Music Videos

Music videos make an excellent focus for your case study because they are featured on both the broadcast and emedia platforms. By creating videos to go with their songs, artists are able to further establish themselves as a 'brand' and promote their music across a wider range of platforms like music channels on TV , and sites like YouTube and Vevo online.

You should have analysed at least three different videos before the exam - you will need to be able to talk about them in detail. In class, we found that the videos we studied:

• often objectified women (especially hip-hop videos)
• featured elements which were overtly sexual (desensitisation of young audience members)
• promoted patriarchal ideologies - men in positions of power
  
• have become more controversial in content (Katy Perry compared to the Spice Girls)
• use codes and conventions specific to the genre of music
• can be narrative, surreal or performance based

The videos we studied are below - but now you need to make your research independent by looking at another video for yourselves - this is required to get the top grades.

Notice how both videos come from the artists' official 'Vevo' channels.

Finally, thanks to Lottie for reminding me about literal music videos! As well as being funny, I like the way these videos break the images down into individual shots. They help you to consider the target audience and the way the artist wants to be represented. Check out Enrique's Hero video too (the literal version!).



Remember you should be bringing in your Twitter results next Tuesday!

Guardian: Open journalism

The Guardian have recently shown an advert about their concept of 'open journalism', the idea being that everyone has a say in current affairs and that news can be shared via social networking and other platforms in order to reach as vast an audience as possible. The advert is really interesting and gives you an insight into modern dilemmas within the media and how news stories can be treated. It raises lots of interesting questions in relation to recent events such as homeowners rights, press intrusion and the riots. The Guardian claim to give 'the whole picture' when reporting.

Here's a link to the article and video:

Guardian Open Journalism

What do you think about it? Will the idea of open journalism work? Will it mean there are more inaccuracies as people use social networking to discuss current affairs? 

Make sure you are always considering new and interesting things. You need to be reading and viewing various parts of the media in order to have an opinion and be able to relate your work to wider concepts and ideas.