Genre essay (Hammond)

" Media texts rely on audience knowledge of generic codes and conventions in order for them to create meaning"
Analyse on of your coursework productions in relation to genre.

Genre is a big part of my music video that i produced as it had everything to do with connecting to the audience. The genre of a media text is vital for connecting and pleasing an audience and genre is a type of text as Daniel Chandler explains.

I would say that my music video is a mixture of the genres of performance and illustrative. This is because in the video, throughout we are telling a story of the female singer and showing what she is going through. But then we are also giving a performance as we have shots of the band together in the band room and have the main female singer singing to the audience through the camera. The genre of the music of our video would be soft rock and i have used many generic conventions throughout the video. Examples of this would be a close up of lip-syncing as we needed lots of close up shots in our video to get across the emotion of what the song was showing us. Also for the performance of band shots we had mimed playing of instruments to fit in with the music and make it look professional. We had a wide variety of camera shots in the video and the most unusual we had would be when Laura lay down and we had the camera above her. We did this because the definition of her face looked good and it fitted in with the genre as other media texts used these kind of weird shots in the music videos of the genre soft rock.

One of the important parts of my music video was the connect with the audience and so a main thing me and Laura did was ask questions of people that listened to soft rock so we could understand the sort of things they liked to see within a music video so we could keep to the genre and allow the audience to be happy.  By doing this it allowed the audience to feel comfortable when watching the music video as we could structure it to fit the genre and also keeping to what the audience know and like, which in ours was telling a story and connecting with the audience emotionally. Rick Altman as he argues that genres give audiences a set of pleasures. In my music video i had both emotional and intellectual pleasures for the audience. This is because we had emotions from the female singer to connect with the audience and and to create a response from the audience  for example, questioning what the female did to be in this position and what she is going to do about it. The intellectual pleasure was that it left the audience wondering the plot of the story being explained throughout the music video and so made them relate to their own life and how they handle situations.

To make sure that we stuck to our genre we looked at other media texts and the music videos that they did to look at the kind of dress and colouring of shots to make sure we connected to the audience. Also by talking to our audience we got a grasp of the type of things they wanted to see in the way of dress and make up. For example many people said they liked to see the singers as being strong and powerful in what they were saying and to get the emotions across so it linked to the song. So by concentrating on what the audience wanted and still sticking to our genre we managed to create a music video that fit the expectation of generics that were used by other artists with the same genre.