Audience Essay - 1

For my A2 production, i created a cross-media promotional package for an upcoming artist.  We named our artist Tori Lorente with the genre of her being pop/urban.  Our target audience we selected were 16-25 year old as we thought this age is very similar to our own and they are most likely to listen to this genre of music, therefore it will be easier for us to relate and act as part of the audience for our video.
As mentioned above the age of our audience is 16025 year old, both female and male.  We did not chose a specific class for our audience as we wanted to send the message that anyone can listen to her music, regardless of their financial situation.  For our artist we created a music video, website and a digipak alongside four social media accounts; Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
A major part of our product was to make sure our target audience could relate to Tori's lyrics of her song.  Therefore, we chose a song which conveyed meaning of love and heartbreak which is a common occurrence for young adults.  The setting of our video was in SOHO in London, which is where Tori grew up.  Not only was this her hometown, SOHO is famous for attracting young, hipster like teens who aren't afraid to be themselves which is one of the messages we wanted to send to our audience.  From this, we decided to subvert the genre of pop and make Tori look stereo typically 'normal'.  Therefore, we dressed her in black jeans, a red hoodie and trainers, however she had her hair layed elegantly and her make up look was subtle but slick.  From gaining audience feedback, 75% of people claimed Tori's image was different to what they expected.  This is because people often see pop artists dressed in wham outfits like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga etc.  This is where we incorporated Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposites.  Tori came from a lower class family but her music is set in the middle/upper class of London.  Again, her genre is pop yet her look was more of a casual, urban type costume.
When creating the website for Tori Lorente, I tried to present it simply but eye-catching at the same time.  I wanted to use the idea of a hypodermic syringe so the audience's would get an instant affect/idea of what Tori is like as an artist.  Therefore, i kept the synergy of her colour red continuous throughout the website and i also added vibrant and bold fonts here and there in order to keep the flow of the website intriguing.  On the website, I made sure i linked her social media accounts to the page and kept updating the news website as this is the most common way our target audience can be linked to Tori.
For the digipak, again we used the main colour to be red as this kept the synergy going.  We used the same font as on the website so we make it recognisable by the audience.  In one of the sides of the digipak, we added a personal message written by Tori to her fans thanking them for buying her album.  We saw this as a clever way of getting close with her fans and making sure she obtained a strong fan base right from the very start.
Our audience is an active audience, therefore they get themselves actively involved with Tori which meant they would be buying tickets to her concert and buying her album at the shops etc.  Not only this but due to creating social media accounts, the audience can see when and where it is being released.  Social media is crucial to use as part of engaging with the audience as they are at the peak age of using these accounts so they are more likely to see links on their than they are off a billboard or a poster etc.
To conclude, i believe my group and I were successful in attracting our audience especially as they were at a similar age to us.  Therefore, by using our own experiences with the media and artists we love, we were able to use our own knowledge and research beyond this in order to create a cross media promotional package suitable for our audience.

Genre Essay - 1

In my A2 production, I along my three classmates created a music video branding a new artist.  The genre of our music was electro pop mixed with an urban twist.  We decided that our target audience was people ages 16-25 years old as this would be easier for us to relate with their taste of music.  We were inspired by other pop artists such as; Bebe Rexa and Dua Lipa.  By watching existing media products, this helped us to create a music video which we had planned.

The setting of our music video was based in Soho in London.  This area is known to attracting unique, urban, different people.  Therefore, it strongly fits the genre of our music video which is why we captured distinctive shots.  These shots included pan shots of the city landscape and our artist (Tori Lorente) herself in the same shot.  We also included (flip shot, two areas looking like one) which was effective after editing as it was noticed by others when we received feedback of the first draft.  Another area we specifically chose to incorporate was the theme across our cross media promotional package.  We wanted to maintain the colours of red, grey and black throughout each product; especially red as it is a bold, illuminating colour which stood out and continued the synergy through the website, digipak and music video.  From this idea, we noticed other pop artists like Ariana Grande kept to baby pink through all her albums and on her website.  We found this an intelligent way of creating a star image for our artist and emphasizing the genre.

Goodwin claims there are five aspects needed to complete a music video.  These include; thought beats, narrative performance, star image, relation of visuals and technical aspects of the video.  as the genre of our music video was pop/urban, it is known that thought beats are often used in videos with the pop genre.  One example is Calvin Harris' Bounce.  We used this as an inspiration for our video; when the chorus dropped, the camera shot shoots to the right and back again in time with the music which was shown from our audience feedback to be very effective.
Another theorist we took inspiration from was Vernallis' theory.  He believed there are four concepts that manufacture a video including; narrative, editing, camera movement and diegesis.  From this we decided to edit our music video completely subverting the usual effects and transitions a mainstream pop video would entail.  Therefore, we took more of a slow approach by editing many of our shots in slow motion in order to create a star image for our artist.  Therefore, we linked the editing effect with the camera movement, we decided to move the camera in a slow, flowing motion so we could end up with a fluent, smooth final product.  However, we did add flashing cuts and sharp transitions during the video to make it interesting to the audience yet we made sure it fitted.
From my A2 production, i learnt that to make sure our genre is obvious to the audience, it is important to research existing media artists to get a similar idea.  However, once we retrieved these ideas we managed to add a twist to the product in order to make it our own.