Advanced Portfolio

Critical Reflection

Ollie Thomas

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

I believe representation in its simplest form is an Image and an Idea, the factors  

contributing to this being Values And Beliefs. Stuart Hall's reception theory suggests that media should be encoded and decoded meaning the producer encodes messages and values into their media which are then decoded by the audience.It can also be observed in more complex narratives which don't necessarily have clear themes and issues. This theory relates to our own work as our Digipak has a preferred reading but is a polysemic text. Barthes suggests the idea of semiotics in media. This means there are codes within media, cultural codes, symbolic and semic codes. These codes help give media meaning and help our audience create either a preferred or oppositional reading.

We found that our Digipak was identified by random people most commonly as indie rock which showed that the majority of our audience had a preferred reading.  Our Digipak summarized the themes of the album conveying an emotional and meaningful product. Our use of props and lighting really helped to convey the mood of the album and the letter props were symbolic of a previous memory of our star and can be interpreted in many ways, for example, the star being face down in the letters suggests that he is overwhelmed and that the person sending him the letters has broken him. The depth of field used creates an ominous look to the letters and the high angle long shot of the man and the letters on the floor diversified the look of the digipak but also added more layers of meaning. The conflict shown in the grammatical content of the letters is a very plausible and relatable theme which members of our audience can certainly relate to. The mysterious nature of the letters also means that the audience can relate to our content even if the preferred reading isn't necessarily the same as theirs; the visual overtone of the digipak with the letters popping out of the page catches the audience's attention.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

Branding is vital for the success of any artist, the artist must sell themselves as both extraordinary and ordinary according to Dyer so that the star is both relatable yet inspiring, this is used  in order to appeal to fans and grasp a sense of relatability. We want our band to be real, relatable & authentic people but at the same time a brand which can be sold to our audience and to do this we had to ensure that our production elements worked together to create an identifiable and extraordinary package. We wanted our stars to be portrayed as energetic and rebellious giving our audience the metanarrative of being shown as an outcast and people with a different outlook on the world.

We created a sense of branding through our products in many ways, for example in the music video the black and white corresponds to the stars tragic and morbid life, the witch character stabbing the voodoo doll and inflicting pain on him is signified through the change to red color correction which shows the effect that the witch character inflicts on the main character even though he is walking back to find her, this encodes the ideas of toxic relationships and going back to people who aren't good for you, struggles which a majority of our audience have experienced or are still experiencing. In the Digipak the pose of the boy on the floor surrounded by letters encodes him as a tragic hero, broken by love, this tells a story but also ties in to the music video as it carries over a similar theme of rejection and pain. Oppositional our social media shows a less thematic and deep experience but instead focuses on the band and their friendship and it creates relatable and candid content which allows our audience to get to know the band through more means than the products they have created. This helps to separate the art from the artist and has opened opportunities for the band to represent themselves as more than what they have created, the band are close knit and good friends and represent a stable and influential friendship which our audience can inspire to.

How do your products engage with the audience?

For our social media page we knew that we had to make it engaging and appealing. Blumler and Katz suggest that media consumers want many things, amongst these are social interaction, personal identity, entertainment and information, overall the audience wants pleasure and utility. We wanted to target these key factors and implement them in our social media page in order to create an extraordinary and ordinary star image which our fans can relate to. Social media is there to establish a close relationship between the star and the audience so this was something we had to capitalize on.

On our main page and our story we promoted the release of the whole album and the single Rango.We created tour posters which gave our audience a chance to get involved and play an active role in the band by watching them live and supporting them. We kept a consistent blue and white color scheme so the whole page looks neat and simple. I think that this helps the audience identify not only the band but the brand they portray and it helps our audience associate the band with those colors. We made a post about a charity in an effort to fight against pollution in the ocean, we thought this was a perfect charity to support as it is a relevant global matter and it works in well with the band's name “Turning Tides’ This charity post shows that the band are down to earth and relatable and shows them as good role models to their fans who have strong opinions on global and environmental issues, because of this we will get more interaction with fans and will satisfy them knowing there personal identity reflects the stars image. It  also paints the band as ordinary yet extraordinary as the paradox of the star theory suggests.

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

We chose Indie rock as the  genre for our music video. Lacey suggests that ‘Genre is similarity and difference’ meaning the audience want their media to be the same yet different the audience wants predictability yet also innovation. Our music video was based on catfish and the bottlemen video ‘Longshot’. We found the bleak and gritty feel of the desaturated video encapsulated perfectly the genre & atmosphere we wanted to use to appeal to our audiences expectations.

In our music video we took Laceys statement and used it.  We used conventions from other music videos such as desaturation in the male narrative shots which encodes the ideas of a bleak and muted  atmosphere. We contrasted and subverted the expectations however by having scenes with contrasting characters in color helped to establish the separation in the narrative and reflect the dark tragic events better. We tried to capture the darker themes and ideas by using a voodoo doll narrative which has themes of toxicity in relationships and unhealthy relationships it also portrays revenge and cruelty a topic which many of our audience members will have experienced in their own relationships .We hoped that these themes made our video more generically appropriate and amplify the lyrics of the song which we found to be conventional in indie rock music videos. The location where we encounter the witch character is cleverly tied to the narrative of the boy as the location is a bleak and dirty bunker however that narrative is not color corrected, an insight to the theme of revenge and cruelty. We used overlapping shots in post to give the impression of the witch looming over the boy's life and the red color correction symbolizes the pain she caused him .  A lot of research blog posts really helped us to develop and create these ideas and I found just by watching and seeing what other bands and artists in the genre have done it was easier to establish and create our own product.