Bad Romance Second Life: Cyberspace Impact

Somme Publishing - Women's Sufferage




Horrible Histories - French Revolution

#GlobalGaga - Creative Arts Evening

Here is our viral video in this we placed a green screen behind and replaced it with cities that lady gaga went to on her last tour, with the addition of some wonders of the world plus a couple of other famous places. Please enjoy our #GlobalGaga video! Containing some teachers you might recognise including Mr Clarke, Mr Burrowes and even Mr Rignall! If you watch 'til the very end you'll even see some behind the scenes footage.

UGC: A Look at AWOLNATION's Sail

While researching for my Video Research Blog, I discovered the video for AWOLNATION's 'Sail'. The video itself is a narrative/performance video (but could be argued as a concept), about a man and his attempts to find the illuminati. You can watch it here:



The original video, however, has been out-done by a fan-made video, done by popular YouTubers Tessa Violet (Meekakitty) and Shawna Howson (Nanalew). Who have a combined subscriber total of 1,567,164 (that is 1,000,022 and 567,142 respectively) However, their creation of a video for sail has 130,000,000+ views, compared to the (roughly) combined total (as it has been on the AWOLNATION official channel, awolnationvevo, and red bull records) 60,000,000 times. While there may be a number of factors at play here, such as the fact that the official video has moved around so much, this is nevertheless a very surprising achievement.

Here is the fan-made video:



Judging the videos, one might think that they would stand fairly equal chance, with Nanalew's having the inane humour to it, but AWOLNATION's featuring references to the illuminati and being backed by their record label, so perhaps appearing higher owing to some feature of google's algorithm. But the popularity of Nanalew's version has even led it to be the very thing that appears when googling the track.

Nanalew's version appears to be favoured even by google...

This is a very unique case, and I, personally cannot think of a time where this has happened. And all top 3 of the most viewed youtube videos being taken up by music videos. In fact, aside from 'Charlie bit my finger -again!', the top 30 most viewed videos are all music videos, and the official ones at that. The true reason as to why this video has succeeded so much is very hard to pin point, Perhaps it has succeeded owning to it's lack of plot, it's complete pointlessness, the 'surprise twist' or the family friendliness. The inability to pinpoint the reason as to the success of this video perhaps encompasses what McDougall was talking about when they suggested the inability to conceive media audience as a stable, identifiable group.

The success of this video could be placed down to web 2.0, The video has been created by consumers, who made a video they enjoy themselves and so think others enjoy too. This video truly demonstrates the power of web 2.0. Comparatively amateur, independent film, video, music and TV makers can stand their ground against major corporations, while this may take time and luck, this video shows that it is in no way impossible.

Applying Theory To Our Chosen Idea

Applying Theories:



David Gauntlett - Audience Studies:

• The notion of 'audience' is collapsing as people become producers as well as consumers in media.

Rick Altman - Audience Pleasures:

• Emotional Pleasures: The emotional pleasures offered to audiences of genre films are particularly significant when they generate a strong audience response. 
• Visceral Pleasures: Visceral pleasures are 'gut' responses and are defined by how the film's stylistic construction elicits a physical effect upon its audience. This can be a feeling of revulsion, kinetic speed or a 'roller coaster ride'  
• Intellectual Puzzles: Certain film genres such as the thriller or 'whodunit' offer the pleasure in trying to unravel a mystery or a puzzle. Pleasure is derived from deciphering the plot and forecasting the end or the being surprised by the unexpected.

Dan Gillmor - The Former Audience:

• Gillmor famously wrote of '' the former audience'', to reinforce his argument that the notion of a passive audience is gone. 'They are no longer the passive masses, athey have the tools to challenge traditional media and create media for themselves'.

David Gauntlett proclaims that the notion of the audience no longer exsists and is therefore collapsing due to the birth of Web 2.0 which allows the auudience to create content . this is usually made through fan based videos or UGC (user generated content), which is blurring the lines between producer and audience. this is also backed by Gillmor who also argues that passive audience has gone. To further this, Lady Gaga has created her own lyric video when her song applause was leaked. As a consequence, no music video was ready for the single so Gaga made a video herself at a drag queen club which featured  some of her fans. What this demonstrates is that today, in a digital age it is possible to create videos of producer standard easily with little material.