Research - Uses and Gratification Theory

Uses and Gratification theory - is a popular approach to understanding mass communication.The theory focuses more on the consumer or audience instead of the actual message itself by asking "what people do with media" rather than "what the media does to people". The theory also holds the audience responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that the audience use the media to full fill specific gratifications. This theory would then imply that the media competes against other information sources for the  viewers gratification. 

It suggests that the uses of gratification theory has to full fill the following when we choose a form of media:-

• Personal Identify - being able to recognize the person or product  in front of you, role models that reflect similar values to yours.
• Educate - being able to acquire information, knowledge and understanding. 
• Entertainment - what you are consuming should give you enjoyment, and also some forms of escapism enabling us to forget about worries temporarily.  
• Social Interaction - the ability for media products to produce a topic of conversation between other people, sparks debates. Emotional interaction. 

Applying Uses and Gratification Theory to my work 

I believe that I can apply the Uses and Gratification Theory to my music video successfully, when trying to gain and target an audience. 

Personal Identity 

I will apply Personal Identity to our music video by having the characters in the narrative and the band members wearing clothes and make up that represent the genre. The two different styles that we will have to fit the fashion sense into will be Rock and Indie. This fashion style is the styles that attract the target audience that follow the plain white T's. Applying this part of the theory to the music video will allow our audience to appreciate the video in the terms of them seeing themselves as part of the band and social group. 

 This image shows the type of fashion style that the band and members in the narrative will wear, this fashion sense is also what our fans will wear. This is the same with the hair style/colour and make up sense.

Social Interaction

We will also apply Social Interaction to our music video, showing emotions between the main characters in the narrative will show the story to the audience and reach out to their emotions, if we manage to apply Social Interact successfully we will be able to control how the audience will feel at specific times . To make this as successful as it could possible be we will apply close ups of the characters faces when showing important emotions, flash backs to past memories when times were happy or sad.

Here I have placed two images , these images set of two very different emotions, the photograph of the couple in the rain will show the audience that this couple are in love but going through hard times, making the viewer feel sad and sorry for the couple, where as the photograph at the bottom will make the audience feel happy in themselves and for the characters, as the audience can see that the couple are happy, the lighting in the photograph is light and colour full this also shows the audience that the couple are happy where as in the photograph where it is raining the lighting is dark and dull show that this is a sad, depressing time.

Just by changing the lighting and the background where the couple are hugging can give off totally different emotions , this is something that we will use in our music video to control how the audience feels. We will have low lighting in sad times and high, clear lighting in the happy times to clearly state the difference.   

Entertainment

During our music we will incorporated entertainment by the use of the narrative. This will give the audience a chance to come on the journey with the characters, feeling the same emotions along the way. Through our music video we will show through our narrative the good and bad times of being in a relationship. The music video will be like a fairy tale to the audience starting off with a happy, good relationship, then in the middle something goes wrong and the relationship turns sour, then by the end the relationship  will be happy again, taking the audience on this journey with the characters, letting the audience feel all the emotions the characters are going through. 

Applying these sections to our music video will increase audience consumption and the target my specific audience giving them the conventions of an indie/rock genre.