, the audience have to be active and be able to recognise Stuart hall’s decoding theory to appreciate the text, whether they do this consciously/sub.  In the scene where the company try and win Jaguar they do use a 20 second clip of non-diegetic music to create a sense of atmosphere and introduce this feel of slight hyper reality to the narrative which allows the audience to be gratified by this familiarity of a ‘mainstream’ influence. Some people would react passively to the fact that they’d included the use of non-dietetics taking the negotiated/oppositional reading.

In the second text set in Birmingham, Peaky Blinders. This text was screened on BBC2 and set in the early 1900’s. Due to it’s popular channel screening this series seems like it would be in the mainstream market but the fact that it’s set in the 1900’s could only appeal to a certain type of audience making it part niche. The scene I am going to look at is where Thomas finds out his sister is pregnant with his ex-best friend’s child. A lot more goes on in this episode to show that this series has a lot of information attached to it that the audience sticking to the series would be following and understanding. The character names are made clear in this episode, purposely done by the production to encourage people to feel involved if they haven’t seen the programme before. The use of well-known actors also allows the audience to take the preferred reading by using favoured character roles; this would encourage a wider audience to view the text from the use of familiarity. Leading on from actors the use of film connotations and mise en scene is highly encoded within the text, the use of slow motion, lighting techniques and explored vantage points shows the high budget for the film therefore better quality of production, this would appeal to the mainstream target audience due to the film stylistics, or an audience may take a negotiated reading due to the place in which the text is set, the mixed class of people and dull environments could influence a turn off.

The final text I’m looking at is Lost, manufactured by a big media company called ABC. Lost is set in the present day, which straight the way an audience would take a preferred reading to, relating and gaining familiarity with the ethnicity and origins currently populating our culture. This text was set out to be a mainstream target, a number of producers, JJ abram being one of them. Jj was influenced by Star Wars, a film that targeted a mass audience due to its unique hyper reality quality and use of character mixed character roles from Prop’s theory relating age/genders. Going back to Lost, Jj wrote the main structure of the series with a group of others allowing there to be more ideas of what people wanted in the text. A fan base called Lostipedia was also set up by fans that told the scripters what they wanted to appear in the forthcoming series. The fact that Lost was such a big production and was purely a money making, mainstream targeted scheme wouldn’t appeal to some audiences and they would take the oppositional reading due to the undeveloped ideas and lack of unique qualities, “Everything’s a version of something else”. Looking at the second episode of Pilot, the use of long close up shots are excessive. One shot was 30 seconds long showing a close up of Charlie’s face, creating tension alongside the also excessive use of non-diegetics. This could appeal to the audience by creating a realistic sense of drama. The use of rigid handheld camera work, fast tracking shots and vantage points would widely appeal to the mainstream audience, using realistic connotations and exaggerated which could capture a wider audience appeal. With the text a wide range of ethnicities/ages and genders are used to gratify the specific audience types which allow more people to relate to their aspired character role.

Fish Tank genre analysis

The scene I'll be focusing on is where the social worker visits Mia and tries to talk to her about going to study at college. The opening scene is Mia waking up, the audience hearing filtered diegetic sounds as though coming from outside her room. The camera angle is placed next to Mia as though you're in her bed alongside her; showing the audience from her point of view. The tracking shots conform to the realism, allowing you to follow Mia's movements. Disruption occurs when Mia wakes by the sound of her normal family environment (e.g dog barking, thudding) her then beginning to open her eyes, being brought back from the quiet and still of the shots the camera uses when she was sleeping. 

Her mother comes in and states calmly theres someone in the house for her. 

Most texts today mix genres. how true is this of your three main texts ? (District 9)

In the text 'District 9' it is a mixture of documentation style and Sci-fy. These are both prominently shown through different scenes and use prime evidence of the two genres. Examples of the document style genre is shown through the stock footage and the use of interviews of the 'public' that use mid shots and close ups set in the film as simular as a real version; the realistic conventions show the documentary features but only act as a style due to the unrealism. The other half of the mixed genre is Science fiction, the use of high mechanisms and advanced technology opens up this idea of a new distinct world. The use of robots and high tech equipment, contrasting with the Dystopian surroundings and slums the aliens were forced to live in; this shows a diverse mix of representations of the setting. 

-merging

-dystopian

-use of real derelict houses that were once used as family homes

Throughout my three texts I have explored a number of mix genres. In my first text 'Fishtank' the film mixing the two genres social realism and documentary. The different aspects of the film such as the documenting of

Text Characters

Ideas and research-

representation book:

Pleasure in Looking/Fascination with the Human Form
A
The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people’s genital and bodily func- tions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.
At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed 



Archetype - Same, structured

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at- ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin- ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objecti- fication. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tenden- cies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male1 protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor co-ordination. In contrast to

woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject internalized his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action. 


'The patriarchal ideology is reinforced by the fact that the presidents wife is fatally injured through ignoring her husbands advice and not returning home from a business trip.'  Independence day article from  'Studying the media Tom O' Sullivan'