During the research process for this Unit
the initial approach was to first analyse the chosen music video texts for
common conventions that would link them together such as the artists attitude
towards women in the videos, the lyrics and the way in which the women are
presented. The next stage was to gather information regarding the themes
expressed in the videos, such as the attitude towards women, which would allow
me to focus on a topic that I could research and find sources that related to
it. I began to collect primary sources of information through the organization
of a focus group, where a number of people were shown each music video text and
were then asked questions about their thoughts on the videos, what themes or
conventions they could see within them and what kind of audience the videos
could be intended for. Their answers often went to the objectification of women
and the hyper-reality of the artists lifestyle which seemed to be common among
all of the texts. I also collected various secondary resources such as a copy
of Laura Mulveys Essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which helped
explain the reasons why a certain audience would watch something like an R’n’B
music video and the way in which women are presented in certain types of visual
media. Other secondary sources included online versions of extracts from Naomi
Wolfs book “The Beauty Myth” and Sigmund Freud’s “Three Essays on Sexuality”
which all provided useful information regarding attitudes towards women, female
sexuality and why an audience would gain visual pleasure from viewing women in
the way they are presented in music videos. In addition to this I also used a
few websites that either discussed the topic of music videos or had quotes and
explanations from the essays I had looked over, which provided me with useful
pieces of information quickly, that I otherwise would likely not have spotted. After
I gathered this information I needed to cross check its validity before I used
any of it within my essay, as incorrect information would be useless when
applying it to the texts, so I compared the various theories and information
that I found in my secondary resources against each other to try and find a link
between them, then I needed to apply them to the music videos I had chosen to
analyse in order to prove that the theories were present within the text. I
believe that through the research process I gathered a viable amount of
resources both primary and secondary however I think that a few more primary
sources would have given me more information to work with as well as a few more
secondary online sources may have helped me to make my points clearer as some
of the information I found was rather repetitive and it was difficult to pick
out a decent amount of useful information regarding the theories that could be
applied to the music videos.
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