Music Biz – The Marketing of MeatloafLuke dickinson

This documentary is based around the music artist Meatloaf. It gave audiences insights into his fall from stardom and his journey back to the top.

This documentary is mixed, as it has a variety of interviews, narration, actuality footage and archive footage.

It has a closed narrative structure, with no audience question going without an answer. It is non-linear as well as it does not follow any type of chronological order, it is also single stranded.

The themes that are discussed throughout documentary are: Meatloaf's personal life, celebrities, public image and the power of the media/meatloaf as he can manipulate audiences.

Within the main themes there where more in-depth themes such as: the importance of the Christmas number 1 and the competition he faced when trying to make it: his competition was, Mr. Blobby, the Village People and Cliff Richard.

The camera work for the documentary featured shots like hand held and profile. Hand Held was used when people entered an event. They also used an establishing shot to show the location of certain events that happened as seen here:

The framing for the interviews where always conventional, with the interviewee, is either put left or right of the screen, with either a medium shot, close up or extreme close up.

The mise en scene used was mostly a chromakey/blue or green screen in every interview excluding when meatloaf was interviewed as he was in the studio. They used the screen to add in special effects like videos of meat loaf singing and covers of his old albums.

The voice over used in the documentary is of a middle aged male using standard English, he speaks with a clear voice and a calm under tone.

Many of Meatloaf’s songs are used throughout the documentary.

The editing in the documentary was done so the audience would keep engaged, for example cross cutting is used to cross the brit awards and the back stage press conference. It is also cut quite fast to keep the documentary fast passed and up beat.

Archive footage was used throughout the documentary, examples of these are: Brit Awards, music video of Meatloaf and village people and top of the pops footage.

Many graphics where used throughout the documentary: when interviewing Paul Conroy of virgin the graphic tells us who he is, his name is in capitals with his job role in italics.

Another example is the opening of the shoe a template of a magazine is seen with the subject matter inside, this is a trademark for the series of Music Biz.