Questions for Mr Smith

GENERAL

1) What genre of music video is the text?
Indie-Pop
2) What subject matter and basic themes is the text concerned with?
The basic theme of my text is a sort of story about love and rejection to a male character and the ay that he copes with this by spending time with his mates.
3) How typical of the genre is the text in terms of content?
The text isn't very typical in terms of the genre as it doesn't feature many things in which indie pop might in the text, this most prominently being no lip syncing.
4) What expectations do you have about texts in the genre?
I would expect to see a star image prominently and a narrative/performance showing off which. I would also expect a certain type of styling and miss en scene that would fit the genre.
5) Have you found any formal generic labels for this particular text?

6) Which conventions of the genre do you recognise in the text?
My styling suits conventions, also the rise en scene. The convention I used the most was the featuring of star imagery.
7) Find three examples of this text using the conventions of its genre?
Costume and clothing throughout,
use of colouring and editing techniques, again throughout,
finally a use of backgrounds and miss en scene.
8) Find two examples where the text challenges the conventions of the genre?
The use of text and lyrics highlighted on the screen isn't common particle,
also the use of a cameo appearance from a female character at the end.
9) Find three examples of similar motifs or imagery used?



10) What relationship to "reality" does the text lay claim to?
A strong relationship to reality as it is trying to relate to the audience and relies on basic human conventions of love and also features a lot of scenes in various areas of public.
11) What purposes does the genre serve?
To include certain elements and to match it with the music in order to create a product that the target audience will enjoy.
12) What predictions about events did your generic identification of the text lead to?

MODE OF ADDRESS

1) What sort of audience was your text aimed at?

Stylers: Still representing status and style, it’s about partying, looking good and staying ahead of cool.

DIY'ers: DIYers are creative, tech savvy self-starters that bring culture to life for Tribes today – they produce music, promote club nights, start indie brands and create festival stages.

2) How does the text address your audience?

Through certain featured shots of background and miss en scene, but primarily styling.

3) What sort of person does it assume they are?

Semi popular with an eye on the indie scene, regularly attends lower less mainstream events etc.

4) What relevance does the text actually have for you?

Personally it bears semi relevance as I am actually part of the target audience. I find the video to be aesthetically pleasing.

5) What knowledge does it take for granted?

6) Are there any notable shifts in the texts mode of address?

7) What responses does the text seem to expect from your audience?

A positive reception as it fits the conventions.

8) What is the preferred, oppositional and negotiated reading of your text?

The preferred reding is that the audience will perceive the lead to be relatable and maybe even some some form of empathy toward, also envy due to lifestyle (clothing backgrounds etc).

RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER TEXTS

1) What intertextual references are there in the text you have created?
Not used that many intertextual references, a use of a south park money bank is about as far as it will go.

2) Genercially, which other texts does the text resemble and most how closely?
The text resembles that of Aiden Grimshaw's-Virtually Married. Similar narrative, editing techniques and just overall very similar text.

3) What key features are shared by these texts?
Editing techniques, costume, overall feel through mise en scene, narrative. Very similar video but haven't coped shot by shot.

4) What major differences do you notice between them?
The major differences is in the shots used and differently perspectives.

Examples Of Sampling In Music

Grizzly bears- two weeks sampled by Childish Gambino- bitch, look at me now
Kendrick Lamar- Bitch don't kill my vibe sampled boom clap bachelors- Tiden flyver
Disclosure- Latch samples Zed Bias- Fairplay

Features Of A Post Modern Film

Bricolage: the process of assembling artefacts from bits and pieces of other things

1 Genre Cross-Over

2 recycling old forms

3 mixing high and low culture (kitsch)

Intertextuality: the multiple ways in which a text is entangled with or contains references to other texts

Pastiche (copying in tribute) and Parody (copying in jest)

Style over content; the image and visual excitement over narrative coherence

Confusions over time and space; the subversion of classical cinematic conventions; fragmented narratives; time-bending.

Self-reflexiveness / self-referentiality: texts that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition.

Metafiction: fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with fiction and its conventions

Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence, drugs and the media lead to detached, emotionless lives

Hyperreality: Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics and cybernetics seek to enhance or replace humanity

Features of postmodern films

Pastiche

Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture

Flattening of Affect

Technology, violence, drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives

Hyperreality

Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Time Bending

Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

Altered States

Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new      internal realities

More Human than Human

Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

Postmodern ideas

We no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them.

The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum.

Postmodernism rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgments of value are merely taste.

Culture ‘eats itself’ and there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.

All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses – and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’ discourse.

Postmodern texts are said to be intertextual and self-referential – they break the rules of realism to explore the nature of their own status as constructed texts.

In the postmodern world, media texts make visible and challenge ideas of truth and reality, removing the illusion that stories, texts or images can ever accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth

Audience Theories

The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts. 

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world? 

• have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?

• in terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.

• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts

• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.

• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.

Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’

Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’

Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.