Question 1B

1b – Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to the concept of audience.

The music video I wanted to create had to appeal to a certain audience. This meant that the music video had to contain certain key elements that would attract or entertain a specific group of people.

The genre of music that I used was dubstep, this is a fairly new musical genre but is very popular with young people as it is party music. The fun and youthful genre allowed me to be creative with the narrative but I had to be strict with myself and the production team when it came to certain conventions as I wanted target the right audience. Nicholas Abercrombie stated “Television producers are set out to exploit genre conventions,” this influenced me to look at similar artists that have made a music video to suit a similar audience to mine so I researched into a band called The Streets, where I saw lots of camera angles and editing styles that would appeal to category C2.

All of the characters in my video were 18 years of age and were all male; I chose this as I wanted to appeal to ‘YAKS’ which is short for ‘Young Adventurous Keen and Singe’. This would be targeting audience C2 which are young aspiring people from the ages of 17-24.  Due to me being surrounded by people within my sixth form that are within the C2 category I asked people about things that interest them when it comes to music videos, the only answers I received involved relationships or partying, so I went straight ahead and worked on that. At the start of my video I wanted an establishing shot which showed my audience a text that I have received from a girl saying “Reece its Amy, please pick up your phone x,” followed by a short conversation. This small scene was done naturalistic and was had no backing track behind it so that hopefully the awkward silence and the negative text is something my audience can relate to. I used clean cuts which were all to the beat and sometimes edited the footage to essentially speed up time as the songs climax or ‘drop’ as I call it is about to commence. My target audience would want to be entertained visually meaning that I had to keep changing my scenery and speeding up and slowing down the footage. I put the footage at 50% speed when I was filming in the night club, this meant that I could really recreate the party scene and give my audience time to take in all of the lighting and visual effects that were happening around my characters. I wanted my audience to be able to relate to the video as much as possible so I used expressionist camera angles which involved close ups of my characters faces at the clubs to show their drunken party like expression and highlighted how outstanding the party lifestyle is. One of the most important scenes that would relate to my audience would be the “Hangover scene.” This is where the camera angles slowly zoom in and are quite still showing a medium shot of my characters lying in bed. I did this to represent the common hangover and sickness that teenagers go through after a night out. This isnt usually common in dubstep narratives as the scenes usually end in the club, this is usually because of the song ending on a high, but I thought I would go against these narratives and try something new, but still targeting my audience and keeping them entertained.