Richard Dyer's Star Theory

Dyers star theory is essentially that Pop Stars are not people, but are in fact constructed by the various articles, advertising and music videos. These constructions are mainly fuelled by magazines like "Hello" that are dedicated to following the news of these "Stars".

We can use Dyers Star theory by looking at how the Pop Stars are manufactured and what makes them the star that they are. An example would be Bono with his own style of sunglasses. Or Marilyn Monroe wouldn't be the star she was unless she wore the clothes etc that made her have sex appeal.

Filming Progress on Mock Video

Unfortunately our group didn't make much progress on the 30 second task to copy Rick Astley's "Never gunna give you up". This was due to two of us (out of 3) going on holiday just before term ended (which was when we was doing our preliminary task). It was unlucky that the majority of our group were not around to do the preliminary task. However, we did do some filming so here is the report of what we did do. We planned out what we could get done before some of us went on holiday. And we managed to film all the parts that the girl in the first 30 seconds does but we did not get the parts done with Rick Astley in.

Black Eyed Peas - Music Video Analysis

I analysed the music video of the song "Where is the love" by Black Eyed Peas. The music video gives off many connotations throughout. One image is shown throughout the clip (shown below).

 This is shown in various places ie signs, cars, walls. I believe it is a visual image to represent the meaning of the song, which is essentially, that "everyone should care for everyone else." This meaning is also shown in the name of the song and in various lyrics throughout the song.

Throughout the song, there are various religious connotations like in the lyrics "practise what you preach" and in the ending, everyone is looking up to the sky and the lighting is brighter.

Analysis of an existing digipack

Research for Digipack that we made

Analysis of our Mock Digipack

Overall, I am reasonably happy with our mock digipack. Although it uses the same image on each side, I am relatively happy that it conforms enough to the general conventions of Boy Band digipacks.

It conforms with the very popular convention to show all the members of the boyband and to ensure that they are all well dressed and looking quite smart.

We also have made sure that the name of our group stands out. This is also important as it means that the album would stand out in a shop. Which is the main objective of CD's (to sell and earn money).

Our back cover includes the legal necessities, but also has a bar code which is vital in the sale of the CD in store.

Despite all the other successes I believe we had, the picture above shows (in my opinion) the biggest shortfall with our digipack. The picture above clearly shows that the background we used behind the song names means that the song names are not clearly visible to the viewer. This is a big problem and we should have used another image as the background to ensure the song names are clearly viewed.

Our own digipack

We were given a genre of music and made our own digipack according to the genre. The genre was boyband, so here is our front cover of an album:-

Here is the back cover of the album:-