Audience Essay Question

'Media texts will never be successful unless they are carefully constructed to target pre-established audience needs or desires.' Evaluate the ways that you constructed a media text to target a specific audience.

     In the research stage before we started to create our music video we spent time viewing existing music videos from the rock and rock/pop genre including 'My Immortal' by Evanescence, 'Sorrow' by Flyleaf and 'Jar of Hearts' by Christina Perri. This helped us to become aware of the conventions used within this style of music video. The main thing that we noticed was the costume and make up. The females in these videos had a feminine grunge style, usually pairing dresses with boots and eyeliner. This look definitely lends itself to the rock style and could be something that the audience can relate to or look up to. In our music video we developed this idea and the costume was a leather jacket over a black lace dress and docs. The styling was more focused on the female, meaning that the female audience would probably be more interested. Viewing existing music videos also helped us to decide to use both a narrative and performance shots because most of the other rock genre music videos did both. The story was basically about finding salvation in music and our audience would be able to relate to this because we are targeting big music fans and people that are involved in music themselves. Rock music fans tend to be very loyal and it is often more than
music to them, it's more about a lifestyle. Also, the feelings and emotion we tried to portray could also be something that the audience could relate to. If you think about the stereotype of rock fans as 'emos' and the connotations this has then the tone of the video very much fits.

     We thought it was important to have performance shots, not only for the narrative, but because a lot of other rock genre videos do and it is a convention that our target audience would enjoy and probably relate to. Rock music fans are the ones that spend a lot of time at concerts, gigs and festivals and are very into the live music scene. They may also play or sing themselves, whether it be in a band as a solo artist, meaning that the quality of live and 'real' music is very important. Therefore, we wanted to portray the live music aspect of the band within the video, making sure to give them an image as a 'real' band.

     We also created an audience profile which helped us to think about the shops that the audience would be likely to shop at which gave us ideas about what clothes they might wear. We looked at local shops such as Voodoo in Leicester, only stores like Disturbia and well known high street shops like New Look and River Island. During the research and planning stage I looked on Lookbook for some styling and aesthetic ideas too. The aesthetic is obviously very important for a music video and it is important that the artist is portrayed in a way that the audience can both relate and look up to. We wanted a strong female but not someone intimidating, meaning that the mixture of feminine and grunge worked well as well as being quite conventional for the genre of music.