Textual Analysis of a CD cover // TRXYE

The CD cover I have chosen to analyse is Troye Sivan's EP - TRXYE.

The colours chosen for the CD cover, reflect his style and personality. Troye is also a YouTuber and Actor aswell as a singer appearing as young wolverine in X-Men and also as 'Spud' in the trilogy 'Spud; The movies'.

The pink paint stripe over his face was explained by him in an interview. He said he didn't want people to judge his music on his looks, but more on the sound of his voice, so by covering his eyes people wont judge him. This also goes against how we see the 'gender norms' as pink is not seen as a manly colour, but this is his way of showing how he is different and denies the idea of 'gender norms' as an openly gay man.

Also the 'X' in TRXYE stands for 'more to come' so this wont be his only EP or album.


His CD cover reflects his music style which is pop, but it also has a relaxing feel to it, so he chose colours that stand out but are simple and reflect his relaxed personality.

Preliminary task // Zella Day - Hypnotic

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

For our 1 minute practice video, I have teamed up with Rachael to create this video.
We have chosen the song 'Hypnotic' by Zella Day because it is a song we both really like and also I have linked the official music video below, so you can see what elements she uses and how she brought the song to life.


For our idea we have decided to go with a Bohemian/Hippie theme, which is very similar to hers, as we wanted to keep some of the themes within the song, as you can see the song is very alternative and that's how we want to keep it.


We are not going to copy everything completely, as we are choosing different kinds of locations such as a field near a dam, outside of a train station where there is a water feature that lights up at night, an old hall that has become ruins, and a black background.


W have decided on these sets because they are different to what she has got in hers, also she has many animals such as a horse and a snake. We contemplated using animals but decided against it because we didn't want to copy her ideas. The locations we picked are close to home and easy to access.


We start filming on Monday 13th July.

Zella Day // Hypnotic

Shake it Off // Practice Music Video

Our practice music video was to re-create the music video for 'Happy' by Pharell Williams. But Rachael and I decided that we didn't want to dot hat song, so instead we decided to do 'Shake it Off' by Taylor Swift.


We asked our fellow classmates and teachers to be in the video and just dance and the outcome was really funny.
With our editing skills we cut from shot to shot of people dancing and lip syncing to the words and created a great 1 minute video.

Shake it Off // Practice Video

Textual Analysis of Taylor Swifts 'Shake it Off'

The context of the song is just to let go of everything and ignore what everyone is saying to you.


We chose this because it shows how different cliques and styles can accept you no matter what background or talent you have and no one can bring you down or say anything to make you feel bad beause all you have to do is 'Shake it Off'.

Shake it Off shows Taylor dancing to different styles of dance and messing around as a bit of fun and eventually people al around are dancing with her showing the message which is 'shake it off', metaphorically and physically.

The mise-en-scene is a plain background showing us that the different styles of dance embrace people from all different backgrounds and not one specific backgrounds. Also the clothing the entourage wears for each different style has something different which represents that style, for example the Ballerina's wear tutu's and the cheerleaders wear a cheerleader outfit.

Halls Reception Theory

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist born in Jamaica, who worked in the UK from 1951 whilst theorising the encoding and decoding model. Hall often focused on perception and also theorised the Audience Reception theory, which identified 3 different models of reading media texts. I want to link this to Pharrell Williams' 'Happy'..

The three types of reading were named

states that all texts are polysemic (can have multiple meanings)

texts can be read in different ways depending on the audience 

can be read in 3 different ways

1. preferred reading 
- audience responds the way the media producers want them to. So the audience would react happily because the video shows people dancing and singing along to the song, and as a result of having such a happy effect, people recreated the video from diiferent countries around the world.

2 negotiated reading
- the audience partly agrees withe the message but may disagree. The audience can enjoy the video for a short period of time before getting completely annoyed with it and refusing to watch the video or listen to the song at all, whch is what happened with 'happy' because it was so over played.

3. oppositional reading 
- completely disagrees. The audience do not agree with the songs video or message and see it as annoying or wrong. 'Happy' was used for the movie 'Dispicable Me 2' but was not written for the film so they believe the song has no meaning.

Story Boarding!

This the story board to our 30 second Music video for 'Shake it Off'.

These ideas we thought of by Rachael and I when talking about being happy.