Audience Theory

An audience is a group of people who receive a media text, they receive these texts through a variety of mediums including through televison, internet, radio, DVD and Magazines. For our audience watching our music video, they would receive these through Youtube and Music Channels such as 4Music as this particularly  and MTV, MTV for its high status as a music channel and 4Music due to its pop based features which our video would be shown on.

Audience is a key concept throughout media studies, because all media texts are produced with an audience in mind-that is to say a group of people who will recieve the text and make some sort of interpretation of it. For our music video we have targeted a young female audience as both artists featured, us,  are young females which might make a younger audience see us as perhaps role models. We have very youthful playful locations too such as the beach, the arcade and playing in the snow which we feel would attract this type of audience.

Demographics

A common and traditional method of audience research is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work they do. It breaks the population down into 6 groups, and labels them by using a letter code to describe the income and status of the members of each group.

A- Higher management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals

B- Middle management, teachers, creative and media people eg graphic designers

C1- Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff

C2- Skilled ,amual workers, plumbers, builders

D- Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers

E- Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

I think we are mainly targeting group E as this group includes students however I think creative media people in group B may also be attracted to our video.

This audience demographics are based on the National Readership Survey's socio-economic grades http://www.nrs.co.uk/


Hierarchy of Needs- Maslow

Maslow's theory suggests that we as individuals have basic needs, for example the basic needs to eat and sleep up to a higher level of needs such as self esteem and self respect. This theory is very relevant to advertisers, and institutions that carry advertising in for example newspapers, cinema, television and radio channels.

Marslow's upper leverls at the top of the pyramid are about self esteem and gaining the respect of others. This can be linked to the idea that consuming particular media texts fulfils self esteem, as does buying certain products.

Cultivation Theory

This theory treats the audience as passive. Its suggests that repeated exposure to the same message, such as advertisement, will have an effect on the audience's attitudes and values. A similar idea is known as de-sensitation which suggests that long term exposure to violent media makes the audience less likey to be shocked by violence. Being less shocked by violence the audience may be more likely to behave violently.

This can be applied to our music video in the sense that people are now getting used to the fact that girls can be strong and wont sit around crying because of their boyfriends. Women being dominant and strong is being shown more and more regularly, for example Beyonce's video of 'who rules the world..girls'.

Two Step Flow Theory

Katz and Lazarsfield assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests media messages move in two ways;

-Individuals who are opinion leaders receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpreatations
- The audience mediate the information receieved directly from the media, with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process but by a two step flow.

This theory relates to our music video as with sites such as Twitter, You Tube and facebook trends are easily made with people discussing a text/product and forming a strong opinion on something which may then influence other peoples opinions.
 

On Monday me and Beste made our way down to Southend. Firstly we spent the morning uploading all our previous footage and we then headed into town to buy our balloons.

When we finally arrived in Southend, we put on our wellies and set up all the equipment on the beach, witht he peer and sea in the background. We decided to begin with filming the balloon shots in order to get them out of the way. We bought 8 ballons so that we could at least do two takes, releasing 4 each time. The first time we did it we set up the camera and released the balloons. The second time, we filmed the balloons going up into the sky, these shots will be played on the lyrics 'don't let me go, coz without me you know your lost..'. We also did some other shots for example a long shot of us running along the beach with balloons as well as some shots of us lip syncing the chorus.

We then moved on to film my verse, the third verse 'we got along'. For this we used my bubble machine, as we felt that they would look pretty floating around me whilst I sang sitting on the sand. We then went off and began getting as many different shots as possible, splashing in the sea, some stop animation shots writing in the sand, the heart being washed away by the sea, shots of us looking out at the sea, panning shots of the funfair (even though it was sadly closed) and in the arcades, and also on the peer with a sunset background, which looks really effective as there is no one else around. We also found a large fountain area which we took advantage of and got some quite fun footage, although we did get fairly soaked!

We are both really excited to spend the rest of our time editing now that we have all our footage.

Today me and Beste spent the whole day filming. We haven't yet managed to get down to Southend however we have set aside Monday for my parents to take us down there. We hopefully managed to film everything else in which we needed to, making the most out of our day. I set up some of my dads music equipment so that we could film the bridge in our song. I spent quite some time practising lip syncing this part as it is sung very quickly! We tried our best to get a number of different shot types, for example a close up of the microphones and the mixers. We then moved on to film the third and fourth verses of our song. We had to improvise my verse as we had previously planned to film it in the forest, however we filmed outside in the snow with trees already so we decided to scrap that idea and make the most out of what we had at my house. Luckily I have a balcony and so I suggested that it would be nice to get some shots of me up there staring out into the distance. Whilst I was up there I noticed that the sky looked really pretty, with the clouds reflecting pink and orange. Beste passed me up the camera and I managed to get a nice shot, slowly zooming into the pastel coloured sky, perhaps an ending to our song. It was a very long day of filming, we started at around 12 and finished at roughly 7, however we feel it was a very productive day, and we are excited to start editing the new footage!

Yesterday I went to see The Woman in Black, a 2012 horror-thriller film directed by James Watkins and written by Jane Goldman, starring Daniel Radcliff. It is a story based on Susan Hill's novel of the Same Name.

The film had all the typical conventions of a thriller/horror, set in an old abandoned mansion, covered in cobwebs and full of dark corridors leading to strange mysterious rooms. It was a very jumpy film often using the loud screeching of a crow to scare the audience into thinking its the Woman in Black. The film was exactly what I expected it to be, very scary and disturbing especially when showing clips of the children killing themselves. For example in the opening scene it showed three children, girls, playing with their dolls and having a tea party. Then unexpectedly the girls looked up, with a glazed look on their faces. They dropped their toys and began to walk towards the windows, crushing their dolls beneath their feet. Then as they approached the window they stopped, twisted the handle and jumped. It was a very horrific opening scene but was a great way to capture the attention of the audience, as we then wanted to learn the cause of these events.

The music and sound effects, I felt, played a very important part to the film. The loud banging of the rocking chair built up so much tension in the audience, as we were yet to discover what the noise was, coming from a door which would not open. Also the noise of the music boxes and toys in the nursery created such a creepy atmosphere, the innocence of children mixed with the horrors of the house was pretty terrifying. Also the shrill cold voice of the Woman in Black repeating the words 'I will never forgive' was very scary and I found myself literally hiding behind my coat, I'm not great with scary films, I was shocked to discover that it was a 12A!

Here is the trailer of the film, which shows you some of the aspects mentioned above..

In yesterday's lesson Beste and I continued editing our footage together and also decided to go outside and get one more shot. Luckily we still had snow outside and were able to get this one shot with no problem. I made the word LOVE out of twigs in the snow while Beste filmed. I then dropped snow on top of the word which destroyed it. We decided to do this as the shot before is of me throwing a snowball towards the camera. Now it looks like it was the snow ball I threw which destroyed the word.

Here is our third draft with this small change..

Here is the footage which we managed to capture in the snow. We've recently spent our lessons selecting the bits we want to include in our music video and have edited this footage on imovie. We currently do not have all of our footage however we are planning on inserting different shot at different locations in between the snow footage, making it more choppy and interesting to watch rather than having one location after the other. This is our second draft showing you what we have got up to so far..

Today me and Beste spent the day filming. We filmed our petal location and also took the camera out in the snow to get some footage for our chorus. I set the camera up and sprinkled petals in Beste's hair, we were really happy that we decided to get real dried petals rather than using material ones as we felt they looked more professional. When filming Beste, I decided to use a number of different camera angles such as a close up of her hand scrunching up the petals, so that when editing we could chop and change to different shots on the beat of the music making it more interesting to watch. We then made our way outside to get some more footage making the most out of the snow. We both wore our fur coats so that we would match but also because they are quite quirky and bold. We managed to set up the camera on the tripod so that we could both be in it. At some points I filmed Beste and at other times we swapped and she filmed me. We will be uploading what we have done so far very soon..