Media Revision 1

Media Revision 1

Component 1 - Media Products, Industries and Audiences 

Component 2 - Media Forms and Products in Depth

• Codes and conventions – performance/narrative/experimental features
• Camera work (framing – shot types, angle, position, movement)
• Editing – beat-matched?
• Elements of continuity/montage
• How does the video interpret the music and/or lyrics?
• Structure/narrative
• Intertextuality
• Sound
• Mise-en-scene – colour, lighting, location, costume/dress, hair/make-up 

Unseen Text:

Explore how audiences can respond to and interpret the video to 'This Is America' by Childish Gambino. Make reference to media language.

• The setting is an empty car park/garage.
• It begins with a long shot of a man playing the guitar which is tattered, his costume is plain and light and he is wearing no shoes.
• Single shot take with no cuts apart from the ending when he is running in lowkey lighting away from people.
• Beat match, he is dancing when the main verse of the song begins, he shoots the man in the head, 'This is America' - this has connotations of the gun problem in America.
• Connotations of costume of Childish Gambino, he has no shirt on and is wearing plain grey trousers (could link to the clothing of men in the period of slavery), yellow shoes, gold chains and a long beard and hair (black hair is a key part of identity).
• The mise en scene of the costume of the church choir, they are dancing and singing with a close up shot tracking to a long shot of Childish Gambino who then shoots at them - binary opposition of harmonious gospel and violence and rap.
• Halfway through the video we see lots of narratives in the background of the centre shot of Gambino and the school children dancing, creates a form of hermenutic codes to the audience, smoke, glowing red in the back with a police car, chaos is created through people running around this is a a symbolic code of riots, with costume of people wearing helmets linking to riot gear.

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• Mise-en-scene --> costume: Childish Gambino wears old confederate uniform trousers --> the southern confederacy reminds the audience of the history of black people in America such as slavery and segregation.
• Costume - backup dancers (implied kids) in uniforms, most low income area school districts in America establish a dress code with uniform.
• Genre of music of rap and gospel music forms binary opposition.
• Intertextual reference in performance - Childish Gambino takes samples of popular dances that derive from African culture and Hip Hop. This shows that popular pieces of culture lose their specificity over time.
• Pacing - 17 second gap silence for the Parkland school shooting in Florida.
• Costume - backup dancers (implied kids) in uniforms, most low income area school districts in America establish a dress code with uniform.
• Red mise-en-scene is used as a symbolic code for violence - Gambino shoots someone and the gun is placed in a red cloth and is carefully taken away. In contrast, the body of the person who has been shot is dragged carelessly out of the frame. This illustrates to the audience America’s value of protecting guns over human lives.
• Camera is positioned and centred on Glover, the audience are told to watch only him and ignore everything happening in the background - microcosm of America.
• American is represented entirely as a concrete jungle through the mise-en-scene set dressing and choice in location. There is no greenery at any given point in the video, we could infer from this an implication that nothing is natural about the situation in the US.
• Tracking shot at the end, the audience is positioned with him.
• Midshots of the performer means the audience becomes familiar with him and his character, making it more surprising to them when he fires the gun.
• White people are largely absent from the video until the end, when Childish Gambino smokes weed and he is chased by a mob of them, the editing of the video slows down perhaps reflecting the effect the drug has. This implies that white people are more worried about non-violent drug crime in the US, rather than gun violence. The lighting at the end is dark and low-key, with the white mob in shadow, suggesting that they are representative of white people as a whole and their values, since they are not personally identifiable.
• Performance --> the way Childish Gambino bends over to shoot the man with the guitar is an imitation of the Jim Crowe character as well as his exaggerated movements and expression, again a reference to African American history and the way they were mocked in minstrel shows --> intertextuality.
• Setting - Abandoned warehouse (similar to Detroit's car factories, now abandoned).
• Mise-en-scene --> when the choir is gunned down this is a reference to the racially motivated Charleston church shooting in 2015, a recent event which highlights the ongoing problem with racism in the US.
• As the man plays guitar we see Donald Glover appear he is positioned behind a post, this uses an hermenutic code to create an ominous feeling. As Donald Glover approaches he is standing and the man is sitting, making use of levels to present the unequal power dynamic between an armed and unarmed man, binary opposition.