Andrew Goodwin’s
There are 5 key aspects of music videos that we the audience
should look out for which are:
Thought beats-
seeing the sound
§
First step- to look at the music video itself. We
must take into account the structure of the song for e.g. chorus/ verses
§
Secondly- the voice of the song. The artist
voice is extremely unique and can form identification or trademarks that work
well with the star image. Roland Barthes theory of the Grain of voice can be
related to this. He sees the singing voice as an expressive instrument and
therefore able to make associations of its own.
§
Thirdly- Goodwin also points out the artist mode
of address. Songs can be seen as stories and the artist the storyteller, making
the music video a two communication device, them telling us a story and us
listening.
Narrative
and performance
§
Most songs fail to give us the complete
narrative
§
We only tend to get a gist of the meaning of the
song and then tend to make up our own idea of what is being told. Goodwin
explains that music videos should ignore common narrative. It is important in
their role of advertising. Music video should coherent repeatability. Narrative
and performance work hand in hand it makes it easier for the audience to watch
over and over without losing interests. The
artist acting as both narrator and participant helps to increase the
authenticity, however the lip sync and other mimed actions remains the heart of
the music videos. The audience need to believe this is real.
§
It helps to make the song look more realistic
and also giving the audience a special connecting and good understanding of the
song. For example Katy Perry ROAR, she is the main actor in the song an also
the singer and it helps the video by making the song and video look more
realistic and this also help to engage the audience.
The star
image
§
The star image is another vital aspect of music
videos. Meta narrative which is a big story that describes the development of
the star over time, it has an important
part to play in the music video production process.
§
This helps to promote the artist/stars image in
public and also helps to promote the video while creating a public reputation
for the artist.
Relation of
visuals to song
§
There are three ways in which music videos work
to promote a song.
§
Illustrate- music videos can use a set of images
to illustrate the meaning of lyric and genre, this is the most common. This explains
the meaning of lyrics to their song and the genre.
§
Amplify- this is similar to repeatability. Meanings
and effects are manipulated and constantly sown through the video and drummed
into our vision.
§
Disjuncture- this is where the meaning of the
song is completely ignored
§
He believed that a music video can promote a
song by though the way it analysis the lyrics. This is shown in many music
videos when a character does exactly what the song says. For example when the
song says JUMP JUMP JUMP and on the video there are characters/actors actually
jumping.
Technical
aspects of music video
§
Technical aspects hold the music video together
through use of camera work, movement, angle, mise-en-scene, editing, sound and
special effects.
§
Speed, camera movement, editing, cutting and post
production are all forms of use of camera.
§
Lighting the colour help set the moods and
emphasise key moments of the song for dramatic effect.
§
Mise-en-scene, the setting of music videos is
vital, it needs to look authentic to attain professionalism.
§
Beats, music videos use cuts to go with the beat
or rhythm making the video more entertaining. This is very useful as they can
help to create effective cuts that go with the rhythm of the song to make the
music video look more entertaining.
Laura
Mulvey’s
The male gaze 1975
She believes that in television audiences have to “view”
characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male.
This is the concept of the gaze is one that deals with how
people an audience views the people presented.
For feminists it can be thought of in 3 ways:
1.
How men look at women
2.
How women look at themselves
3.
How women look at each other
Features:
·
The camera lingers on the curves of the female
body, and an event which occurs to women are presented largely in the context
of a man’s reaction to these events. Relegates woman to the status of objects.
The female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification
with the male.
Also some theorists also have noticed the sexualising of the
female body even in situations where females sexiness has nothing to do with
product being advertise
Criticisms:
·
Some women enjoy being looked at, for example
beauty pageants
·
The gaze can also be directed toward members of
the same gender for several reasons, not all of which are sexual, such as in comparison
of body image or in clothing.
Marjorie Ferguson (1980) categorised facial expressions for
women:
·
Chocolate box
·
Invitational
·
Super-smiler
·
Romantic
·
Sexual
While Trevor Millum (1975) categorised facial expressions
for men:
·
Carefree
·
Practical
·
Seductive
·
Comic
·
Catalogue
The Uses
and Gratification Model
An approach to understanding why and how people actively seek
out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience-centered
approach to understanding mass communication
This communication theory is positivistic in its approach, based in the socio-psychological communication tradition, and focuses on communication at
the mass media scale. The
driving question of UGT is: Why do people use media and what do they
use them for? UGT discusses how users deliberately choose media that will
satisfy given needs and allow one to enhance knowledge, relaxation, social
interactions/companionship, diversion, or escape
It assumes that audience members are not
passive consumers of media. Rather, the audience has power over their media
consumption and assumes an active role in interpreting and integrating media
into their own lives. Unlike other theoretical perspectives, UGT holds that
audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their desires and needs to
achieve gratification. This theory would then imply that the media compete
against other information sources for viewers' gratification
Research has shown that media taken in for entertainment purposes (i.e.,
movies, songs, television, etc.) have a wide range of uses and emotional
gratifications, and that these are not mutually exclusive but can overlap with
each other.
·
Mood
management: This is
the most prominently cited emotional gratification of media use. People prefer
to maintain a state of intermediate arousal; this is a pleasant medium. When in
a bad mood, bored, or over-aroused, people will seek media as regulation for or
distraction from their mood.
·
Affective
disposition:
Affective disposition theory states that people enjoy "rooting for"
characters depicted as good and moral. Users experience gratification when good
things happen to characters with "good" morals and also when bad
things happen to "evil" or "bad" characters.
·
Excitation
transfer: This use
and gratification for media posits that people like to feel worried for
characters we perceive as "good," and this is even more gratifying if
that character gets "rewarded" in some way in the end.
·
Sensation
seeking: This use
and gratification can be understood when considering excitement as its own
reward.
·
Modes of
reception:
"Emotional involvement correlates with other modes of reception,
especially with diegetic involvement (getting absorbed in the fictional world),
socio-involvement (identifying with characters), and ego-involvelment (relating
the film to one's own life). ...Emotional involvement can be helpful for the
pursuit of a broader variety of goals in the reception process. ... It can be
concluded that the experience of emotions can be functional in a number of
other ways than just regulating emotions in terms of affective valence and
arousal."
·
Intrinsic
motivation: If the
user experiences a challenge to his or her media-related skills, but not to the
point of being frustrated or overwhelmed, then the gratification is a reward in
a feeling of competence that inspires the user to continue using the media in
question.[40]
·
Mood
adjustment: Users
are gratified by using media to adjust their mood to whatever is currently
happening. For instance, once already provoked by an aggressor and promised a
chance to retaliate, males were found to prefer bad news over good news in that
emotionally charged moment.
·
Gender
socialization of emotions: This use
is gratified by the idea that women enjoy feeling other-directed sadness
(empathy, sympathy, and pity) because our culture values and validates women’s
feeling these; similarly, teenage couples like to watch scary movies so
the male feels protective and the female feels vulnerable.
·
Relationship
functions of entertainment: According
to this particular branch of use and gratification, we use entertainment to
apply lessons to or escape from our real-life relationships.
·
Parasocial
relationships:
Consumers of entertainment media sometimes use it to gratify a need for social
connection by becoming very attached to characters seen in entertainment media,
such as characters in a TV show or newscasters.
·
Vicarious
experiences: A
related use and gratification for entertainment media is the idea of living through
the characters portrayed and imagining ourselves in their lives by adopting the
characters' perspectives.
·
Downward
social comparison: This use
and gratification holds that we enjoy taking in media that portrays people similar
or worse off than ourselves
·
Eudaimonic
motivation: Media
consumers also turn to entertainment media to search for deeper meanings,
insights, purpose for life, finding beauty, raising morale, experience strong
emotions, and understand how others think and feel.
Hyperdermic Needle Model
This is a model of
communications suggests that an intended message is directly received and
wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviourism. This
theory is not based on empirical findings from research but rather assumptions
of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be uniformly controlled
by their biologically based instincts. This theory is also known as the Magic
Bullet this assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun"
into the viewer's "head" (Berger 1995). This suggests that the media
injects its message straight into the passive audience, and then the audience
is directly affected by the message. This suggests a powerful and direct flow
of information from the sender to the receiver.
It suggests that media messages are
injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by
the message, because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the
media’s effect on the masses at the time. There is no escape from the effect of
the message in this model. People are seen as passive and end up thinking what
they are told because there is no other source of information.
Factors which contribute:
Speedy increase of popular media
Industries Persuasion by advertising or public opinion
Impact of motion pictures on children (The Payne Fund)
Hitler’s monopolization of the mass media in world war two.
