'Representations in media texts are often simplistic and reinforce dominant ideologies so that audiences can make sense of them.' Evaluate the ways you have used/challenged simplistic representations in one of the media products you have produced.

I am going to analyse my advanced portfolio in which certain representations where used in order to send out messages to the audience. Representation refers to the construction in any media that involves not only how identities are represented within the text but how they are constructed in the process of production.  “All representation has ideologies behind them. Certain paradigms are encoded into text and others are left out in order to give preferred representation”

We have challenged representations in our music video through genre. In our music video we have represented the main artist as an independent male who is unemotional and competent. Also he is of an Asian ethnic background, with the other artist as black. We tried to break the stereotypical view of the black male being dominated over the Asian which is represented in most other music videos, as black people are portrayed with drugs and guns and normally the dominant character. These videos are considered to portray real situations that are, according to the standards of western culture, severely condemned, based on an attitude that sees a direct link between the events of daily reality and their depiction in the music video. The breaking of the stereotype of the black dominant figure has allowed the video to be represented as more real.

Furthermore you can see that the artist is represented as an R&B performance artist by the clothes he is wearing. Most male figures tend to show off their clothes or ‘swag’. You can see the artist is wearing casual clothes which he then changes later on in the video. This is a key feature in R&B music videos as it makes the artist seen to be a dominant figure. However using the plurality model, we can see how a male audience would view the representation of our artist. It could be argued that the male audience would refer to the artist as their role model as he is living the life.

Most R&B videos tend to exploit women’s femininity as feminist would say that women are portrayed in patriarchal way. Most music videos show women as a sex object, that males would just ‘gaze’ at. We decided not to go for this stereotype as then the main artist wouldn’t be the centre of attention. We wanted to make the main artist dominant throughout the whole music video.

1B Audience

The project I will be discussing for this question is my advanced portfolio, where I created a music video called “Kiss Kiss”. When creating my music video I thought extensively about the kind of people I was appealing to and how I would do this. The target audience for my video is mainly men and women between the ages of 15-25, due to the fact that the main artist is a young male which fall in to the same age category, and the lyrics of the song can be evidential through high school life. Throughout the process of making my music video, I asked members of my target audience to look at my ideas and work and give me feedback so that I could ensure that it was specifically tailored to the wants and needs of my audience. I did this by making questionnaires where I would tell people in the age group to fill out. Julian McDougall quotes, “audiences still clearly make sense and give meaning to cultural products,” which means that audiences play an active role in the understanding of real media text. We wanted to gain an active audience for our music video as it appealed to a wide range of people.

I began by researching certain music videos that were represented as the same genre as my video. This would allow me to gain wider knowledge of the conventions that were essential for a R&B style music video. I used Goodwin’s theory when analysing the music video “All Of The Lights” by Kanye West and Rihanna. This music video was mainly performance based; however it had a narrative concept in the beginning. We wanted to create a strong relationship between the lyrics and the visuals as this was a key theme that was done in most music videos.

Another way of looking at how audiences consume media is reception theory, which is based on Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model. It argues that producers encode meaning into a media text and audience then in turn decode it. When creating my music video, I encoded meaning in many ways. For example, I shot most of the video with close-ups of the artist whilst he was performing; this created the R&B genre. 

Furthermore, the main artist “Chris Brown” can be a role model to young people as he is a young person himself, at 17 years old and audiences can familiarise with him. When looking at other music videos we found out that many artists changed their clothes throughout the music video. It was never seen that the artist wears the same clothes. We then took this idea and changed the clothes of the artist when he was performing.

The uses and gratification theory by McQuail came to our attention throughout our advanced portfolio. Uses and gratifications theory is a framework for studying the effects of media on an audience, mainly from the perspective of individual audience members. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfil specific gratifications. The audience seek out gratifications from the media, in our case, the music video. The audience seeks out a need and a sense of gratification. We focused on entertainment. The majority of our audience will be entertained by our music video; they can get cultural enjoyment from our music video by being part of that culture. Some people may simply relax while listening/watching our music video.

In conclusion I believe that our audience is active rather than passive where they can refer to the music video as how they feel. I think the target audience was in a good range as according to our research most people aged between 15-25 listen to this type of music.