Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time.

Over the last 2 years in Media Studies I was required to complete 2 tasks, one of which was a 2 minute opening sequence of a Film Noir including titles and the in the A2 year to create the promotional package of a music video, including video, digipak and advert for the Dance Music genre. I will look at the pre-production, production and post-production of these two things, showing a progression between the two.

In the pre-production of the Film Noir we looked at the film LA Confidential, which had everything that you would expect from the genre. There were many things that we got from this film with the camera angles being a main one. It uses a low angle tilt shot to show the power and the respect expected of people like police officers, something that we thought we would use in our opening sequence when we produced it. It also used a lot of close ups of the facial expressions that the protagonists had and we noticed that this meant we could see the emotion that was shown in the scenes. Also whilst researching in the pre-production stage we looked at the film Double Indemnity, which gave us a good idea of the costumes and locations that would be good to use to make it look realistic. We could see by the smart suits, trilbys and briefcases, the way we needed to look to be convincing. The locations used in this film were a good indicator as we could see that we could use bars, offices and similar business environments to make it look like a real opening sequence. We then made sure that our locations matched this when we came to the filming.

In the pre-production of the Music Promo Package we looked at a lot more textual examples, and did much more in depth research to give us a better understandings of the Dance Music genre. We look at the video for All Of The Lights by Kanye West and Jay Z, which gave us a good understanding of the genre, with the mise-en-scene being very apparent in this video. We could tell by watching it and taking notes that things like bright lights, a party atmosphere and the protagonists being the centre of everything how we would need to set it out. We could also see that the main settings were bars and clubs, typical of the genre we were looking at. The other video we were looking at was Call On Me by Eric Prydz, and this showed us some good editing techniques, with thought beats being a big part of this video. We then knew that we needed to include this in our video to make sure that ours was as realistic as the one we were watching. It also had provocative women, who were in the video to grab the attention of the male gaze, which was a theory by Laura Mulvey, saying that men can be drawn to a music video purely because of the women who are used in it. After watching this video we decided that it would be good to have the protagonist used centrally, and reversed the male gaze, by using lots of meat shots of this male character. We noticed that the amount of research collated was a lot more and was much deeper as we looked at every part of the videos, breaking them down and evaluating meanings and the sort of things their director wanted to show.

In the production stage of the Film Noir I again used the LA Confidential film, as I thought that it was a good example of the genre and a one that could help us to create a good film opening. I noticed that when there was an important meeting there was usually very little natural light in the room, so when we were filming similar scenes I made sure that we did this and were able to create the correct effect. I also noticed that it used a lot of angled shots, to show the power that was reflected in such scenes, so we made sure that we reflected this in what we were doing e.g. in ours we had former President John F Kennedy so when people were looking at him they were looking up, and he was looking down on them. We also looked at the film Smokin’ Aces, which was a more modern Film Noir, a hybrid crossed with a thriller. This film showed us a lot of the sorts of costumes we could use in the modern day, but to keep the 50s feel we were going for, and this meant that we could do a more modern take on this genre, but still keep the history, due to the storyline we were incorporating in.

In the production we used the music video for What If by dance/ RnB singer Jason Derulo. He used some good camera angles that we thought would be good for some of the ideas that we had formed, for example in his video there is a shot in a car from behind the driver in the car on his phone to let you know what is happening, and we could use this for a scene we had planned earlier. We also looked at the video by hybrid genre artist Ed Sheeran and his video The A Team, and the angles and framing that he used. We could see that he used lots of meat shots, to portray who the protagonist and antagonist of the video were. The director of said video made sure that at certain points it was just the person they wanted in the frame, but then, to generate meaning, had parts were they were with others to show that although they were in the middle of this story, they weren’t known to everyone.  In doing this we had collected a lot more research than we did for the Film Noir as it was important to get the whole meaning in there, and there was a lot more to get as the music video was going to be twice as long and the film opening, so there’d be more edits, angles, lighting issues and other parts that we hadn’t needed in the AS year.

In the post-production of the Film Noir we again looked at the film LA Confidential, as some of the edits and changes in time could be important for the overall style of our opening. In between two scenes it showed a newspaper slamming down to show passing in time and we incorporated this into our video and it became an integral part of the final product. Also the actors in the film showed the passing in time with different voiceovers, so we used this during the first few seconds of our opening to create this meaning. We also looked at Smokin’ Aces, and its less conventional editing, which was much faster paced than you’d expect, possibly because of the year it was produced in, compared to LA Confidential. We took both of these films into account when editing our own films, as we wanted to get a feel of both and incorporate in both of them. As mentioned we used the newspapers in our final film because it then meant we had a common denominator from an existing product and to ours.

In the post-production of the Music Promo Package we looked at the dance/ hip-hop song Day n Nite by Kid Cudi and the hyper-realism that he used, in the fact that there were inanimate objects talking to him and the ‘world’ he was in was blurred in between dreams and reality. This theory is one that we used when editing the video especially, with us adding superhero ‘POW’ effects to make it more comic and to mask any real violence from the audience. We also had thought bubbles in the video, which showed the audience the feelings of the characters in it, without interrupting the song to stop and hear them saying it out loud. We also looked at the original video for the song that we were doing ‘Save The World (Tonight)’ by Dance/ Hip Hop group Swedish House Mafia, which features dogs acting as superheroes, fighting with criminals and saving members of the public. This again showed the hyper-reality and gave us some good ideas of the ‘crimes’ that we could use in our final product. This was something we thought to do in this year, but not the last, as we thought that if it was successful then examples like it must work in other people’s videos too. By looking at the comments section we were able to see peoples opinions on aspects of the video, whereas we couldn’t do this in the AS year without very significant research into the world of film, which we had neither the time nor the resources to do.