Monday Lockdown Classwork

 Youtube case study:

- how much content is created every day?

• 300 hours of video content uploaded per minute, it would take nearly 50 years to watch every single video that was uploaded in a day 
• "Represents over 20% of the time spent on connected television"
• Over 500 hours uploaded every minute 
• Over 1 billion hours watched every day

- Who acquired Youtube and how much was spent?

• 3 ex PayPal employees created the idea, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jar Vet Kareem. 
• The first video uploaded to Youtube was a short video of Jarvez Kareem, one of the co-founders, standing outside the elephants' exhibit at the San Diego Zoo 
• Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine 
• In 2019 Youtube generated $15 billion in revenue. 
• YouTube had to pay $170 million to settle lawsuits and other expenses. 
• Google spent $1.65 billion on the purchase of YouTube 

- how was allowing people to monetise channels, a major shift in the industry?

• Over 2 billion users visit Youtube every month
• There are creators who are making millions and millions of dollars every month from posting videos an example includes Dude Perfect who literally do fun stunts and get paid millions to do so - 56.6 million subscribers on YT.

- how were algorithms used to Youtube's advantage with subscribers?

• lead on to people basically "never leaving the app" 
• Videos were suggested to you based on what you had watched previously and who you’re subscribed to.

- name some of the ways Youtube has changed and added aspects to their channel to increase audience/subscribers?

• Youtube at first had no traffic therefore was changed into a dating site where people were enticed with money and other methods. 
• They tweaked their technology so that anyone would be able to upload videos and share them online for the world to see. 
• Just one click Youtube's "Big Bang Moment"

- why is content moderation hard for Youtube?

• Content published isn't always accurate 
• Content moderation has been seen to be quite the challenge

The diversity report

Notes:

- shows that 54.6% of the top films of 2020 were released solely via streaming subscription services, a major departure from business as usual.

- The global home and mobile entertainment market increased to a record $68 billion over the course of 2020, up 23% from the $55.9 billion in 2019.

- The U.S. share of this global market stood at nearly 44% in 2020. Latino and Black adults, in particular, consumed online content at higher levels than other groups.

- All four job categories showed progress in 2020, but women and people of color are still underrepresented in critical behind-the-camera jobs. Women made up just 26% of film writers and just 20.5% of directors. Combined, minority groups were slightly better represented as directors at 25.4%. Just 25.9% of film writers in 2020 were people of color.

- For streaming platforms, films featuring casts that were 21% to 30% minority had the highest ratings among white, Black, Latino, and Asian households and viewers 18–49.

- In 2011, the first year tracked, more than half of the films fell into the lowest level of cast diversity — less than 11%. In 2020, however, 28.8% of films had the highest level of cast diversity — 50% or higher. Just under 10% of films in 2020 fell into the lowest level of cast diversity.

- In 2020, nearly all of the films with a female director also featured a female lead (94.7%). Films directed by minorities had the highest level of cast diversity. And 78.3% of films directed by people of color featured minority leads.

- White film directors were more than twice as likely as minority directors to helm a film with a budget of $100 million or more — 6.4% versus 2.8%. Men and women were equally likely to direct a big-budget film in 2020 — 5.7% and 5.6%, respectively.

-Women and people of color were more likely to direct films that fell into the lowest budget category of less than $20 million. For films directed by people of color, 72.3% had budgets less than $20 million, compared to 60% for white directors. It was about the same for films directed by women. Of those, 74.3% had budgets less than $20 million, compared to 59.2% for men's directors.

Power in the form of censorship

"Should social media companies and big tech have the right or the power to silence voices on their platforms?"

Social media companies and big tech companies should have the power to be able to silence voices on their media platforms. Pew research center did a survey and found that 72% of U.S. adults say that social media platforms are having too much of an influence on today's society. In a similar way, 59% of people think that certain types of media should be banned or censored in order to stop different messages from being misunderstood, for example, the covid pandemic showed how different information was twisted into something to either scare people further or give wrong news. Platforms such as Twitter began really as a tool that allowed those in social circles to essentially "shout out" to one another, but it has increasingly become a broadcast platform to reach the masses. Some 47% of the population thinks that the government should be regulation major technology companies more than it is now. Regulation can be seen as a good thing but censorship may be argued against. Rather than silencing someone's right to free speech, it could be edited or just the post that was seen as offensive could be taken down. An example of this is when Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump's account. As of this within the weekend nearly every link to his account was taken down as well as him being banned from as well social media giant Facebook. The people who hold the power here are the ones creating the content as well as the ones regulating it. Social media is still a massive evolving phenomenon and the problem is now whether it is having a more positive or negative affect and influence on the masses 

Power in the media

Notes

Stuart Hauls representation theory:

- implies that the subject has a single fixed meaning against which accuracy can be measured. H points out that this cant be so.  

- The media gives meaning to events, they decide whether it is a positive representation or not. 

- "Representation isn't an after occurrence it's a constitutive one"

- "Has no obvious meaning until it has been represented"

- Media producers who are in power try to fix a particular meaning to a certain thing in the real world. 

- Hegemonic meaning/ representation 

The mean world syndrome:

- People base judgments on the media even when there are present facts such as crime rates dropping, the perception people have is taken from the violence shown in the media. 

- How one kind of story blends into another to create and reinforce a distinct sense of the world. 

George Gerbner's Cultivation Theory:

- sociological and communications framework 

- media tends to repeat representations of people or groups of people over and over again, effects build up slowly over time. 

- May does not believe the intended message if only seen once for example violence amongst people. See it repeated in different media forums 

- accept it as realistic 

-The cultivation of the effects of the media can change the dominant ideologies of society.  

Media ecology essay

Media Ecology

Essay

The relationship between media and audiences is changing drastically. Media ecology aims to describe how diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives. The theory's overall core is how the content's communication isn't as nearly impactful as the way it is being consumed. It focuses on media, environments, and environments as media, with an explicit concern for their evolution, effects, and forms. It is the aim to increase awareness of the complex relationship between technology and humans. I agree with the fact that media is constantly changing and the way it is being consumed can have an altering effect on audiences. The way audiences consume media is an ever-changing phenomenon that has been introduced to different generations. New ways of consuming media are being introduced daily. In the last year, 4 new streaming video on demand platforms have been introduced, which I will explain in detail later on.

Marshall McLuhan came up with the media ecology theory in 1964 and was officially coined in 1968 by the media theorist Neil postman. McLuhan was the first to suggest that studies should be focused on the type of media rather than the message being communicated. "Our behavior in media has been changed by the medium rather than the media", in this sense the medium is the technology on which the media is being consumed on whether it is a smartphone, laptop, TV, etc, it is almost like the middle man that gets forgotten about between people and what they are consuming digitally. It suggests that the environment inevitably affects our perceptions, feelings, values, and beliefs.

Fragmentation shows the trend of the increasing choice of how audiences consume media in terms of different platforms or channels, for example, linear TV, streaming video on demand (SVOD), or things such as social media platforms i.e Instagram or Facebook. In 2020, 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 45% say they are online 'almost constantly. In today's date, nearly half of the teen population aged from 13 to 17 say they use Facebook (2004), less compared to platforms such as Instagram (2010), and Snapchat (2011), which were released later. Surveys were used to determine different social standings and somewhat 40% of these respondents have said that social media has had a positive impact because it helps them keep in touch and interact with others. An increase in fragmentation amongst households has occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic that was introduced to the world in 2019. People used devices to escape from their reality and used things such as laptops and smartphones to work from home or for young kids to go to school virtually. This is where McLuhan's theory may be criticized or challenged in terms of the way we consume has a larger effect than what we consume, because, in terms of COVID, the content being consumed by young minds will have a longer-lasting effect in the future rather than them looking at the screen. Nuclear families no longer watch linear TV together, but rather watch their own platforms on their own devices. While 42% of families in the USA were nuclear families 50 years ago, just under 22% are being shown as your typical family figure.

In 2019 a survey was conducted to measure how many adults still went to cinemas in the USA. It was found that 14% of adults said that they go to the cinemas at least once a month or more, around 46% said that they would go to the cinemas maybe once or a few times a year. This shows the slow decline of the use of cinemas. People state that they go for the experience that you can’t get at home. Streaming videos on demand has changed the ways in which we consume media, it also relates to the concept of fragmentation. People are now able to subscribe to different streaming platforms such as Netflix, Youtube, Neon etc. In the last 2 years alone, already 4 new streaming services have been released by monopolies in the media industry, Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock, and Disney+. Because of the massive range that is available to watch media and the development of technology, kids are able to watch whatever they want freely without regulatory boundaries unless parents are aware and change settings so that kids are only able to see certain content. Between 2019-2020, the number of global subscriptions increased by 26% reaching 1.2 billion subscribers in the year 2020. In this year the Film and TV industry experienced unprecedented growth. Disney+ has already gained over 100 million subscribers since its launch in November 2020.

Audience demand constantly grows and spending on content production continues to ramp up. In 2020 there was a record-breaking $220.2 billion spent on making and acquiring new feature films and TV programming. Disney has encountered some issues with certain actors who are paid off box office sales, where Disney releases films in both cinemas and on Disney+ so people don't have to necessarily go to the theatre to watch a new movie, which is causing certain actors such as Scarlett Johansson distress as the recent release of Black Widow was released on Disney+ in July 2021 and was only a couple days later after the cinema release.

A version of the Fandom theory was first seen in the 1960s when the first-star trek was released. Henry Jenkins was the one who released this theory explaining different fan cultures and communities built around the shared enjoyment of a particular movie or TV series. An example of this is when a fan page was made for Stranger Things, released in 2016, but fans were so critical to characters and actors that it started affecting the cast and the people helping to make the series so it was shut down. This is an extreme version where simple fandom has been turned into extreme criticism and involvement. The way people interact with the media is drastically and almost rapidly changing. In the early 1930s watching TV was a rare commodity that wasn't seen as an essential part of life, compared to now in 2021 we have had massive reliability upon technology and media. Without online websites and the introduction of web 2.0 in 1999, people would still be relying on paper newspapers to get their information or daily news. Now we are able to actively engage with others online as well as have our input in the world by creating websites, uploading our own media, and streaming others. Has this changed the world we live in for the better or for worse?

Media ecology essay plan

 Media Ecology 

*Essay Plan*

Opening sentence: The relationship between media and audiences is changing drastically. 

intro:

Definition 

- Media ecology aims to describe how diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives. The theory's overall core is how the content's communication isn't as nearly impactful as the way it is being consumed. 

Position of argument 

- I agree with the fact that media is constantly changing and the way it is being consumed can have an altering effect on audiences. The way audiences consume media is an ever-changing phenomenon that has been introduced to different generations. New ways of consuming media are being introduced daily. In the last year, 4 new streaming video on demand platforms have been introduced, which I will detail later on.

First paragraph:
 

Introduced

- Marshall McLuhan came up with the media ecology theory in 1964 and was officially introduced in 1968by the media theorist Neil postman. McLuhan was the first to suggest that studies should be focused on the type of media rather than the message being communicated. 

- Our behavior in society has been changed by the medium rather than the media. 

- Explain how media = message, medium = technology. The middle man 

-Suggests that the environment inevitably affects our perceptions, feelings, values, and beliefs. 

Second paragraph: 

Fragmentation 

- Fragmentation shows the trend of the increasing choice of how audiences consume media in terms of different platforms or channels, for example, linear TV, streaming video on demand (SVOD), or things such as social media platforms i.e Instagram or Facebook

 

- How many kids have smartphones, fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 45% say they are online 'almost constantly. In today's date, nearly half of the teen population aged from 13 to 17 say they use Facebook less compare to platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat which were released later.  

- Instagram: 2010

- Snapchat: 2011 

- Facebook: 2004

- Surveys were used to determine different social standings and somewhat 40% of these respondents have said that social media has had a positive impact because it helps them keep in touch and interact with others.

- Nuclear family then vs now. Typical family figure 2 parents and multiple children. 

 

Third paragraph: 

SVOD, Cinemas 

- Rapid decline in cinema use massive incline in streaming videos on demand 

- Introduction of 4 new SVOD platforms, Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock, and Disney+ in the last 2 years

 (relate back to fragmentation and how different age groups are using different types of technology to view media without regulatory boundaries)

- Between 2019-2020, the number of global subscriptions increased by 26% reaching 1.2 billion subscribers in the year 2020. In this year the Film and TV industry experienced unprecedented growth.   

(Disney+ has already gained over 100 million subscribers since its launch in November 2020). 

• Simultaneous releases from Disney, both in cinema and SVOD, actors pay based on box office sales. 

- Audience demand constantly grows and spending on content production continues to ramp up. In 2020 there was a record-breaking $220.2 billion spent on making and acquiring new feature films and TV programming.  

Fourth paragraph: 

Piracy, Web 2.0

- introduction of web 2.0 in 1999. The second stage of development of the internet is where users can now be interactive online and have user-generated content. 

- Piracy is the copying of other work. People have the freedom to download films illegally off the internet without having to pay. 

• Takes away from traditional methods such as movie cinemas, why would you pay when you could get it at home for free. 
• The risk of having SVOD makes it easier to copy and upload to the internet, taking away some of the profits that they could potentially be earning. 

- 126.7 billion viewings worth of US-produced TV episodes are pirated every year.

- Annual global revenue losses from digital piracy are between $40 and $97.1 billion in the movie industry.

Henry Jenkins and the Fandom theory
- Fan culture or communities built around the shared enjoyment around a particular film or TV series
*Mandalorian example
* Stranger things, fan pages having to be taken down because of the mockery and pressure put on characters. The message of what fans were posting.

Shirky 

- Clay Shirky believes that passive audiences (audiences that watch/intake media mindlessly) no longer exist in today's day-in-age 

- He believes that technology has changed certain expectations and behaviors, that audiences like to talk back to producers and be active, communicating with the people making the media. 

Fifth paragraph:

Conclusion 

- Cinemas are on a rapid decline, but people still like the experience of going to the movies but feel overcharged because of the high prices cinemas charge to compensate for the lower amount of ticket sales.

- SVOD is a rapidly growing market that may help create monopolies within the film industry 

- Fragmentation doesn't help in terms of keeping linear TV alive amongst nuclear families. Young people having more freedom to different types of unregulated media. Should certain media be regulated? Is it the media itself that has an effect on the audience or more the medium (technology), Marshall McLuhan 

- Because of the easier access, easier to download and upload videos illegally to free streaming platforms, creating scams and sometimes fooling young kids or older generations such as boomers. 

CCR

Advanced Portfolio CCR

We chose the song “What Other People Say” by Demi Lovato and Sam Fischer for our music video. In this, a boy and a girl were singing therefore we chose both a female and male character to represent the two artists. Our most prominent actor/character was Phoebe who played Demi Lovato and was our female lead throughout the video. Although there was a male voice that had almost the same amount of input as the female voice, we chose to base everything around Phoebe (Demi Lovato) and how she is going through a hardship that is making her lament the loss of her mum and the mood and overall tone is supposed to come across as sad and almost depressing. To keep the realism of the video we decided to take society's view on women and portray it. Females are stereotypically known for being more emotionally unstable and vulnerable compared to men. We felt as though this would draw the audience in and make it more believable even though males can often be just as sensitive as women if not more.

In this day and age, mental health plays a big factor in how we live our lives and certain guidelines and rules that have been put in place to try and spread awareness for mental health such as depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts. It is such a big thing now that although it is a sad contributing factor, some people may be able to relate to the music video more if they feel as though they have gone through something similar themselves or knows someone else who has had troubles in the past. Audiences can become more invested or like something better when it shows the problems of society and how life can change from being an adolescent girl to a struggling young adult. This idea was based on the research we did of the original artists where Demi Lovato had a past of mental illness and struggled with drug abuse herself. 

I decided to try and maintain a blue and purple-hued color scheme throughout my digipak as well as mimicking the colored lights that are seen in the music video. In contrast to the cold colors we used a lot of black and white to represent the ‘dark’ times and how her whole life felt like it was in literal darkness and shadowed, so I took this into my digipak as well as my social media page, where my first post of the ‘artist’ is a black and white photo and she was smiling to almost let viewers know that although what we filmed about is a hard-hitting topic, that the artist was okay and enjoying producing the album. I also used black and white images taken from the music video on the inside of my digipak so that it maintained fluidity and wasn't overwhelmed with too many colors or different shots. We chose to use Instagram because in this day-in-age moire than 45% of teens now either own or have access to a smartphone. Nearly half of the teen population aged from 13-18 have said that they use Instagram compared to Facebook, released in 2004. This was ideal as our target age range was anywhere from 15 to mid-20s. 


My CD case's front and back cover was purple staged lighting, the front cover containing an image of the artist (Phoebe), and the back just of a purple screen with a stage lighting streaming through and lyrics on the back. Although the music video is supposed to be sad at the beginning, it is also supposed to be a sort of visible breakthrough where our character comes out the other sad despite her difference and I tried carrying that through into my social media page where there are images of Phoebe doing different things like holding an umbrella in the rain. To keep the Instagram page realistic, I had to also take inspiration from Demi Lovato's real page and tried to carry that through to make it realistic. For example, she had just announced that she is non-binary meaning she is neither a boy nor a girl nor a selected gender. Because of this, I used a lot of gay pride images or pictures showing support to the LGBTQ community. A big part of my digipak was based on Richard Dryer's Star image theory first introduced in 1979, where it's based on the idea that the viewer's perception of a narrative is highly influenced by the image of the stars. In order to follow these guidelines, I made sure that Phoebe was the main feature on the cover and the bold font behind her was to give the impression that she is now a solid and firm wall who is slowly rebuilding herself, but it also made her stand out almost 3D. 

To engage with viewers we had to determine a target audience, because the genre of the song is mid-tempo pop, we thought that this is best suited to females aged from 15 - 40. The song is slow in some places and has a melodic tune but is also quite touching, and to really grasp the concept I feel that the person has to be a bit more in touch with their feelings, something women are usually known for. I tried to keep the design of my digipak, not ‘girly’ but so that you could definitely say that it had more of a feminine touch with the colors and fonts. This was carried through in all the different elements both seen in the music video and my social media. On the Instagram page, there are different links that you can click on to take you to the music video on Vimeo, because of different copyright regulations, etc we aren't able to upload it anywhere else limiting the realism of the song actually being produced. Even though this may have restricted what we were able to post I still tried to incorporate a lot of different interactive hashtags and carried the slogan ‘#WOPS’ throughout my post adding continuity to the images and creating hype because of the acronym of ‘What Other People Say'.

Since doing the music video first, we had to learn a lot about the different types of conventions that were usually seen in a video from mid-tempo pop. A lot of them had a storytelling/ narrative theme where the audience was to follow along with the message being portrayed rather than just singing or seeing different images that had little connection to the song or the meaning behind the lyrics. The narrative theory is based on the concept that people are essentially storytellers, a theory coined by 20th-century communication scholar Walter Fisher. Another convention was how nearly every music video from every genre had lip-syncing. In my opinion, a music video, depending on the way it is being made, can't be a music video without singing or some sort of lip-syncing. To make it look right we had to watch different tutorials from Youtube to learn how to overlay the original song over the lip-syncing in editing without hearing the original audio and making it look realistic. In different videos it had tips and tricks such as always getting your actor or actress to actually sing the song when you are filming and just cut it out later, it makes it easier to match up the mouth movements with the different words in the song. Having your audio always on is another helpful bit that we forgot at times thinking that we wouldn't need audio but then when we got to editing we didn't know what part they were singing.

What Other People Say - Final edit

Social Media Page

Demi Lovato, Instagram Page 

Username: l0vato_fanpage

Link: https://www.instagram.com/l0vato_fanpage/

This is the main cover page you see when going onto the Instagram page that I created. I tried to add in little things such as the "Musician" title to make it more realistic. I added highlights which are stories of different moments in the 'singers' life, for example, I put one backstage when they were supposedly producing the song 'What Other People Say'. I also added one of a dog because on Demi Lovato's real Instagram page she has stories of normal things such as pets or family outings etc. It almost humanizes our artist. 

This was the first image I posted on my Instagram page. It was to imitate the feeling of her being backstage and recording parts of the song, almost like a sneak peek of what was to come which I took from Demi Lovatos and other recording artists' pages. It was a very common thing to release small images and teasers for the album or single that is going to be released. 

I posted this once the Digipak had been and prior to the showing of the digipak I posted things on stories and highlights leading up to the release. 

Something that has been seen a lot on the media lately is how Demi Lovato is now Non-binary, therefore they now refer to themself as they/them. This had only been known throughout the making of our social media page so I tried to include little things such as quotes and images supporting the LGBTQ community. Because Demi is they/them, I chose to use the Non-Binary flag because it is something that relates to them as the artist we are trying to represent. 

Digipak Online Covers

 Front cover:

Back Cover:

Inside Left:

CD back:

DigiPak CD Case

Demi Lovato Digipak by Kayla Lockington