Molly La Fosse's Media Blog

Personally I do not have one favourite genre of music as my taste is quite eclectic. Mostly I listen to jazz, funk and neo soul. One of my favourite artists is Amy Winehouse. I own vinyls of her two albums, Frank and Back to Black. I also listen to her music on spotify. I found out about her through my parents, who are always playing music around the house. I have not seen Amy Winehouse live because unfortunately she died around the time I had started to get into her music. If there was one person, alive or dead that I would LOVE to see live it would be Amy. I recently watched the documentary about her life, 'Amy', which was directed by Asif Kapadia and absolutely loved the insight it gave into her life and works. Another one of my favourite artists at the moment (who is still alive and well) is the band Khruangbin. I don't yet own any physical copies of their album but I do listen to their music by streaming it on Spotify and Soundcloud. I found out about thi...

For my A2 blog this year I will be focusing on promotional music campaigns, including production of a music video, a CD digipak and a website.  I learnt a lot from making my blog last year, including that it is very important to record every part of your process. I would like to improve the layout of my blog since last year I used a very plain template and I would like to find a more exciting, professional looking layout. I would also like to write more about what I have learnt from what we do in Media Studies, rather than just outlining what we did, and looking more at the process and reasoning behind everything.  I am excited for the year ahead, partly about learning about different medio theorists - which wasn't as big of a part of the A1 syllabus - and I also feel that I can explore my creativity to a greater extent with the production of a music video. 

For this exercise we created a homepage for an artist of our choosing using WIX software. I chose the band Khruangbin. The link to the website is :  khruangbin.com I started by choosing a picture to set as the background of the homepage. I looked at various images of the band on google images. At first I tried using this black and white photograph : However I decided that this was not ideal for the ideology of the band as their music is very vibrant and colourful, and therefore I wanted a fun, bright image for the background. It is important for the website to adhere to the ideology/message of the band's music in order to ensure that their 'star image' is the same across everything that the band releases and creates. I eventually found this illustration of the band : I really liked how this background looked on the homepage as I felt it fit well with the funky aesthetic of Khruangbin. The original font on the WIX software looked too formal and boring so I ...

When Madonna’s music video for ‘Like a Prayer’ came out in 1989, it was very controversial due to the themes of race, religion and female empowerment that it presented.  Conventions of a music video include many close up shots of the artist or band, as well as a direct address. Often women are sexualised by the close ups and the artist is lip syncing along with the song. In this music video, all these conventions are adhered to. However, it also subverts some conventions because it explores controversial topics such as race, religion, and the treatment of women, that are  not often explored by the media.      The narrative of this video is as follows : a group of white men are assaulting a woman, and they run away when they hear police sirens. A black man comes to the helpless woman’s aid but when the police arrive, they automatically assume that it was the black man who assaulted her, and they arrest him. Madonna sees all of this and doesn’...