I also used social networks to contact and find my cast. I had previously seen one of the actors – Han Kim – perform at the Thames Festival in 2011 and had a few mutual friends on social network Facebook.
I first contacted him via YouTube ‘personal message’ asking whether he’d be interested in taking part and then moved onto Facebook to discuss further.
As for the other actor – Dzung – was an old friend whom I had lost touch with and did not have Facebook which made contacting him slightly harder but I found him via YouTube, messaged and discussed my proposals with him. I then used Skype to video call both actors to finalise details, props and costume ideas before the day of filming, this enabled an easier, faster and more efficient way to operate.
Despite the fact that I knew it was a challenging task, my decision to use a Korean song was because the internet allowed me with so much access to their industry and the conventions. Even if the conventions were pretty similar, there were some cultural elements that really give it an identity of their own. It not only allowed me to see a variety of videos but I also was able to carry out in depth case studies where I matched my understanding of theory to the finished products.
Nowadays it is a lot easier to produce DIY videos and edit the content on home editing packages that can give a professional finish to amateur videos. YouTube has now become such a powerful tool that I found myself finding my unsigned artist on that site as well and because YouTube is such a huge library of videos, to analyse a range of videos for camera angles, styles and locations were possible.
From Goodwin’s video analysis theories and exploring ideas of representation, I understood the close correlation between the music video, genre and star image. YouTube as Gauntlett describes as Web 2.0 has been an amazing phenomenon in the way music promotion and videos are distributed.
