Yes We Can - Music Video
Analysis of media text: Yes we can music video.
Production
This music video is a political piece of Media text, being an independent promotion for Barack Obama to be the Democratic candidate to go up for election as the next American President. The content and aim of this music video is to persuade and encourage the reader/viewer to believe the words delivered in Barack Obama’s speech. This speech is the backbone of the music video. Aside from the seemingly obvious political dimension to the actual media text, there is actually very little legislation around this music video as this is a private video that has been submitted to the website You Tube. The only regulatory standards that are in place surrounding it are the ones that the website has put into place (www.youtube.com/t/terms).
Technological influences were used extensively in the Yes We Can music video, one notably, the use of hypermediacy. Hypermediacy was particularly prominent in the split screen delivery of the video. The screen between the speech delivered live by Senator Obama in New Hampshire and the artists in the studio flicks between the medley of high profile celebrities singing their version of the words delivered. This is a perfect example of the use of hypermediacy. The medium that this text was broadcasted through was the Internet. In Luke Goode’s Media Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2004) it explains that hypermediacy is designed to remind the consumer that this is a media text, this technique is used to show the viewer what ‘tricks’ were used in making the clip. (Goode, 2004)
Textual and Creative influences shone through in the Yes We Can music video with a smorgasbord of semiotics. Semiotics by definition being “the study of spoken or written language, musical sounds, visual symbols, gestures, body language, and all other means of communication” (Goode, 2004). In the video clip there is much gesturing with the...
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