Analyse one of your media productions in relation to representation.

In my second year of media studies the brief was to create a music promo package including a music video. I created a video for the song "No sleep tonight" by enter shikari. The song and video was of rock genre with a hybrid sub genre of post hardcore, trance-core and metal-core. I will discuss this production in relation to representation and the theorists James Baker, Richard Dyer, Dick Hebdidge and Jean Baudrillard.

Theorist James Baker says that media productions are mediated to represent particular meanings in certain ways. He explained that the mediation of these works in 3 ways, which are often used alongside each other in steps to create the final product. The first "Step" is selection. The producers select what they wish to end up on the screen, a lot of irrelevant material, or things the producer does not agree with will be left out of the final video. This can be applied to our production as we chose the storyline that we wanted to include in the video, leaving out a lot of things that could have important impact on both the narrative and how the people in the video were represented to make our video simple enough to understand in the short amount of time that music tracks allow. The second step or way of mediation is the organisation of content into a way which real life is not. Again this applies to our video, the best example would be that that we have band footage between main events in our video which would not be seen in real life but makes perfect sense in this particular type of media text, especially in this genre. The final step is focusing.  Mediation always ends up with the audience being encouraged to focus on a particular aspect of the narrative and deterred from reading into irrelevant topics related to the video. For example in our video we tried to have the audience focus on the life of a man, working for an oil company, who was unhappy and ended up drinking heavily and blacking out towards the end of the video. We did this using fast paced shots not leaving much time for the audience to consider off-screen aspects that we found irrelevant and chose not to represent in our video. This allowed our audience to focus on how we represented the main characters and his current state of mind, as well as the culture and genre of our band.

Richard Dyer explains how the image of particular social groups, alongside the "star image" of the band/performer in texts, create stereotypes that define who is "in" and who is not in a particular group of sub genre. This can be applied to our video. The lead singer of our band in the video gets the most screen time and is one of the main characters in both the narrative and the non-narrative sequences within the text. We created an audience profile and decided to represent our star in similar ways, we got him to wear the same style clothing and the same hair and looks as our audience. This conforms to Richard Dyer's idea as our star  is reflecting the image of a particular social group, by doing so he is "in" with that group. This also links in to another theory of Dyer's, saying that music videos create a star image that is followed and often looked up to by the social groups and sub genres of the video and often looked at negatively by opposing or mainstream genres. This reflects our video as those of the correct sub genre will understand it and likely take from our star's style whereas people from other genres and groups may look at it in a negative light, possibly seeing through the narrative to the alcohol and greed themed background story of the video.

This leads on to the next theory. Dick hebdidge wrote that sub cultures represented in media texts can be and are often perceived as negative due to their nature of criticism to the dominant standard. In relation to our video this means our band, star and fans could be seen as a negative group because they dress act and look different to the dominant standard or the "Mainstream". Hebdidge also argued that sub-cultures bring together likeminded individuals who feel neglected or outside of the standard social groups and allow them to develop a separate sense of identity. These groups are represented differently than the main groups in texts, often going against the mainstream views. For example a mainstream society view could be that it is a good thing to have a steady job in an office working for a large firm, whereas in our video that view is represented negatively and our social group is united against such views, whereas other sub genres and groups may look at it differently.