Marketing of Meat loaf

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The Music Biz Marketing of Meatloaf Analysis

• Raychelle Shaw

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• Marketing of Meatloaf is a mixed documentary that
  uses interviews, voice of god narration, archive
  footage and vox pops.
• Its purpose is to document, inform about
  Meatloaf and the music industry. Its purpose is
  also to entertain through visually interesting
  themes and graphics.
• Also, the documentary investigates why Meatloafs
  career did not go as far as he wanted it to.
• The narrative structure is voice of god as the
  narrator is never seen addressing the audience.
  It is also single stranded as it focuses on
  Meatloaf and the music industry. It is a closed
  narrative and non linear, as it has no specific
  chronological order.
• The narrative at the beginning gives us a small
  insight into what is going to be appearing in the
  documentary it also gives us an idea of what the
  main themes are.

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• The key themes of the documentary are Music,
  media, marketing, advertising, success, failure
  and risk taking.
• During the analysis of this documentary these key
  themes will influence the way that certain
  aspects of analysis are written and observed.
  Also, due to some of the themes certain parts of
  the documentary will be taken differently to how
  they might usually be taken.

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During the beginning of the documentary they use
a chromakey to edit some of the interviewees
into magazines, they also use this during
interviews, they edit out the background and
usually place an image of meatloaf behind the
interviewee
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The graphics of the title stand out because they
are bold, white letters and the red background
makes them stand out even more, this is to draw
in attention as red is an eye grabbing colour.
The font and text size is also to make the
viewers fell like the documentary is exciting and
interesting.
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This part of the title sequence is a cross cut,
it is used to again make the documentary look
exciting and also to then bring us into the
actual documentary. The graphics Marketing Meat
Loaf also indicate the key themes Meat loaf and
marketing.
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The camera work for this documentary is messy
which reflects low production quality. The camera
is often a hand held one as this makes it easier
for the camera man to manoeuvre but this shows as
the video is often out of focus or moving
consistently. In this documentary we also see
behind the scenes of the music industry, which
goes from glamorous and well polished to
unglamorous and we see how tough their work is.
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This is another example of the chromakey, it is
also an example of an interview abiding by the
conventions. The man is framed to the right and
facing the right. However the lighting for the
interviews is low key making it seem grainy and
low quality. The archive material edited in also
shows Meat loaf in the infancy of his career.
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During the rule of thirds documentary they use
B-roll footage and also flip one of the
interviewees interviews around which is unusual
as the interviewee has been seen before being
interviewed the other way.
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Although one of the key themes is Meat loaf we
are not actually presented with him until about
15 minutes into the documentary this does not
make him stand out as the main focus and
therefore due to the narrative we can assume the
music business as a whole is the main theme of
the documentary.
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The documentary uses high profile guests to
attract those who are interested and make the
documentary worthwhile. The editing throughout is
fast paced and depicts the nature of the music
industry which we see as a busy industry but we
also see it as risky which links into the risk
taking theme but also to the success an failure
themes as they took a risk on Meat loaf for his
past success not failures.
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Here archive footage is presented to us as
graphics, due to the editing style. They also
focus on tech as the mise-en-scene showing us
microphones, cables and the sound engineers, this
is to show us who makes it possible for the music
to be broadcasted and show the music industry is
a tech based industry.
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Throughout we have non-diegetic sound such as a
mixed tape, there is also a narrator the whole
way through the documentary. The camera
consistently uses close ups and long shots even
having a track shot. At the end of the
documentary they use the village people to show
that Meat loaf marketed himself better than them,
linking in to the success and failure themes
again.