1B Audience Essay (Improved)

For my advanced portfolio, my group and I created a music video for the song 'I'm 17' by Rizzle Kicks. Our video is designed to appeal to a niche audience, of a specific age (late teens) and a stereotypically rebellious subculture. Musically, our video is designed to attract indie audiences as well as urban audiences as the song is a rap over an indie instrumental (originally by Arctic Monkeys). In terms of gender, our video is more orientated towards males, as they can better relate to the role and behaviour of the protagonist, as well as the fact that the music is sung by a male.

In the planning stages of our video we took inspiration from acts we consider to be similar to Rizzle Kicks. These included Ed Sheeran, The Streets and Wretch 32 as they are urban UK acts with a more alternative, fun and less agressive twist than most. We found that these artists managed to produce creative videos on low budgets, shot in similarly suburban settings, such as The Streets' 'Fit But You Know It' video and Wretch 32's 'Unorthodox' video. Similar settings to these which we used included the shots of our artist dancing and bopping as he goes down the street, and sitting outside a row of shops while rapping and looking away from the camera. We inferred that using similar settings would clearly define the genre and attract the desired audience as they relate to the visuals for being similar to visuals associated with other artists in this genre. Ang (1991) and Hartley (1987) noted that the audience is in the interest of the institution and it is therefore important for them to be able to visualise and cater for this audience when researching and planning.

Our audience not only played a key part in the pre-production but also during production. We used our audience as a reference for how well we were performing our task of appealing to them with our video. We did this by gaining feedback from our peers after creating our initial rough cut of our video. This allowed our audience to have an input on what they liked about the video, what they felt did not work, and what else they would like to see. We kept note of feedback on our blogs and then edited and reworked our video to fit the criteria of the feedback received, making the changes clear with each new version of the video we posted. An example of something we changed based on audience feedback at the halfway stage, is we included more camera interaction in the second half of the video, as the audience felt it added personality.

Another important element to think about is how the audience will interpret and react to what our video portrays. In our video we used shots of the artist underage drinking as we believe that teenagers will relate to this, and others will find it humorous. However this was a risk as if viewers have an oppositional reading they will see this as a message which encourages and condones underage drinking. To try and restrict the extent that the message could be interpreted in this way we limited the number of shots featuring this behaviour and tried to make them more humorous than serious and realistic. This humour is also a key gratification of our video, as it adds to the repeatability of the video, with our audience being more likely to watch it again in order to see the one or two specific humorous moments again, rather than if there were not any funny scenes included, or if the video was a strict narrative. These aforementioned more humorous and light-hearted scenes include the ones of our artist interacting with the camera, and the ones of him appearing drunk in the house while drinking beer.

It would be fair to say in hindsight that our video was built around our audience, and they were therefore an active audience, as their stereotypes and needs were catered for by our media, rather than us creating messages and feeding them to a specific audience.