Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra) - official video

Gotye is an indie rock / experimental singer-songwriter. The video was produced, directed and edited by  Natasha Pincus of Australian based Stark Raving Productions. 

The video is a very simple concept, showing Gotye naked against a plain white backdrop singing into the camera. As the song progresses his skin and the background are covered with a painted pattern, which is done by stop-motion animation. When the featured singer Kimbra sings, the view widens and she appears painted into the background and moves closer and closer to Gotye before she is singing into his ear. The song already has two perspectives, Gotye’s and Kimbra’s, the lyrics provide both sides of the story. The paint on their bodies gradually disappears during the final chorus which could be symbolic for their separation.The stop motion animation had to be blended into the live vocal footage.

The video doesn’t have a narrative because the song’s lyrics speak for themselves. The song is about a bad breakup. Gotye said in an interview with Rolling Stone Australia ‘It wasn’t a nasty break-up, but it was messy in the sense that we hurt each other more than we needed to because it wasn’t a clean break… We both realised we had to move on and we haven’t seen each other since.’ The video was incredibly well received.

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.

She instead stated that she intended to use Freud and Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon." She 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" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article."

"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).

Feminist critic Gaylyn Studlar wrote extensively to contradict Mulvey's central thesis that the spectator is male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic perspective. Studlar suggested rather that visual pleasure for all audiences is derived from a passive, masochistic perspective, where the audience seeks to be powerless and overwhelmed by the cinematic image.

Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account. She addressed many of her critics, and changed some of her opinions, in a follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (which also appears in the Visual and Other Pleasurescollection).

Analysis of Katy Perry's album 'Teenage Dream'

Analysis of Katy Perry's album 'Teenage Dream' - CD Cover

Analysis of Katy Perry's album 'Teenage Dream' - CD Discs

Analysis of Katy Perry's album 'Teenage Dream' - Back Cover

Magazine advert layout idea's

Both of these images gave us a deeper insight on the common structures and layouts for magazine adverts.

Music Video Comparisons

Magazine Advert Analysis - Adele

Lady Gaga Magazine Advertisement

Some Audience Feedback

We decided to carry out some audience research to see what and how others were perceiving it.

These are the two covers we have come up with. Now with the opinion of the audience we will finalise which cover to go with.  We asked 20 individuals which cover they felt most represented our genre, artist and song and the result we received was:

30 percent of the people I asked said black and a large 70 percent preferred the yellow one. This will aid us in the decision of deciding which cover to finalise.

After concluding that the yellow cover will be the one we will work further on to improve, we then interviewed our target audience. During the making of our digipak, we felt it was important to get audience feedback in order to improve our final product, ensure it is appealing to our target market and also to make it as real as possible. We set out 5 questions to ask our target audience and concluded the following results/answers.

Here are the questions I asked and the answers I received:

Do you like the positioning of the text and image? Do they complement each other?

Most of the audience responded with yes the positioning is good. Most people really liked the creativity of it and the bright colour. However they said that the background was a little simple.

So we thought we should add some further stars or designs in the background and make it slightly busier.

Are the sizes/font of the text easy to read?

Majority answered Yes the sizes are fine. Everyone really liked the font and thought it represented the original artists well.

After gathering this information we decided to keep text the way it was.

What stand out on the cover/the unique selling point to you?

I found out that what most appealed to the audience was the use of the colour yellow as it was bright and bold and making statement which reflects the meaning of the song. This is exactly what we wanted and were happy that the audience realised the significance of this colour.

Another comment they made was that they liked the fact that there was not a main image of the artists on the cover as this is something they would expect from a band like ‘scouting for girls’.

A further USP appealing to the audience was the title of the song being written within the main image of the sunglasses (This was one of our personal favourites too).

Does the cover represent the indie/pop genre?

All the people asked answered Yes as they felt that we kept the fun element throughout it with the bright and bold colours which represented the pop element but also kept it very “indie” as there was no picture of the artists on the cover and this is a very common concept amongst that genre.

Any suggestions?

There were no specific suggestions made but to maybe trial and error with the position of the text and image. Everyone was actually excited to see our final piece along with the whole digipack.

Overall we are all pleased with what we have created and with further alterations hopefully it will end up like we had imagined.

Now that we have gathered this information we can apply it to not just our cover but the whole digipack and be sure that we are targeting our chosen target market. 

Album Cover Analysis - Bruno Mars

Album Cover Analysis - The Saturdays

I have chosen to analyse the album cover of the British girl band, The Saturdays. They are a pop band with a target audience of young girls from the ages of roughly 13-23. They are signed to Polydor Records and this is their 4^th studio album, which was released at the end of 2011. The audience of this band will most likely buy this album for pleasure and escapism. It is a fun, dance music album with larger than life topics. The lyrical content of this album is carefree and creates a surrealistic world of no worries. This is what one would expect from a pop girl-band.

Carol Vernallis

Comparison of The Saturdays' album covers

The Saturdays album covers compared

Here are the album covers of that the pop girl band ‘The Saturdays’ have released.  Here are the similarities between their own albums:

• ·       Band name text- the band name has been written in the same font and style throughout all the covers which becomes an iconic style for them and allows the target audience to instantly identify.
• ·       There is a common concept of using bright colours.
• ·       There is a common theme between the girls, be that the make-up, clothes or even style of posing.
• ·       In all the album covers, they seem to be making the main attention-drawer their bodies. This is done by their style of posing, which accentuate their long legs. This is done to portray them in an idolistic way, so their demographics (young females) look up to them and aspire to be like them.
• ·       Even though their demographics are young females, they still have a sex appeal to the male audience. LAURA MULVEY argues that this voyeurism involves turning the represented figure itself into a fetish (object) so that it becomes increasingly beautiful but more objectified. Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to the cult of the female celebrity, celebrated for her looks but considered as an object and often treated as such.
• ·       Male stars are active, dynamic and not always conventionally attractive. Female stars, on the other hand, must be glamorous and attractive. Therefore, they are seen as ‘eye-candy’ to appease the male gaze of the male audience. Moreover, even though their main demographics are young females, they dress and illustrate themselves in a manner that will attract the male gender towards them as well. This helps to increase their awareness and widen their audience.
• ·       DAVID GAUNTLETT argues that in contemporary society, gender roles are more complex and that the media reflect this. He points out that female role models today are often glamorous as well as successful in a way that previously they were not. He states that much of this is due to the rise of ‘girl power’ and ‘women independency’ in the media, through identities constructed by music artists such as DESTINY’S CHILD and THE SATURDAYS. However, The Saturdays are a recent establishment. This is as well as contemporary actresses, for example, who are demanding less passive film roles. He argues that our expectations of gender are flexible and culturally dependent, therefore will continue to change.

Back Covers

Photoshop Tutorial We Used For Help - 2

Photoshop Tutorial We Used For Help - 1

Some Of The Editing Websites Used

http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=115&page=2

www.brusheezy.com

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/41-nicest-photoshop-photo-effects-photoshop-tutorials/

Magazine Advert Analysis