Audience Theory

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Hypodermic Model Theory

• Dating from the 1920's
• It is a crude model, and suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data

Basic principles of Hypodermic/Bullet Theory

Reflect Moment

• However, thinking about your own media product, what specific production decisions did you take to try and encourage your audiences to interpret and respond in a desired way and, how successful do you think you were in achieving it?

Used a specific effect, Teal Orange, to signify the Music Video narrative was entering a flashback. The brightness and colourful look of the effect suggests that the footage is of a happier time, when the protagonist of the Music Video and her lover were together, particularly when compared to the dull, Strife effect the footage of the present features.

• Reflecting on the content of your audience feedback, to what extent was your audience's interpretation of your text far from passive?

A fairly obvious visual difference between the two clips, and with the soldier present in the Past shots identifies them as flashbacks, meaning the audience doesn't have to work particularly hard to understand the narrative

Users and Gratification Theory

• Denis McQuail 1987

Blulmer and Katz stated that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:

• Diversion = Escape from everyday problems and routine
• Personal Relationships = Using the media for emotional and other interaction e.g. Substituting soap operas for family life
• Personal Identity = Finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
• Surveillance = Information which could be useful for living e.g. Weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains
• Zillman =  Has shown the influence of mood on media choice: Boredom encourages the choice of exciting content and stress encourages a choice of releasing content. The same TV programme may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs are associated with individual personalities, stages of maturation, backgrounds and social roles

Our music video offers the audience a Diversion, an escape from real life. Set in the 1940's (A world a way from the modern period), it features a narrative plot although familiar, is exclusive to a certain group of people. It is a highly idealised and very common, overly romantic, offering an escape from the boring.

Two-Step Flow-Lazarsfeld and Katz 1944

• Media information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through
• "Opinion Leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the Opinion Leaders, thus being influenced not by direct process, but by a Two-Step flow

Before we even began filming, we carried out Target Audience research, finding out what is expected from the Indie-Pop genre in terms of music videos. This we used as inspiration and an indicator of what we were doing and planning - Along the right track...

The popularity of a music video is suspect to how much coverage and exposure it gets from its audience. To tackle this issue, we carried out Target Audience research looking at how they access the Media and what kind of platforms they use to look at new things and connect with artists and the music industry e.g. YouTube. 

If the first few people who watch it aren't impressed, then it is less likely it will be recommended to others.

Reception Analysis - Audience as Individuals

• Preferred/Dominant Reading How the media producer wants you to consume the product
• Oppositional Reading Rejection - Alternative reading
• Negotiated Reading Acknowledge and modify preferred reading