Analyse a product you have created in terms of Representation theories

For my A2 coursework I created a music video that conforms to the genre of indie alternative. We chose this genre as it is a hybrid genre which allows us to challenge conventions and subvert from the norm in terms of typical videos of the same genre. The synopsis of the music video is about a young guy who is twenty years of age who has recently been parted from his lover. He is experiencing heart-ache which affects his life and leaves him in an emotional turmoil as he is unable to continue with life like normal and is evidently confused with what path to choose next.

During the production we had a few issues with choosing the appropriate target audience for our video but eventually decided that teenagers and a young audience would be suitable as they are able to relate to visuals within our video and also use our product as a sense of escapism from their own personal relationships. We decided to make our entire video black and white to connote sadness and misery which reinforces the theme of our music video. Our main protagonist Jake Black is very melancholic we used a number of close-up shots of his saddened facial expressions In order to represent him as an emotional masculine figure. This representation subverts from typical music videos of this genre as the gender role of the emotional being is reversed and is not a female. Our protagonist goes through sequences of confusion we incorporated fast paced editing to portray the disturbance his lover has had over his life. In relation to stereotypes Dutton’s theory can be applied to Jake Black as he presents realism through his dress code that consists of jeans, a hoodie and trainers, which are seen as the typical dress code for a guy of his age.

Moreover, we also chose an enigmatic location of a park to represent realism and Jake Black’s lost and broken identity that he is searching for, throughout our music video we have used a variety of editing techniques which consist of flashbacks to convey a sense of regret and reflection of the past. It can be said that our music video conforms to White’s theory proposed in 1961 which concluded that the ‘gatekeepers’ are the people who are part of the decision making process in the construction of a text. In terms of this theory we applied to our planning and marketing strategies as we used existing videos b Bruno Mars and James Blunt to shape our ideas and the male representations of our artist James Black.