Web 2.0

Web 2.0 - The shift from a passive up to down model to a dynamic convergence between audience and producer. Interactivity enabled by convergence.

The idea of Web 3.0 is the dominance of UGC, that the audience now has become the dominant producer. 

What I would include in the exam:

Applying Stuart Hall's concept of a clear preferred reading was very difficult, since we were 3 members in our group. 

Dan Gillmor writes of "the former audience", suggesting that a passive audience is gone and that the audience now have "the tools to challenge traditional media and create media for themselves".

Through several hours spent with our audience, we gained a large variety of audience feedback, our audience ended up as playing the "producer" of our music video too. They had a great impact on what we changed in our music video. Some things they argued included bad lip-syncing, not achieving versimilitude. Lip-syncing is one of the common conventions of music videos and should therefore also achieve verisimilitude in a music video.

Another argument our audience brought up was that there should be a clearer narrative. At the beginning we had a fragmented narrative, which our audience argued was confusing, which then didn't bring the preferred reading (Stuart Hall) accross. They suggested we should have a linear narrative containing more footage. Hence, our audience feedback actually led to us having to do a re-shoot of our narrative. After having done that, we got the preferred reading from our audience that we wanted. Our narrative storyline follows a male protagonist who is depressed and drowning in his sorrows and that he used to be together and happy with a girl (our female protagonist). We have denoted this "happy couple" by having footage of them laughing together, hugging each other and cooking together and denoted him having sorrows, by filming him under water, which is an intertextual reference to the music video Runnin' by Naughty Boy ft. Beyoncé . However, we also got this idea when brainstorming of what we should film and putting our storyboard and call sheet together. Andrew Goodwin argues that one of the 6 main features of a music video is a link between the visuals and the lyrics. This doesn't necessarily have to be there but comes accross nicely for the audience, because it is illustrative and allows them to relate to the male protagonist.

Question 1B

For our question 1B in our exam we have to apply concepts and theories of media language to our own music video.

A long group shot (5 people) of the band. The band is composed of just male members and we are conforming to the stereotype that rock music only consists of male band members. Simple mise-en-scene, members all have tattoos and are wearing dark clothes. Non-objectified female protagonist in the narrative later, so not just focused on male characters. You can identify with the band members if you are younger. The short hair of every band member is normative nowadays. However, 20 years back long hair was part of metal. The drummer has a very evident beard, which fits together with his fast paced drumming. This doesn't look like a boyband, because they have tattoos, beards and are therefore no completely desexualised. The singer in this band counters the hegemonic norms on the masculin side of things, because he shows emotions very heavily, because he is singing about his girlfriend and arguably it is a love song. It is about the pain he feels, which makes it counterhegomonic to the masculin normative.

Opens the door for her, which is the stereotype of a gentleman, but isn't the normative nowadays.

The dirt on the shoes represents the genre of rock, because it goes against the normative of perfect beauty. With men there is not as much focus on beauty and clean shoes. There is rule of thirds and the foot is centrally framed and is therefore what the audience will focus on.

There is an equivalence between the male protagonist and the female protagonist, no strong binary, because there are both having an ice cream or a smoothie and are both wearing tight jeans.
The one and only thing that would be a binary opposition in this shot would be the long hair of the female protagonist and the short hair of the male protagonist. The frozen yoghurt is a representation point because you would typically expect a bar with alcohol and smoking, because it is metal genre. Iconic image
of someone like Lemmy is alcohol and a bottle of Jack Daniels for the metal genre. This is somewhat different compared to frozen yoghurt and smoothies.

If the guitar wouldn't be there the focus would be on his groin. However, because the guitar is there, the groin is framed but not for sexualised purposes, which it would be in thousands of other music videos. 

KO: AUDIENCE: BBFC Music rating

BBFC stands for British Board of Film Classification. They choose the ratings for physical movies, online streaming movies and music videos. I will be discussing the ratings for Bring Me The Horizons music videos and how this effects our audience as well as how they decide on the ratings.

BBFC was responsible for the music video ratings for videos created by the big 3 music company's (Sony Music UK, Universal Music UK and Warner Music UK) and their release in the UK. Later on they also started ratings for Indie music videos.

Unlike movies that have 6 different age ratings music videos only have 3. They dont have the U, PG and R18 ratings for music videos as this is not necessary. The ratings appear on Vevo online and on YouTube.

 The BBFC get send music videos by record labels that will be released online in the UK,  and are expected to receive at least a 12 rating. The issues the BBFC consider in classifying music videos include:

• Drug misuse
• dangerous behavior presented as safe
• bad language
• sexual behavior and nudity
• threatening behavior and violence

For more information about the BBFCs involvement in music videos you can click here.

BMTH ratings:

On the BBFC you can search for any content they may have been age rated. I searched for Bring Me The Horizon and got four hits. As you can see 3 videos got a rating of 15 and the othe video got a rating of 12. This brings me to believe that the other videos got a rating bellow 12. The fact that 3 videos got a 15 rating and one of them being a movie tells us that the Target Audience for BMTH are 15 and above. If their target audience where 12 then non of the videos would be 15.

However you could argue that because there is no way to stop a 12 year old watching a 15 age rated video the higher age rating might be motivating for a 12 year old to watch it. This could bring the secondary audience to be less then 15. But the movie which was filmed live at a concert was also given a 15 rating and to get into the concert would there would be guards to stop under-aged kids from entering.

Audience Feedback 6: Throne Rough Cut 6

This is some audience feedback that I got from 2 year 12 students. One of them was Emilie who is the female protagonist, which was very interesting since I wanted to hear what she thought of the result of all of the hours spent on filming.

Audience Feedback 4: Throne Rough Cut 4

This is some of the audience feedback we got from our teacher and our fellow year 13 Media students.



The points our teacher addressed included:

• return to shots more often (Crosscutting) 
• some occasions where it cuts well to the beat - needs a few more
• impact points where it is not visually representive
• pool scenes are a bit all over the place should be placed better
• experiment more with special effects
• more colorpowder scenes because they look good
• try to use color flicker effect/ flicker effect
• color correction to enhance the color
• more narrative: cooking scenes or scenes where the couple sit on a swing set 

Audience Feedback 3: Throne Rough Cut 3

This is some other audience feedback that we got from our Y10's in the school. It was of good use for us as well as a good preparation for them starting Year 11 in September.

Some main points that they mentioned include:

• Too many still tri-pod shots
• Good choice of actors
• Mainly they argued that the audience could be between 16-23
• Bad lip sync
• Flashback colour effect "Dream" makes it look unreaslistic
• Good Drumming and Guitar
• Colour powder was good at the speed it was at
• Break up and fight was easy to determine but other narrative wasn't
• Convincing
• Good shot vareity
• good locations
• convincing actors
• looked real 

Audience Feedback 2: Throne Rough Cut 3

This is the audience feedback that we got after having posted our 3rd rough cut that I edited. Our audience feedback will weekly help us to reflect on what we can do better. Some of the negative points mentioned include: 

• Less running sequence
• More pool scenes 
• Clearer narrative
• More color powder because the effect looked good 
• Work with color correction 

Audience Feedback 1: Follow You

This is the first audience feedback that we got for our first draft of Follow You, it is only a 40 second clip and so the audience couldn't give that much feedback and said that the narrative wasn't clear yet.
UPDATE: Our audience feedback was also one of the reason's why we decided to change our track and idea. Some audience, including ourselves, didn't like the big difference in colour between the depressing narrative and the colorful performance.