My Idea

My idea has been influenced by my research of the song genre which is R&B ballad, although the cover version I have chosen may be considered more of a pop genre. I have found that strong lyrical songs such as this one will tell a story within the text opposed to lots of dancing, which you may find in music videos such as ‘Just Dance’ by Lady Gaga. My idea links into the lyrics of the song. There are a lot of match on word opportunities for me to create within my video.

For my second idea I thought about doing a music video with dancing opposed to telling a story. This is because I feel that dancing may be an easier option for me to complete, and because dancing generally fits in with most R&B music. Dancing is what an audience watching an R&B video would normally expect because of the research I have done. For example in the music video for Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ dancing is the main objective throughout. As in the video ‘Material Girls’ by Madonna, there is all dancing. 

My Survey

I found that doing a survey around my school would help me with my research and planning for my music video. I managed to recieve the answers that I expected when doing this survey. People around my age group liked R&B and R&B ballad music, and even if they didn't they answered that they too expected other's of our age group to. I found that people also answered that they would expect to see dancing in R&B music videos and in R&B ballad music videos they would expect to see a story being told through the lyrics. Most people also answered that they prefered to see stories in music videos to make them interesting. I took all of this on board when creating my music video.

Survey

Put a circle around the bullet point to indicate your answer

1.      Do you like R&B music?

·         Yes

·         No

·         Sometimes

2.      Do you think people your age group like R&B music?

·         Yes

·         No (If not state what age group you think do)

·         Sometimes

3.      Do you watch music videos?

·         Yes

·         No

·         Sometimes

4.      Do you like music videos?

·         Yes

·         No

·         Sometimes

5.      In an R&B ballad song what do you most expect to see in the music video?

·         A story being told through the lyrics

·         Lots of dancing to the music

·         Voyeurism (Women’s bodies or sexual acts)

·         Maybe all of them

·         Something else (if so please state what)

6.      What do you most like to see in a music video?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….......

7.      What is your favourite music video? Or one that sticks in your mind.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………............

Thank you for completing this survey.

Voyeurism

"In clinical psychology voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature. In popular imagination the term is used in a more general sense to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge, with no necessary implication of sexual interest.
Voyeurism (from the French voyeur, "one who looks") can take several forms, but its principal characteristic is that the voyeur does not normally relate directly with the subject of their interest, who is often unaware of being observed."
I decided to look at the theorist Laura Mulvey's work to help with my idea's for my music video. Mulvey looks at voyeurism, and I thought whether or not I should put this aspect into my video. I have decided against this now though as my song is a type of R&B ballad with both male and female roles.

Voyeurism - Laura Mulvey

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" and "fetishistic."

Some feminists criticized "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," claiming that, while Mulvey believed that classical Hollywood cinema reflected and shaped the "patriarchal order," the perspective of her writing actually remained within that very heterosexual order. The article was thus said to have contradicted its "radical" claims, by actually being a covert perpetuation of heterosexual patriarchal order. This was because, in her article, Mulvey presupposes the spectator to be a heterosexual man. She was thus felt to be denying the existence of lesbian women, gay men, heterosexual women, and those outside of these identities.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film – a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different. Her article also did not take into account the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Gay male film theorists such as Richard Dyer have used Mulvey's work as a starting point to explore the complex projections that many gay men fix onto certain female stars (e.g. Liza Minnelli, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland.)

Introduction

I have chosen to do Task 5 for my A2 Media Studies coursework, which is the 'Music Promotion Task'. I have chosen to do this task out of the others because I felt it would enable me to seek my full potential in my coursework as I enjoy to use my imagination and therefore creating a story within a music video (which will be part of my task) would allow me to do that.