Explore how media language combines to create meaning in the music video for Are We Ready by Two Door Cinema Club. You should make reference to
- Generic conventions
- Ideological perspectives
- Elements of narrative
Knee jerk reaction
This conventional indie pop video uses genre conventions to appeal to a larger audience. However, it also includes unconventional elements, making it highly polysemic
Plan
Bright colours
Shaky camera
Deliberately low production values
Fast paced editing
Ideology: consumerism
Beat matched
Variety of camera angles
POV
Binary oppositions
Intertextuality
Direct mode of address
Continuous narrative (in order)
Clear story
Continuity editing
Lyrics appear on packaging
Time jumping
Challenges advertising industry
70s 80s aesthetic
retro
Costumes
Backdrops
Weird and creepy
Gross
Not conventionally attractive
Makeup
Prosthetics
Horror
Unconventional camera angles
Dutch tilt/canted angle
Barthes codes
Levi-strauss
Baudrillard postmodernism
Introduction
Media language refers to conventions of the music video which construct the ideology of the producer. In this essay I shall argue that the 70s aesthetic and editing style construct stereotypical conventions of indie pop genre to encode the ideology of the producer and appeal to their target audience. I shall also argue that this music video includes many unconventional elements also, which creates polysemy [GOOD]
or
Media language refers to the building blocks of media products, and the various techniques that producers use to encode their ideology. In this essay, I shall argue the video to Are We Ready uses genre conventions in both conventional and atypical ways, in order to construct a confusing and exciting mode of address for the target audience [BETTER!]
Content
- On screen graphics repeat the lyrics of the song in an intertextual reference to the advertising industry. This encodes through mise en scene the ideology that adverts present disingenuous and fake mode of address, which is highly manipulative of audience, This is further anchored and reinforced through dangerous and additive products such as cigarettes, chocolate, medication and alcohol.
- The video consistently uses an unconventional and highly direct mode of address throughout to deliberately make the target audience feel uncomfortable. This achieved through the use of highly confrontation direct mode of address, and is further anchored through intimidating and creepy fake smiles that the performers use throughout. Additionally, a filter has been applied in post production to blur and soften the skins of the performers, and makeup has been used to construct a binary opposition between pale sickly skin and yellow teeth
- The video is also unconventional through the highly atypical representation of its male performers. Far from being stereotypically, hegemonically attractive, the performers are augmented through hair and makeup to look both physically unattractive and even unwell. This, in combination with the MES of the drugs and constant use of sickening canted angles represent the damaging and dangerous side effects caused by the products being sold. This constructs a potentially controversial and even anti capitalist ideology
- Presents a satirical and subversive attack on consumerism
- ...through the use of 70s iconography. A range of this is used, including jump cuts, and a very straightforward, even jerky editing. This, along with the shabby, cheap looking MESof the setting construct a video with deliberately low production values. This of course serves to make the video even more unconventional, which allows it to target an even larger audience. This is a classic example of Neale's repetition and difference theory, where some elements are repeated and others are changed in order to appeal to audiences
- the video constructs a highly postmodern and deliberately challenging ideology through it's disparate and confusing use of mise en scene. By combining a number of different elements from different time periods, such as 70's drug commercials and 50 Western movies, as well as intertextual reference to the horror genre through the MES of peeling skin and vile, pale flesh...