Lady GaGa, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta has been inspired by music from an early age while singing along, dancing around tables and posh resturants as soon as she hears the tunes from her favourites such as Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Rolling stones and The Beatles.

She comes from an New York Italian family where she turned into multi talented singer/songwriter who is now known today as Lady GaGa.

She always considered herself as an entertainer and as a young girl, she referred to her self as Ham, before she came up with the name Lady GaGa on the lower east side club scene. You will find that she customizes her outfits and strip right down to her hand crafted hot pants and bikini top and strike a pose.

Lady GaGa wanted to combine pop and rock to make a new face of music and looked up to fashion icons such as rock star girlfriends, Peggy Bundy and Donatella Versace. She doesn’t look at music as music, she looks at music as an art and feels that it is about the attitude, the performance, the look, the everything.

Lady GaGa learnt how to play the piano at the age of 4, by the age of 13 she wrote her first ballad and at 14 she attended open mic nights. She attended The Manhatten Private School where the perez sisters attended and by the age of 20 she was one of the of the lucky ones to get early admission to NYU where she did song writing for artist such as the pussy cat dolls!

She now claims that she is trying to change the world, one sequin at a time.

Institutional Information

Initially she signed with Def Jam Recordings at 19 after the chairman heard her singing on the way to his office in the hallway but after 3 months she was dropped. Music producer Rob Fusari who  helped her write some songs compared her vocals to Freddie Mercury. The pair began doing gigs together. He then sent records they produced to Streamline Records. Having already served as an apprentice songwriter under the internship at Famous music publishing, which was later acquired by Sony/ATV Music publishing, she then stuck a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV. She was then requested to write songs for Britany Spears and pussycat dolls. While doing this she was recogniszed by Akon for her vocal ability where he signed her for his record label, Kon Live Distribution and after she joined Cherrytree Records.

Career Information

Awards: Altogether she has won 68 awards including 2 Grammy awards and she has been nominated 152 times!

Songs:

WordPress is one of the digital technologies that we have used to show our research and notes of previous media theories. We also inserted images to show how we were inspired by different media products. We also analysed CD Covers/Adverts/Music videos using wordpress because it would be easier to get screen shots etc.

Digital Camera is another digital technology we used to take still images of our performer for the CD Cover and Advert. We tested out a range of poses to see which ones worked best and also experimented with different camera angles e.g close ups, long shots etc.

Photoshop was used in the making of our cd cover and magazine advert and we were creative and trying out lots of different layouts, fonts and we used different pictures to suit each cover and advert we did. For our final CD cover we used photo manipulation where we used a texture and layers changing the blending mode to create the blue, cool effect on our performer. However the magazine advert was used a lot more manipulation and time and you can click here to see how it was done.

We also used a Video Camera to film footage for our music video where we used our knowledge from the stills camera and put them into the filming, as well as this we applied a good amount of camera movements such as hand held, pan etc.

Imovie was a programme we used to edit out music video together using the footage we have filmed. We have never used this programme before so when using it, it was a bit tricky but once we knew how to use it we was fine and was able to create some good scenes. We also used trasactions to make the cuts more continious and more of a flow and we also edited the clips so they were black and white or slower/faster. We felt that the song was also a bit to long in some places so we used imovie to cut the song down and edit it out, we also faded the song out with this software.

From our audience feedback we learnt that we needed introduce a performer in the start whereas she was just at the end of the video as it didn’t really have that sense of flow, this made us realise that we had changes to do and we were greatful that we were critised for that which made us improve what we had.

Once we showed it again to another group of audience we had very positive comments about our performers and how they were confident and we had good comments on our editing which made us proud because we had such big ideas for out project that we couldn’t wait to show the audience our music video. It was also good because we wanted something different to what everyone had so this meant that we had to go about it really carefully otherwise we could offend certain people but, from audience feedback we manage to pull off our ideas with camera work, angles and put this into our editing skills to create a sucessful music video.

For our music video we wanted to use the conventions of a stereotypical female artist videos where they would take advantage of their appearance to create star identification. We chose to use strong Voyeurism of the female and male form because that way we would be taking risk and doing something different compared to other students.

In our media product we wanted it to be all sexy with actors and actresses with the right attitude and confidence. We wanted our performers to take full advantage of their looks to make the media product look very stereotypical, at the same time this was very challenging to find someone within our social group that is willing to do this. We also then decided we need a performer which was going against what we planned, it made it a whole lot different but a much better media product.

We were inspired by many female artist that uses their appearances to their advantage such as Lady Gaga as she challenges conventions in her music videos by her fashion and storyline etc. We were also inspired by Beyonce because she stands for strong, independent and feminist views, as her band is all female, she also appeals well to a male audience

We wanted to follow the conventions of RnB with it being shot in black and white, the uses of their image and how they portray it so, we decided to have Ellis in nice lingerie and Joe and Mike with their toned up bodies.

The biggest challenge we had was the performer, at first she was at the end dancing but then we realise it didn’t tie in so we had to introduce her a bit earlier in the music video, once we did this, it made Carla to be the main performer and the video looked a lot better.

For our CD cover, we wanted to challenge conventions as well as develop them, so we decided to use photo manipulation where, for the CD cover, she would be posing like a real singer and then we would get a smoky background and adjust the settings etc and as for the poster this was done by a range of brushes and change of settings. We also used synergy with the same continuity flow with the CD cover.

• How big of audience is out there: huge, number 1 albums,awards, festivals.
• Who are they? Age? Geek?: Unisex,teens to 40+
• What else would they listen to? Rhianna, Kayne west, T.I
• What do you think the audience get from the video?: entertainment, influence

Created a new layer (layer 1) and using the brush tool (http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Scrambled-Letters-Brushes-96494829) i covered his face in scrambled letters in solid white colour.

I then held control and clicked on the layer one, this then automatically selected the outline of the brush, I then clicked on the face layer (without holding ctrl) and copied and pasted which made a new layer and I deleted the other one, i repeted this step about 8 times. If you hide the face layer you can see what you have created.I then grouped these lettered layer and added a outter shadow to make the letters look more overlapping.

I then created to more layers and filled each one with blue and orange and changed the blending mode and opacity to the colour over the face.

I drew lines diagonally at the top of his face in bright blue and green, and a messy pink scribble above his head, then changed the blur settings to give it a smuged glow.

On a new file, using an image found on google of an exploded fire work I changed added another layer on top of it and filled it with pink and changed the blending mode to colour and renderd a cloud on top of it to give it a smokey look and merged it together and copied it on top of the image and changed the blended mode to make it all fade in together.

I made a new layer and filled it with black and rendered a light flare on top and changed the blend mode to screen.

Lastly I changed the brightness and contrast to make it bold.

• Men look at woman and the media reinforces this by filming/photographing from male point of view
• woman seen as objects to look at – Hollywood conventionally uses attractive actresses which reinforces this.