Audience Feedback on First Draft and CD Digipak...

I sent out a message on Facebook to some friends that contained a link to our first draft of our music video and asked them to send me back some feedback with three aspects that they liked about the concept/camera shots/mise-en-scene/etc. I also got them to look at my blog and comment on my CD Digipak.

Here is the message I sent out to them;



Here are their responses to the first draft of our video and my CD Digipak;

RESPONDENT NO.1;

"This is really good, its hard to judge it overall with all the black bits so i shall tell u my fav parts... i really like the part with the pa desk thought it was quite an original idea and drew my attention. I liked it with the girl speaking upside down reflects the nature of the song. The shots of the band were good i like it in black and white and the set up of the equipment makes countys stage look pro lol. Not too sure about josh's face :) My other favorite part is with the lipstick marks on the guitar!

One thing i would say maybe the ending could be slightly different it seems a bit slow and is just lacking something........ but what do i know lol.... otherwise its really good... cant wait to see the finished product.

I also looked at your blog i think the cd cover u made is amazing!!!! Looks extremely pro :) xxx"

RESPONDENT NO.2;

"hey hey,
first off love the cd cover! looks amazing!
so....yeah like piano i loved the pa desk part! though it was catchy! And i liked the close up bit of the pile of torn out bits from the magazine when they were being taken off....do you know the part i mean? its kinda hard to explain, but yeah love that bit!! and also love the shots of the girl upside down! singing and crumbleing the paper etc....was really effective! so yeah those are the bits that i like! :D

in contarty to piano i think the end was really effective! and quite enjoyed it! :) i dont think you should change it!!

just curious as to what your gunna put in the black parts....?!"

So now we just need to add in all the new footage we are going to take into the black screens to complete the video, but it is getting really good responses so far! I am also pleased that people seem to like my CD Digipak design!

Paramore Gig...

On Saturday 13th November 2010, I went to the 02 Arena (by boat because the Jubilee line was closed!) to see one of my favourite bands for the third time. It has been so nice to watch their rise to success as I first saw them at a very small venue in 2007 called the Mean Fiddler where they were good but not yet confident in their performance.

I then saw them in 2009 at Wembley Arena which seemed like a huge step up as they were now performing very well to thousands and thousands of people and even they seemed in awe of how far they had come.

So to see them put on such an extravagant show at London's 02 Arena, probably the biggest music venue in London, was unbelievable. They pulled out all the stops and had some brilliant films playing on the screens in the background that added so much to the show. This just shows how effective film can be when put to music.

I found lots of videos of their performance on YouTube so here are a few examples of the show I was at on 13th November. The first one is their opening song called Ignorance, the graphics in the background were amazing and the lighting was very impressive too;





Here is another of their songs called 'Playing God'



Pressure - She introduces the whole band here and finds out who has/hasn't been to a Paramore show before...









The Only Exception was the last song before the encore and was performed beautifully, and Misery Business was the very last song, probably because that was their first huge hit.
They used fireworks and confetti with these two last songs and when you look back at one of their older performances (which I have put at the bottom of this post) shows how far they have come as a band.



I thought it was relevant to document my trip to see this band because they are of a fairly similiar genre to Kings Of Leon and they're live shows would cater to the same target audience.

Hypodermic Syringe Effect...

The hypodermic needle model (also known as the hypodermic-syringe model) is a model of communications also referred to as the "magic bullet" perspective, or the transmission-belt model. Essentially, this model holds that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model is rooted in 1930s behaviorism and is largely considered obsolete today.

The hypodermic needle theory implied that mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behaviour change. Several factors contributed to this "strong effects" theory of communication, including: the fast rise and popularization of radio and television, the emergence of the persuasion industries, such as advertising and propaganda, the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children, and Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party.

The "Magic Bullet" or "Hypodermic Needle Theory" of direct influence effects was not as widely accepted by scholars as many books on mass communication indicate. The magic bullet theory was not based on empirical findings from research but rather on assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along" (Lowery & DefFleur, 1995, p. 400). The "Magic Bullet" theory graphically assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head" (Berger 1995). Similarly, the "Hypodermic Needle Model" uses the same idea of the "shooting" paradigm. It suggests that the media injects its messages straight into the passive audience (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). This passive audience is immediately affected by these messages. The public essentially cannot escape from the media's influence, and is therefore considered a "sitting duck" (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). Both models suggests that the media is vulnerable to the messages shot at them because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the media's effects on the masses at the time (Davis, Baron 1981).

The phrasing "hypodermic needle" is meant to give a mental image of the direct, strategic, and planned infusion of a message into an individual. But as research methodology became more highly developed, it became apparent that the media had selective influences on people.
The most famous incident often cited as an example for the hypodermic needle model was the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds and the subsequent reaction of widespread panic among its American mass audience. However, this incident actually sparked the research movement, led by Paul Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog, that would disprove the magic bullet or hypodermic needle theory, as Hadley Cantril managed to show that reactions to the broadcast were, in fact, diverse, and were largely determined by situational and attitudinal attributes of the listeners.

(This information was gathered from www.wikipedia.org)

Audience Theory...

Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies.
With a specific focus on rhetoric, some, such as Walter Ong, have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the text is addressing. Others, such as Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor have said writers and speakers actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Some others like Ede and Lunsford try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is "fictionalized," as Ong would say, but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience.
There is also a wide range of media theory and communication studies theories about the audience's role in any kind of mediated communication. A sub-culturally focussed and Marxism-inflected take on the subject arose as the 'New audience theory' or 'Active audience theory' from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1980s.

(This information was gathered from www.wikipedia.org)