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.