A2 media work

Monday, 8 February 2010

Representation in music videos (fig1.d)

Laura Mulvey “Gaze Theory”

· Essay – visual pleasure and narrative cinema

· The male gaze – men control media so always from their point of view

· The male gaze when the audience is put in the perspective of a heterosexual man

o May linger on the curves of a woman’s body

· Denise women human agency – removes free thought

o Relating to them as objects

· Media effects

o Hypodermic syringe – women are changed by ideas given to them

o Cultivation theory – slower effect –Passive audience

o Two step flow – passing information from people

o Use of gratification - active audience – one of the four reasons

§ Servalience

§ Identification

§ Socialisation

§ Entertainment or escapism

· visual pleasure and narrative cinema – expands on the theory

o says that people are using the idea of women as sexual objects even when they don’t have to

o causes effects on people in real life

· sidelining women

· the videos are saying that this is exemptible

· “The cinema satisfies a primordial wish fir pleasurable looking.”

· Patriarchal

· The three looks

o The first perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character

o The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen

o The third look joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member’s perspective of the male character in the film this their perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself through looking to the male character in the film

· Sexy chick – David Guettila

o Women in swim suits

o Close ups of there curves

o Up shots of them

o Girls dancing provocatively in the back ground

o Cuts to shots of girls

o Photos of the girls

o Shows him controlling you

o Men looking at women

· Hotel room service by Pittbull

o Stars straight way focusing on women curves

o Low cut, tight or skimpy outfits

o Has women going for him

o Has lots of women pawing at him

o He has the power

o Girl brakes in to confront him but he pushes him out

§ Breaks the fourth wall

Anlysing music videos (fig1.c)

http://musicbox.sonybmg.com/video/bob_dylan/?bcpid=187832446&bclid=187743874&bctid=1178857421

The first music video that I’m analysing is Bob Dylan’s “Tangled up in blue.” The entire song was shot in close up showing Bob Dylan singing at a microphone and we can see that he is wearing a Stetson styled hat and the harmonica that he plays to words the end of the song. The lyrics and the music don’t relate to the song as it is solely a performance video, shot at a live show, it is just done in the one shot, which moves to keep the his face in shot as he moves about and to this extent there is no editing. This video clearly fits to Goodwin’s theory that a Artist creates a motif or style for themselves, Bob Dylan, as I previously stated, is wearing a Stetson styled hat, he wears this style of hat a lot on album covers so the hat can be seen as part of his motif, the other part of his motif is his harmonica, many of his songs feature harmonica songs he is well known for playing a harmonica. I like the idea of a performance being shot in one shot and might try to use this idea in my final video for any performance sections.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1nxmt_the-pogues-a-fairytale-of-new-york_music

The second music video I am looking at is “Fairytale in new York” by Kristy McColl and the Poguse. This video is a mixture of performances and narrative. The lyrics fit to the video, when the lyrics are slower and more sentimental the images are as well, there is one section when the two singers are having a call and response fight and the images in the video is of them fighting, a more recurring images is showing the NYPC choir when the song sings about them. The images also fit up to the music as when it is slower the images are slower, for example the start which is a piano solo has a series of slow images and when the band starts playing the music picks up the editing becomes faster. The tempo of the video is related to the speed of the song when the song speeds up so dose the editing. The camera pans and moves slowly for most of the video showing the band playing or images corresponding to the lyrics, it tends to focus on longer shots and doesn’t really show many close ups or mid shots apart from showing the band playing, the video seems to like wide angle shots to show a lot of the band or in the narrative sections to show a lot of New York. The main editing technique in this video is fading between shots, this happens on many of the shots to create a fantasy feel to the whole piece. The other editing effect is that the video is in black and white to make it fit the fifty’s theme that the costumes are trying to create. The intertextuality is fifties films mainly the ones about a girl going to New York to find fame and fortune and not succeeding films like “A star is born” (1954). The genre stereotypes of this type of video, a duet video, are mainly held up as the couple sing over a piano, but some of the conventions are broken, for example the couple have a fight.

http://musicbox.sonybmg.com/video/bob_dylan/?bcpid=187832446&bclid=187743874&bctid=1184457364

My third video is “Most Likely You Go You” again by Bob Dylan. The video is a very interesting one as it is a autobiographical narrative video, the video follows a number of men dressed differently walking through different time periods, these men represent how Dylan changed as his corer went on, for example we see Dylan filming “Subterranean home sick blues” at the end of the scene he walks off screen and after a few shots of people standing around a motorcycle crash, we see a bed and Dylan dressed in his hype stage walking on. Some of the lyrics match up with the images, for example when the song goes “Telling stories that you know I believe are true.” The video moves in to the scene of a church. The music is drives the video as the music gets more complicated we are shown more men in the band playing instruments. The camera work is very clever as we are shown enough of each of the Dylan’s so that we can recognise him, normally focusing on his guitar, but apart from some extreme close ups of sunglasses at one point most of the shots of Dylan are mid to long shots. There is good intertextuality in this video linking back to other music videos that Dylan has done most obviously “Subterranean home sick blues” but it also has links in to the film “I’m not there” a film based on Dylan’s life. The editing is quite slow as is stereotypical for this style of the video but the most prominent part of the editing is the add on off effects and filters to make the film appear to be from deferent decades, for example the video starts in sepia and then moves to black and white, for “Subterranean home sick blues,” before evolving through many different colour formats before ending up at modern day film styles.

Thursday, 21 January 2010

How music videos began and evolved. (Fig 1.b)

Bohemian Rhapsody, released in 1975 and was a number one hit for 9 weeks¹, music video is widely considered to be the first one, there are many reasons for this. Bohemian Rhapsody was the first video to be shot on the medium of video before this point the majority of them where on film². Before Bohemian Rhapsody the films where just of the band singing on a stage and where taken from television shows the song was performed on, or the music video would be taken from a movie with the same name staring the singer for example see jailhouse rock³. Bohemian Rhapsody was innovate as it was the first music video to have images take preferences over the song and was based on there album cover⁴It was shot in 3 hours for $3,500. Effects were achieved by using camera feedback and prism lenses⁵.From this it is easy to see that Bohemian Rhapsody also set down many of the conventions that modern music video, with a mixture of images to do with the song, or more commonly an abstract series of images that loosely fit the lyrics, and images band singing. The reason queen made the video was so that the song could be shown on Top of the Pops, a show on the BBC, they made the video because the song was too hard for them to perform live with the technology available for the performance.

After queen used Bohemian Rhapsody many British bands took to using a premade video on top of the pops⁶. Top of the pops first appeared on our screens on new year’s day 1964⁷, it offered a television version of what many radio stations already had, a weekly countdown of the chart music, the thing it had in advantage over the radio stations was that people could go to recordings and those recordings would have live bands playing at them. The show spawned a number of spin offs including Top of the pops 2 and a Saturday morning version. The show was finally cancelled in 2006 on the 30^th of july⁸, TOTP2 has run a few specials showing clips from the archive of the show the Saturday morning one had finished a few years earlier when the show that hosted it had been stopped, however there are still yearly Christmas shows⁹.

However music videos started out as being something that artist just made to get the music shown on MTV and the likes. Many videos would conform to the conventions that Queen had set down and would eventually be able to be grouped as, Narrative, has a story line run through it, performance, mainly focused on the band playing at a large venue or the artists dancing, or artsy, where no one could tell what was going on. This dislike for videos changed with the Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Thriller is a land mark in music video history, it starts with a long bit of film that we learn is meant to be a movie, Thriller used a professional director and make man who work on horror movies. Thriller is a combination between two of the styles, Performance and Narrative. Thriller is held up by most as the first music video that was made to enhance the song. Thriller also was the first time people realised they could make money from selling the music videos.

MTV is a channel that first appeared in the 1980’s. It was a television channel devoted to music. MTV started out by just showing music videos, there was one great advantage to this was that people wanted to see the videos and companies weren’t charging for them. When record companies started charging for music videos MTV started creating other shows to go round the music videos these where normally based around bands/performers and celebrates, this evolution and growth of MTV caused many other channels to form that just showed certain types of music videos things like Kerrang TV.

Now nearly every song has to have a video if it wants to see the light of day on any of the charts. Many bands and production companies having their own YouTube channels to show their music videos. So from its growth from not being very important to it know being one of the most important things to a band a music video hasn’t changed much and they still follow the conventions of their grandfather Bohemian Rhapsody.

1. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685

2. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685

3. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=574

4. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685

5. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685

6. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685

7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp/history/index.shtml

8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops