What does ‘White Girl’ say about identity, youth, modernist and post-modernist concepts of identity?

At the beginning of ‘White Girl’ Leah shows signs of a modernist concept of identity, her identity has been created by her family (mostly her mother). She starts as a Christian and rejects the teacher and students at her new school because of the differences between their religions and the feeling of alienation she feels from them because of this. This is shown by Leah’s refusal to join in the assemblies or any of the other activities that the other students partake in, Leah does this to keep her mother happy. As the eldest child she also helps take care of her younger siblings and thus her modernist identity is impressed upon her siblings, however when Leah begins creating her identity her mother rejects the change and the younger siblings see this rejection and keep their identity as is. It gives a huge insight into the vulnerability of children to outside influences such as identity and how they grow strong enough to pull away from the modernist values of identity to build their own. Leah is old enough to see that her mother is not infallible and can be wrong and lie which is why she rebels against the identity her mother has created, which displays her maturity and understanding of the situation they have found themselves in at the beginning of the film.

When Leah’s mother takes back her partner (who was the reason they moved in the first place) Leah starts to realise that her mother’s identity is making her unhappy and creates her own identity, a post-modernist identity created by Leah herself. In this new identity she wants to completely separate herself from her previous modernist identity, including the name her mother gave her which she changes to ‘Layla’, she also changes her religion to that of her new school friends (which indicates that outside influence is always needed to create an identity, in this case, peer influence). At first her mother disagrees with this new identity but it gives the newly dubbed Layla a chance to tell her mother the truth about how she feels. Layla’s post-modernist identity shows the mother why she left her partner in the first place which makes her leave him a second time and accept Layla.

‘White Girl’ associates modernist identity with being unhappy while the post-modern identity gives Layla the confidence to talk to her mother, the friendship, self-belief and hope she needed while her mother was rejecting her, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the clarity that her new identity gave her. Layla’s journey from modernist to post-modernist was mostly positive, even the denial of her mother to accept her turned out to have progressive worth to Layla and her mother. ‘White Girl’ gives the message that post-modernist identity has a positive journey of self-actualisation that is desired by youth who are trying to grow beyond the family values.

Overall Profile

This is my target audience in a basic format, some of these parts I went into more detail with in my audience and musical profile.

Above are the four main aspects of an audience, the parts that an audience use to show themselves as a fan of that genre and parts of how bands appease that (such as in the media section, the target audience don't tend to watch TV much so bands use websites and radio). There are also parts that a marketer would use to target the audience such as lifestlye and what clothes they wear, how they buy music and tickets to festivals.

Although I don't have a specific section in my profile about the importance of music to metal fans, my music profile has explaination to as why fans are attracted to the genre, through research on metal bands, I find that the fan followings seem to be a way of belonging and sharing values. Music seems to have a deeper meaning for metal fans than for other tribes and everything about them is geared towards the genre, for example taking time out to attend festivals and gigs, wearing band t-shirts are the only branded part of thier appearance, etc. The devotion metal fans have to thier music is something that I will have to think about when making my digipak as some specific things have to be met to be a part of the genre that fans would expect from a newly debuted metal band.  

There is more detail of the bands they like and how they are advertised in my musical profile.

There is more detail of festivals on my muical profile.

I went into more detail of this in my audience profile and I find it important which is why I have highlighted it by taking a closer picture.

Musical Profile

Music Profile

What have I learned that I would find useful in making my digipak?

Looking at the posters and merchandise, it is obvious that metal bands prefer to have their own logo for the fans to identify them with so all the items in my digipak will have either a logo or a specific font that sets it apart from the other bands. For the CD cover I noticed that the debut album did one of two things:

1.       Introduced the band

or

2.       Introduced the genre

I have the choice of having images of the band or cover art that depicts the genre, however I also have a third option of putting both together and showing both the band and the genre.

As for colour scheme, I found that most of the metal bands used black or very dark colours contrasted with red/silver/purple. It seems that contrast between light and dark colours is the norm in most CD cover art for metal. As a new metal band, ‘Interstate’ would want to hold to the ideology of metal but set itself apart from it at the same time so I will follow some of the normal traits of metal but set the band apart through different means, most likely with the cover art.

Research into Music Video - White Flag Warriors by Flobot

Two Changes of Cast

While the band and Team 1 remain unchanged, I had to change two members of Team 2 due to unavaliabilty of the actors, I therefore have changed:

Star for myself, Miriam. This does not affect my original reasoning as I have changed a female for a female so my original points about women in the army remain. Myself and Star are of the same stature and height so this does not affect my filming in any way except in the scenes I was in where I had someone else press the record button/hold/move the camera as neccesary. As Team 2 and both teams together are only in a few scenes this did not happen that much

The second change is Jack S for Emily. In this case I changed a male for a female which makes the teams unbalanced in the sense that one team now has one female while the other has two. However I think the imbalance actually supports the music video better, it makes the two teams easier to differentiate for the audience and the unbalance of gender represents the fact that war is never equal and that there is always difference in numbers, ages, gender, race etc. When Jack said he could no longer be in the the music video the above reasons are why I decided to recast a female actress instead of a male. I think that the filming shows these reasons better than with my original cast and some of the differences from my original cast help create a more indepth view into war and the variance between sides.

Michel Maffesilo's POV of 'Find Your Tribe'

On the subject of ‘Find Your Tribe’, I find that the site reflects my opinion of today’s youth culture. While the site is relatively simplistic in how it separates today’s youth into groups or ‘tribes’ using a questionnaire about their current likes and dislikes, its conclusions show without a doubt that our youths have disintegrated from one mass culture into many factions with which they identify themselves. The site also shows how there is a proliferation of lifestyle tribes, ‘Find Your Tribe’ was run in 2005 and again in 2008 and between these three years the number of tribes has increased which means there has been a creation of more tribes. A creation of new tribes and the death of others mean that our adolescents live in the fluidity of ever-changing tribes and social circles. ‘Find Your Tribe’ proves that the young adults have freedom of choice in how they live their lives and express themselves despite the ideological apparatus that they are subjected to from a young age.

Audience Profile based on 'Find Your Tribe'

Mosher's

What is 'Find Your Tribe'?

Find Your Tribe was started by Channel 4 in an attempt to gain insight into the UK youth so they could direct better advertising at them. The UK youth is split up into many different types of people which Channel 4 named as tribes, there are 5 main sections (Mainstream, Leading Edge, Alternative, Urban and Aspirant) and each have tribes associated with them. The reason that UK tribes have so many tribes under these 5 main sections is because the youth culture have a tendancy to group where they find people with similar values, if there is one large tribe whose members can be further divided by a difference in opinion then two seperate tribes are born of this one original tribe that share many values but differ in others. This is why there are now so many sub tribes of metal of example. Each of these tribes, while sharing some values, have some different ideals, and it is targetting these ideals that makes advertising so easy to adept to a niche audience. Channel 4 used an online survey of as many young people as they coulod get as well as getting people out in the street to question young people on their likes, dislikes, media usage and so on until they could find a tribe for them to belong in. Each tribe has some specific markers that make it unique, and it is this that media marketers need to know.

The results of the survey gave marketers a guide that showed them how to appeal to thier target audience for the 16-26 ages. For example Metalheads prefer listening to radio over going to the cinema so advertisers could use that to target Metalheads by using radio advertising, while for Geeks, or PC World tribes using the internet would be a better way. Channel 4 wanted to set themselves up as a key player in identifying new niches for advertisers to use, and they hope to stay in this position by constructing an up-to-date guide to the every-changing dynamics of youth culture.