Collective Identity - Representations of Youth in the Media

Text/ Year of Text	Representation of Youth	Key Points	Theory	Additional
Ill Manors (2012) – Music Video	Youths are represented negatively in this music video. Council estate youths	Youths are seen smoking, drinking and being violent. They talk about how they are feared in society and that it is the government’s fault that they are getting into trouble.

Apply the concept of representation to your media product.

Representation is how a character or location is being portrayed to the audience. In my production of a film opening, 'Because of Them', we had two female characters living in the same house, but many years apart from each other. We then went back and forth between the time periods in order to make our narrative.

Levi-Strauss' theory of binary oppositions suggests that films have characters with opposite traits and characteristics from each other. However, we subverted this theory by having lots of similarities between our characters. We did this to show an obvious relationship between the two women. The only differences between them were due to temporal factors and not personality. For example, the character from the modern day was career driven and very motivated to work. This was not the case for the suffragette, who did not work, but she did have the motivation to fight for what she believed in.

Angela McRobbie's theory suggests that characters conform to male and female stereotypes. However, we strongly subverted this by having the woman from modern day be very powerful and in control. She is the boss of her own company and so very powerful professionally; she also did not have a family. However, we did conform to stereotypes with the post-WW1 woman who was a stereotypical female. She has a baby and can be seen cleaning the house in a few shots. We did this to show how the roles of women are changing as time goes on.

Apply the concept of narrative to your media product.

Narrative is the 'story' in a piece of media. Bordwell and Thomson said that narrative was "a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship occurring in time.". Our film opening was a historical drama called 'Because of Them'. 'Because of Them' flips back and forth in time, showing the life of a suffragette and a woman from the modern day. Our narrative involves our modern day character learning about the suffragette's life and learning to appreciate the rights that she has. The main events occur in the past and get found out by the person in the future.

Todorov believes that the narrative of a film begins with an equilibrium, there was then a disruption to the equilibrium, before equilibrium was restored again or a new equilibrium is formed. We did not reach the disruption stage of the narrative in our opening. However, if we were to make the entire film, then we would conform to Todorov's narrative theory. This is because our film involves going back and forth in time and we felt that this could get confusing for the audience. Therefore, having a simple narrative like Todorov suggests would make the film easier for audiences to understand. 

On the other hand, Levi-Strauss developed the theory of binary oppositions. This is a theory that we decided to conform to. We did this to emphasise the difference between past and present (which are binary oppositions themselves). For example we had black and white footage in the past and colour footage in the present. Another opposition we had was men and women and the men in the past had more power than the women, so there was also the opposition of power and weakness. This binary opposition was vital to our narrative because we were focussing on women's rights. 

Propp developed the idea of 'stock characters' and he claims that all films have certain characters in their narrative. For example, a hero, villain, helper and damsel. We decided to challenge this because we wanted our main characters to be in control of the narrative and we did not want lots of other characters. We also subverted this because we decided to have female protagonists rather than males. This was something that we did deliberately and was very important to our film because we wanted to focus on feminism and women's suffrage. 

Finally, Bathes developed the theory of enigma codes. We conformed to this theory because we did not reveal too much information in the opening of the film. We ensured that the audience did not know exactly what was going on but knew enough to develop an interest in what's happening. We had some big questions that the audiences would ask as well as small ones. For example, 'Who is the woman in the photograph?' or 'Why are some shots in black and white and some in colour?'. These are all questions that keep the audience interested and make them want to continue watching. 

Apply the concept of genre to one of your coursework productions.

According to Daniel Chandler, 'genre is a type' of film and is a way to categorise them. This categorisation gives audiences a chance to make assumptions about what a film would be like before they watch it. For our film opening, we chose the genre 'historical drama'. Our historical drama film opening was called 'Because of Them' and involved showing the parallels a modern-day woman's life with that of a suffragette.

To begin with, we chose the themes for our film and we decided to choose themes that involve attitudes that have changed over time so that we could show a distinct contrast when we change between present and past. We chose the themes of feminism, family values and women's rights. These are all things associated with women's suffrage and so linked perfectly with our genre. We used certain icons throughout the opening to portray our genre. For example, the 'Votes for Women' sash that the suffragette wears. This is a very iconic item of clothing associated with women of that time and so, when the audience sees this, they can quickly make many assumptions about the character, narrative and, most importantly, genre. We also used icons to make links to the themes of our film. The baby in the suffragette's arms and the work phone in the modern woman's hand shows the difference in women's family values and roles in society in these different times.

A genre such as 'historical drama' requires a great amount of attention to be paid to the mise en scene. We, therefore, had to ensure that we chose an appropriate setting for the basis of our mise en scene. We decided to an old house to shoot in that looked like a house from the 19th and 20th century. This meant that the audience could quickly tell that what they were watching was set in the past. When we switched to modern day, we tried to have settings that were more modern looking. This was difficult since the modern day woman lived in the same house. This is where other aspects of mise en scene became important. We needed to now play closer attention to props and costume to show the difference in the time periods. We dressed the suffragette in a long skirt and a bulky, long, fabric coat, accented with a 'Votes for Women' sash. In contrast, the woman from the present was wearing heels, skinny jeans, a blouse and jacket. This immediately shows that these women would be from different times. We then used props, also. The woman from the past held a cloth and was dusting the house and the modern woman held a mobile phone as she calls her employees. This also shows a difference in time as well as a difference in women's roles, linking to the themes of our film.

We used editing techniques to further represent our genre. We did this by highlighting the differences between the past and present. We did this by having the scenes that are in the past in black and white and the modern day scenes in colour. We decided to do this because it is very commonly known that old films and photographs are in black and white and so, now, people commonly make associations between 'old' or the 'past' and black and white footage. Therefore, this was a very easy method of showing a time difference between our shots and demonstrating the historical genre of our film. We also used straight cuts in our film as these are most commonly used in our genre since films that are historical dramas usually carry a serious vibe.

Research and Planning Essay

My research and planning skills have improved throughout my time studying media. In Year 12, we had to begin by researching genre and how it relates to film. We then explored this further by identifying which conventions are related to each genre. We did this by watching a variety of films and, more specifically, film openings. We then did a photography task where we had to take photos around our school to represent different genres of film. This allowed us to put our knowledge into practice. We then had to research independent and mainstream cinema and learnt how the production company of a film has an effect on the quality of the product produced. We discovered that independent films have a much lower budget than mainstream and therefore, do not include massive sets and stunts. Independent films also, typically, tackle more serious narratives than mainstream cinema.
After this, we also looked at different theorists and the things that they believed about the narratives of films. It was important that we knew how narrative worked and what the narrative of our entire film would be in order to make a believable film opening. Theorists we looked at included Todorov's equilibrium theory, Propp's character theory, Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions theory and Bathes' enigma codes theory. As well as this, we explored the audience reception theory, hypodermic needle theory and, most importantly, semiotics. This gave us all of the tools that we needed to develop our own film opening. We also looked at 'Art of the Title' to examine how the titles of a film opening in a particular genre are presented, but also the order that they appear on the screen. We then had to ensure that the titles in our film opening matched the order and style that we had found historical dramas had. We found that the titles faded in and out on the screen with no other transitions or effects, they were black or white and were not 'funky' in any way.
After this initial research, the planning stage of our project began. This started with doing some practice edits using Adobe Premiere Pro to ensure that we could accurately use the software before making our film opening. These practice edits included importing and then editing footage of dancing animals together, copying a real film opening, in our case Juno, and this included both filming and editing the footage and then doing a preliminary task so that we can experience the whole process of making a film opening before doing the real thing. This included making storyboards, shooting schedules, prop lists and shot lists. When making our final film opening, all of these documents needed to be much more thorough and we also needed to make a risk assessment for the location that we were going to film at.
In Year 13, our research process needed to be much more in-depth and complex. There was also more research in general that needed to be carried out since we had to research artist's brands, music videos, digipaks and websites. To begin with, we researched the different forms of music video- narrative, concept and performance. We then looked at genres of music and identified which genres were most likely to produce the different types of music videos. This was a critical thing to look into before we made a decision about which type of music video we decided to make for our chosen genre. We then looked at two prominent music video theorists: Carol Vernallis and Andrew Goodwin. We looked deeply into their theories and then found some music videos that support them. We then did a few creative tasks which involved listening to songs and trying to come up with ideas about what the song's music video looks like. This allowed us to think about the imagery that music and lyrics create so that we could effectively apply this to our own music video.
Once we researched everything we needed to for the music video, we moved on to the digipak. It was important that we looked at how connections were made between an artist's image, their music videos and their digipaks; we would need to make similar links when we created our own. We found that all digipaks had common conventions, such as the size of the panels, the fact that new artists typically have their face on the cover and their name, there is album art inside and a song list and a barcode on the back. However, when we researched further, we found that there were also more specific conventions that could be found within different genres of music. For example, indie artists typically had photos that were black and white or dull in colour on their digipaks.
We then had to look at artist's websites and again see how these link to their other products and branding. We found that artists have many photographs on their website and also a homepage, gallery, news, music, tour and contact page. However, different genres may order these pages differently on their navigation bar. We needed to identify as many of these little details as possible in order to make our own website look professional. We also found that artists tend to have merchandise pages and the products they sell have links to their music video and their current album's digipak.

We then began our extensive planning stage of the course. This involved doing some practice edits in order to develop our skills further before making our music video. This meant using many different creative effects and doing a preliminary task of copying a real music video. This prepared us for the amount of work that was required to make a music video since there are many more shots to film and edit. We started our music video creation process by annotating the lyrics of the song with some ideas that we had and creating a video mood board of ideas from real music videos; we then had to storyboard our music video so that we could work out exactly what our music video would look like. After this, it was time to make our prop list and shot list to ensure that we were as prepared as possible for filming. Before going onto location, we also had to write up a risk assessment for the shoot. This was to ensure that we were prepared for any emergencies that could happen. The same had to be done for the artist photo shoot that we carried out to get the photos for the website and digipak. Once the photo shoot was complete we needed to edit the photographs in Adobe Photoshop before they could be used. We then had to draw out plans for the website and digipak layouts based on the research that we had previously conducted that told us all of the forms and conventions for a website and digipak in our genre. We then had to put together some synergy ideas for how we could ensure that the music video, website and digipak all look like one brand. We decided to use the colour red to do this as well as using the same font and similar costumes.

Real Media Products

At AS, we had to make our own film opening relating to a specific genre. Before we could make this film opening, we had to research what a genre really was in relation to film. We then looked at why it is important to the audience. This was a vital starting point since we had to ensure that our opening followed the forms and conventions that a film in the same genre would have. Firstly, we found that film openings had titles and lots of establishing shots. This was universal across all genres. When looking at our genre in particular (historical drama), we found that the film openings were very slow paced, with simple titles and lots of enigmas. We then delved deeper into some of these conventions and analysed them further. For example, we looked at 'Art of the Title' to examine how the titles of a film opening in a particular genre are presented, but also the order that they appear on the screen. We then had to ensure that the titles in our film opening matched the order and style that we had found historical dramas had. We found that the titles faded in and out on the screen with no other transitions or effects, they were black or white and were not 'funky' in any way. We decided to conform to this convention because we felt that it mirrored the seriousness of the genre we had chosen.

After this, we also looked at different theorists and the things that they believed about the narratives of films. It was important that we knew how narrative worked and what the narrative of our entire film would be in order to make a believable film opening. Theorists we looked at included Todorov's equilibrium theory, Propp's character theory, Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions theory and Bathes' enigma codes theory. As well as this, we explored the audience reception theory, hypodermic needle theory and, most importantly, semiotics. This gave us all of the tools that we needed to develop our own film opening. We looked at 'Ghost Ship' in particular as an example of these different theories. Though a horror film, it is also partly set in 1962. This is similar to what we wanted to do with our film and set some parts of the film in the future and some in the past. We looked at how 'Ghost Ship' used camera work, sound, mise en scene and editing to create a certain atmosphere and also looked at how it used semiotics. We learnt how colours could be used to create a certain effect and how well-timed and paced cuts can evoke different feelings in the audience. This allowed us to have a much more intellectual approach to creating our film opening, as we could apply theory to the choices that we made.

During our second year, we had to create our own music video. This was a much greater challenge because we found that the forms and conventions for music videos in different genres of music were much more subjective than the genres in film; there were lots of grey areas and no hard rules to follow. We started by thinking about the different genres and what kinds of songs fit into these. We then looked at music videos and identified which type of video they were: performance (e.g. 'When We Were Young' by Adele), narrative (e.g. 'Because of You' by Kelly Clarkson) or concept (e.g. 'All the Stars' by Ed Sheeran). We then made links between music video types and genre and identified which type of music video a genre would normally have. We then, like when looking at film, developed our knowledge by looking at the work of a couple of theorists. We looked at Goldwin and Vernallis in particular and found examples of each of their ideas in different music videos. This was vital in order for us to make realistic and believable music videos. We decide to make an Indie/Rock music video. We identified that this genre of music commonly had music videos that were performance and concept based. We decided to conform to this convention because the video type was a fundamental thing when making a music video. We then found that Indie videos seemed to have lots of outdoors themes and decided to conform to this too.

As well as the music video, we also had to create our own website and digipak for our artist. When researching different digipaks we had to identify the correct measurements that we needed to have. These measurements were universal across all of the genres. However, when looking at Indie digipaks specifically, we found that many of them had outdoor themes. We conformed to this since it would match our music video. We also found that digipaks were very plain and often included 'washed out' or black and white colours. We decided to challenge this in favour of creating synergy across our products and wanted to stand out slightly. We, therefore, decided to use colour on our digipak and used the colour red on all of our products to allow them to link together effectively.

When looking at websites, we found that many websites for all genres featured many of the same links in the navigation bar. We found that websites belonging to Indie artists usually had their webpages in the navigation bar in the same order. We decided to conform to this as we thought that this was something vital to creating a realistic website. We also decided to look at websites for relatively new artists to see how they are presented. We did this because we were developing a website for a new artist. We found that one of the main things on a new artist's website was a large photo of themselves on the homepage. We decided to conform to this because we thought that this was a great way of getting our artist's face known.

Research and Planning - Plan

Year	Research	Planning
12	·         What is a film opening? ·         What is a genre? Genre Conventions. ·         What is an independent production company? How does it affect the film? ·         Narrative theories e.g. enigma codes ·         Semiotics ·         Titles – Order of titles, ‘Art of the Title’	·         Practice Edits – Dancing Animals, Juno, Prelim, Moving Production Company Logo ·         Genre tasks ·         Storyboard ·         Shooting Schedule ·         Risk Assessment ·         Prop list ·         Shot List
13	·         What is a music video? ·         What is a genre in a music video? What music genres are there? ·         What types of music videos are there? Narrative, performance, concept. ·         Music video theorists ·         No Rest – emotion and imagery from music and lyrics ·         How does budget affect a music video? ·         How does branding an artist work? Cross-media synergy? ·         What is a digipak? ·         What is a website? ·         How do artists link their website, digipak and music video? ·         Choosing song and identify genre ·         What other artists fall into this genre? ·         How do these artists create their image and brand? ·         What do music videos from this particular genre include? ·         What do the websites and digipak from this genre include?	·         Practice edits – Banana phone, prelim ·         Storyboard ·         Shooting schedules for each shoot ·         Risk assessments for all locations ·         Prop list ·         Shot lists ·         Creating logo ·         Synergy ideas ·         Mood boards ·         Photoshoot ·         Editing photos in Photoshop

Real Media Products - Plan

Film Opening

What is genre? Why is it important?

Textual analysis of film openings - DISTINCT

D- Describe

I - In detail

S - Setting

T - Themes

I - Icons

N - Narative

C - Character

T - Textual Analysis - Camera, editing, mise en scene, sound

Talk about audiences

Independent film - Indie production company- how does this affect the film?

What research did you do?

What did you learn?

What conventions did you find? Give examples.

Enigma codes? Semiotics?

Did you challenge conventions? Conform or subverted? Mix of both?

Music Video

What was our genre? What other genres influenced?

No set rules with music videos- lots of grey areas

Talk about budgets

Performance, narrative or concept?

How did you use conventions?

How id you use digital technology in your research of media conventions?

Conclusion - What have you learnt about using conventions from real media texts? 

Explain how your skills in the creative use of digital technology developed over time. Refer to a range of examples from your media productions in your answer.

My skills in the creative use of digital technology has developed over the two years that I have been studying Media.

Before starting the Media Studies course, my digital technology skills were poor because I had not had many opportunities to use cameras or editing software. The only editing software I had used was Windows Movie Maker and this was only to put shots together. This did not include any effects at all and was, therefore, not creative. At AS, we started the year by practicing our editing skills in Adobe Premiere Pro. Our first editing task was to import some shots of dancing animals and edit them together into a sequence with basic cuts and some colour effects. This was not supposed to be a creative task and was only used for us to form a basic knowledge of the software. After this, we applied our skills to replicating a real film opening in preparation for making my own film opening later in the year. The film opening that we recreated in groups was for the film 'Juno'. This was a creative task to an extent because we had to use some effects to make the footage look like it is a cartoon, but it was not the most creative task because we were replicating something that was already made and so did not need to come up with our own ideas. We then used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit a film opening. We were given a genre to base our film opening on and then had to come up with a film opening to create. Our film opening was effective in some ways because the use of straight cuts were appropriate and moved the narrative along. However, no interesting transitions were used and, due to our genre being a serious historical drama, there were not special effects. This meant that the editing was not very creative and did not push me to my full potential.

In Year 13, we had many opportunities to be more creative with Adobe Premiere Pro and we were able to develop our skills to a much higher level. We started by doing a creative editing task where we had the opportunity to use many different new techniques such as cloning and screen within screen. This allowed us to become more competent with the use of the software and develop our skills. After this, we moved on to our preliminary tasks. Our preliminary task was to replicate approximately 30 seconds of a real life music video. We decided to use Charlie Puth's 'We Don't Talk Anymore' which involves a split screen throughout and the two shots cutting out of sync. This was an editing challenge because we had to ensure that the shots were timed perfectly and cut at exactly the right time. This meant that we needed to slightly alter the length of our shots post-production so that they matched the original video perfectly and cut in time with the music and the other shot on the split screen. This was an editing challenge because we never had to edit two videos, simultaneously, to music. This forced us to be much more creative and precise. This task gave us a great foundation for creating our own music video. In our music video we used a variety of different techniques, such as adding an overlay and using a variety of interesting transitions. Another huge difference between our film opening and our music video was the amount of shots that we included. In our film opening, we used 15 shots in two minutes; for our music video we used 66 shots in the same amount of time. The task of creating a music video allowed us to be much more creative than when we had been to create our film opening in Year 12. This is because a film opening has many more restraints and with our music video we were able to do much more that we were not previously able to do. With our music video, digital technology allowed us to use many special effects and overlays allowing us to make a much more professional looking product than if we were not able to use Adobe Premiere and had to use a program such as Windows Movie Maker instead, which provides many more limitations.

In Year 12, we used YouTube to research different film openings in order to get ideas for our own film opening, but also to develop our textual analysis skills so that we could apply this knowledge to the construction of our own project (for example, giving extra detail to our camera angles, editing, Mise en Scene or sound when trying to convey a point). We were then able to upload our film opening onto YouTube so that we could embed it into our blog. We therefore only used YouTube for basic tasks and did not need to learn much, other than how to upload a video. However, at A2, we used YouTube in a different way. We still used it to research music videos to gain ideas and to upload our videos, but this year we took our use of the website further. We used the video embed link to put the video onto our blog, like last year, but we also then used the link to share our video with the people in our school so that we were able to gain feedback on our work. We also were able to utilise the comment feature so that people could leave us feedback. This kind of digital technology was very important and, without it, we would not have been able to gain the volume of feedback that we did as easily or efficiently.

At AS, we used digital cameras to film our film opening and used our mobile phones to take photos for the film posters. We used very basic shots at this stage with some creativity but very little camera movement. However, at A2, we used a Canon 700D which provided much higher quality footage and we not only filmed on it, but also took any photographs that we needed for the website and digipak on the camera as well, rather than using our phones. This meant that the shots were much higher quality and we were able to do much more with them post-production on software such as Adobe Photoshop. Our use of the camera when filming was also much more proficient and we used a much larger variety of creative shots, both in angles and movements. The composition and exposure of our shots, both in the footage and photographs, was also much more professional. We had also learnt from experience and, instead of just filming the shots that were needed like we did at AS, we allowed ourselves to be more creative on location. If we saw something that we thought would work, we tried new things out to see what effect it would give. We also ensured that we filmed the same thing several times, even if it looked like it went well the first time. This was so that if there was a little something wrong that we had not noticed when we checked the footage or photograph straight away, we had a backup that we could use.

After taking the photos for the film poster on a mobile phone, we tried to edit them in Adobe Photoshop. We selected one character in the image and made the rest black and white. We then added the relevant text over the top of the image. However, we found that, since our photograph was taken on a phone, it was not very high quality, meaning that we were not able to crop it the way that we wanted to because then enlarging it again would cause a very poor quality photo. We were also not very experienced in using Photoshop and so were not able to produce a poster that looked very professional. However, our use greatly improved at A2 when we were able to use the software at a much higher level, having been practicing throughout the year in our own time. We were able to create a whole digipak in Photoshop and edit photos to maximise their quality and increase the synergy between our products. For example, we enhanced the colour red on our photographs of roses and removed the background so that we could add them to our website and digipaks. Adobe Photoshop was extremely important in the production of our digipak and, without it, we would not have been able to edit the photos the degree that we did. Our precise photo editing to create synergy between our products was vital and could not have been done without Photoshop.

Finally, there was a massive improvement in my use of Blogger and the way that I presented my work on my blog. We had to record all of our products and give updates on our work on a blog, this included: research, planning, constructions, feedback, evaluation and inspirations. In Year 12, my blog had a very simple layout and I used a 'image with text underneath' format for my blog posts. This was not creative at all and did not require much skill. However, in Year 13, I used a much larger variety of ways to present my work and format my blog posts. This included the use of online presentation software such as Prezzi, Emaze, Visme, Slideshare and then some of my own ways of presenting like edited videos. This needed more skill and creativity because I had to learn how to use all of these and then create the presentations. As well as this, it made my blog look much more interesting as every post was different. In Year 13, I also took the time to change the color scheme and the background on my blog to match the products that my group and I made. This made my blog look more aesthetically pleasing and took the synergy that I had to create for my products further. Blogger was, in my opinion, one of the most important forms of digital technology that I used throughout my Media Studies A Level. This is because it was the backbone of all of the work that I did and it was the thing that allowed me to bring all of my work together and present it. Blogger allowed me to include all of the work that I did no matter what form it was in, a photo, video, online presentation etc.