Media Studies

Evaluation for Term 1b

Liam Grosvenor-Findlay

This term the class and I have learnt about The Big Issue, The Jungle Book and constructing a
music video. We have learnt about the broad history and founders of the organisations,
creating note documents piled with information. In this evaluation I will divide my writing
into three sections, representing the three main topics and then go into further detail on each
one, summarising what I have learnt.

The Big Issue:

Referring to broad history in my introduction, I had this organisation in mind. Founded in
1991, The Big Issue has been a mouth piece for the homeless and a symbol of redemption,
supplying people living on the streets with magazines to buy in bulk for a low price to be
resold. Entrepreneur, Lord John Bird founded (1991) the newspaper and it is now his most
famous success with the goal overcome poverty. This goal captivates people and influences
many to be selfless to help strangers get back on their own two feet and change their life that
little bit more in buying the £2.50 magazine.

Watching many videos with the topic of The Big Issue I believe that there is a huge diversity
in who the Big Issue targets. Their vague audience would be mainstreamers as throughout the
26 years of being around they have a lot of celebrity endorsements and exclusives to appeal to
most of the public. Seeing a celebrity face on a cover can be the tipping point to buying the
magazine as people will see the famous people as them looking for change in poverty. The
splash on the front page connotes a wide appeal to help the homeless from highly influential
people. Overall, there is no clear target audience as there is a diversity of topics presented in
the big issue but I believe they are mainstreamers.

Intertextuality is creating one text in reference to another, using another piece of media in
another. It can be used to add comedic affect, an ‘in’ joke from the director to the audience.
Both evoke that the intertextuality is mainly used in the comedy genre of films. Also, a self-
eventual is another form of intertextuality because it would appear in a sequel referring to the
original movie. Nowadays many people will pastiche due to the ‘anxiety of influence’:
producers won’t make something completely new as it may fail so to avoid this, they pastiche.

Using photoshop was extremely challenging for me due to the lack of experience I have on the
software. Knowing this, I adapted to it in my free time to try and get the best final result
possible. Intertextuality was used in the subtitle boasting an ‘exclusive’ about music. I used a
neon edit to make my splash stand out, using intertextuality from the Tron film cover; The
idea was to give an idea of the topics being unpredictable, engaging and exciting like the film
and further highlighting my view that The Big Issue has a vague target audience that can
appeal to all with their diversity. I wanted to incorporate this into my own cover. The colour
choice was to have a dark background with a juxtaposition of bright (in this case neon) colours
which can be seen on many past covers on their website.

The Jungle Book:

The Jungle Book has history dating back to the 20th Century. The Jungle Book was written in
1894 by Rudyard Kipling and was mainly inspired by British Imperialism in India.
The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories
were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations.
It was a series of short stories. There was 27 released adaptations in the 20th century in films
and TV series which emphasises the magnitude of this universally known story.
The comedic take and talking animals allowed Anthropomorphism - the attribution of human
characteristics, behaviour or qualities to a god, animal, or object. Significant in story telling
for children, using animals to tell human stories. It gives many serious topics a light hearted
feel. The presentation of a dictatorship is completely not noticed but yet it teaches children
(who watch the adaptations) correct social morals by using heavy topics.

The context of Disney’s 1967 adaptation is a musical comedy aimed at families. The cultural
aspects include the vultures made to be similar to The Beatles. In this time period, slavery was
ongoing with outbreaks of protests in America. A lot was riding on The Jungle Book. In 1961,
101 Dalmations had been a huge box-office success, but the next film, The Sword in the Stone
(1963) was not. Thankfully, the film was a huge success and is still iconic today, with the
songs being regarded as the best out of all of Disney’s soundtracks. The 2016 adaptation is
much darker. The connotations of this is that Disney are looking to expand their audience from
the traditional children aim. With diversity, they will grow as a company and allow themselves
lots of success in future films due to a bigger fan base.

The Jungle book is not owned. It is in free public domain, this allows the story to be developed
and adapted over years. The catch is that institutions cannot use ideas from adaptations, they
can only use their new ideas or original ideas from the original book. Disney marketed the first
trailer to teenagers by getting the most scary and thrilling clips from the movie to entice them
to watch the movie, engaged men by showing past Disney action movies in a Super Bowl
advert and appeared on talk shows to get families to all be aware of the upcoming film.

Music Video
The first ever music video was published on August 1, 1981 on MTV. Since then, videos have
captured the imaginations of millions and shown interpretations and personal views about
songs of the artists, expressing their emotions visually as well as on audio. This has been
highly significant in having a ‘hit’ song.

David Morley (1991) argued that there were five types of uses and gratifications: cognitive,
affective, tension release, personal integrative and social. This shows that even a decade into
making music videos, they all had detailed meaning to try and captivate different groups of
people. Compared to today, class videos didn't have a huge budget like todays, ranging from
$20,000 to $500,000 and up.

There are three main genres for a music video: narrative, artistic and performance that can be
made into hybrid videos together, depending on the artist and director. A narrative clip
contains a visual story that can be followed by viewers. Theses no visual link to the music
(such as dancing to the beat or lip syncing). Artistic music videos have no or no clear link to
the music, they can be random sequences of videos and pictures. The performance video
shows the singer(s) in more than one setting, lip syncing to their song. This is very popular
with pop music with the likes of Bruno Mars.
In my own music video, I decided to compose a narrative. The idea was two people bumping
into each other and instantly making a connection. They would then proceed to have a great
day and socialise, all from verbal communication after bumping into one another. This was
edited to be an upbeat video with edits such as slow motion to put emphasises on certain
points and high-key lighting when meeting to evoke the amount of fun they were
experiencing. Although I enjoyed editing my video, I would've liked to film more scenes to
develop the narrative snd keep a constant flow to then come to a climax. As well as posting
my music video I worked on in class, I edited an artistic style of my footage from festivals
that is also on my website to showcase my editing in more than one genre of music video.