For our A2 coursework we created a music video to a track of our choice. My group chose 'Never Again' by Meaning in Masterpiece who are an indie alternative band.

The plot overview of the video focuses on a troubled young man who has suffered a loss and keeps repeating the same mistake with a girl whom the audience do not whether she is a girlfriend of wife who he sees everywhere around him. He is faced with two paths, sleep on it or move on to which he chooses sleep on it, he continues to see the girl around him. The video then re-winds and takes him back to the path in which he chooses again. There is a sense of enigma in the video as said above the audience are not exactly sure who the girl is and whether she is alive or dead as her presence is almost ghostly. Being from the indie alternative genre the conventions are an emotive storyline and a deep meaning. We used black and white filters throughout the video to represent his melancholic mood and lyrics on screen of words we thought the audience would connect with emotionally such as 'scared' and 'peace'.

Roland Barthe's five codes can be related to our video:
- Action
- Enigma
- Symbolic
- Semic
- Cultural
Although our video did not correspond with all these codes as there was no real sense of action or cultural code it did comply with the engima code as we are left wondering who the girl is and as well as the symbolic and semic codes with the use of the signs and him choosing a path.

Richard Dyer said "How we see determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. How we see them is based on representation". This relates to our video as we wanted Jake Black to be portrayed as a troubled young man who has deep sad emotions and is suffering which we tried to convey through the use of colours, lighting, setting and the lyrics on screen.

White (1961) described 'Gatekeepers' as people who are part of the decision making process in the construction of media texts'. Ultimately we were the gatekeepers of our video but we had to keep to the codes and conventions of indie alternative videos which were decided by gatekeepers.

Finally, Stuart Hall's theory of Encoding and Decoding can be related to our video as we made sure we used emotive imagery through the colour filters and setting, also him being alone in most scenes reflected his state of mind. The audience can see that we would have used these signifiers but not being clear on who the girl is allows the audience to have their own view on who she is and decode our text.