Test filming

We took the opportunity to go a take some shots and film of our town as it was the switching on of the lights. Because of the event the area was busy with stalls and food markets. We used this to our advantage to give us inspiration

Matt

Once we had decided we definitley wanted a guy in the video, we then had to decide who this guy was going to be. Last year we found it quite easy to pick a guy because he was acting on his own. However this year the guy has to act as the girls boyfriend. Therefore we needed to pick someone who is outgoing and will put aside awkwardness to make the video look believeable.

We decided on Matthew

Matthew does performing arts and is reliable and we trust that he is a good choice as he will listen to direction and is not shy.

Costume

Costume on Prezi

Meeting Seven

In todays meeting we continued to write down shots we want to have. We thought about the locations of where we need to film, the actors we need in each location, props and costumes.
We storyboarded our ideas on post-it notes so we could change round the shot order. 

Meeting Five

In todays meeting we discussed the structure of our song. I was concerned that although our film was going to be more artistic there was no idea of narrative or ideas of shots we could story board. I had the idea of splitting the song int the the verses and chorus and have the verses as a story of the artist and her ex boyriend and the chorus as her on her own. The chorus would be in the home video style that we had previously decided, but the verses would be naturalistic. We would still keep the idea of lots of clips put together but now it will be more structured and it will be easier to make a story out of it.

In todays meeting we split the lyrics into groups and decided which verse would be what and started getting some ideas together about shots to storyboard.

Brandon & Leah

Brandon and Leah are not only a duet but a married couple. Life Happens, their first debut album, produced and co-wrote themselves shows of their vibrant and bright sound with the help of ukelele and acoustic guitar. Brandon plays the guitar and Leah leads with the vocals. Their songs are based on their own lives, connections and disconnections between people but the mood is always light and positive.
They describe their music as 'beachy' and say their influences include Ben Harper and Bob Marley which can be heard in their music.

Influencial video - Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber - Beauty and a Beat



This video, although not in the same genre as our video, has given me some ideas for our own video, in particular the camera work. A lot of the video is as though Justin himself is filming his life. This makes the video feel quite personal and as though he is singing directly at the audience. This hand held video style is something that we could include into our video as it makes it feel a bit like a home video which is the type of style we are going for with our own video.

Meeting four

During todays lesson we started planning shooting times. This was a bit hard trying to arrange a time when all members of the team and people staring in the video were free at the same time. However we have decided to film the switching on of lights in our local area without our main character. This should work out as we can do cut aways etc. Because our video is artistic and also the track is quite long we know that we just need as many shots as possible at the moment so we have room to cut down on them.

We also discussed costume and decided that this wasn't a huge importance to the video as we have learnt that in similar videos the artist is naturally dressed. 

We found storyboarding our music video quite difficult because we are unsure of the shots until we get to the location. We want to use what we have at the time. However I think this is risky because one of the main things I learnt from last year is that the storyboard was so important! 

We storyboarded the main shots that we know we want but I think in future meetings before we go out to film we need more of a structure to what we are going to film.

Genre

The genre of our music video could be described as Folk / Pop. Folk pop can be described as a folk song with pop arrangements or a pop song with intimate, acoustic based folk arrangements.
Life Happens falls into the second, this is because the song is very upbeat and fast tempo-ed compared to other folk songs yet has the intimate acoustic based folk arrangements with the instrument use.  

Some recent artists I believe fall under this genre are Eliza Doolittle, Jake Bugg, Lucy Rose, Laura Marling, Mumford and Sons, Ben Howard.

By watching the videos a similar pattern occurs. I have noticed that the videos are very naturalistic for example no special effects are used and the camera work feels natural and hand held making the video more believable.
Another occurrence I have noticed is the use of bikes, either for visual effect or for the artist to travel around.

Eliza Dolittle - Rollerblades

   Jake Bugg- Lightning Bolt












Ben Howard - One Love















Lucy Rose - Middle Of The Bed


















Another similarity between these videos is the use of performance. In mainstream pop videos the performance is often a dance for example Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love or Jessie J - Domino, instead the performance is the use of an instrument.

Laura Marling - Sophia

Jake Bugg - Lightning Bolt

Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man










Another similarity between videos of the same genre I have noticed is that they only usually include the artist or band there are not a lot of other people in it. Occasionally there will be a member of the opposite gender but other than this the main focus seems to be on the artist. It is also normally the main artist in the video, for example it is not that the artists are singing over a video in which actors are acting or dancing, it is usually themselves playing the roles and singing in the videos.

There also is not often a structured narrative to the video. It feels as though we are following them round as apposed to working out a narrative. The videos are more artistic that narrative lead.
The camera work as I mentioned is often hand held and feels more free than perhaps other genres of music. The editing is also naturalistic and together give a home movie effect.






Adding to the naturalism and realism of the videos point, the artists don't look very styled. They look naturalistic and makes the audience feel as though they are getting to know the artist for who they really are. For example in my opinion.....

... I feel like I know more about Lucy Rose in this naturalistic video than Beyonces'.





According to Goodwin, a good music video should include intertextuality and voyeurism. Folk / pop videos don't display intertextuality and voyeurism that you may expect from more mainstream artist and videos such as Rihanna and Beyonce.

We have taken these points into great consideration. For example we are going to use only one main person in our video, she will be dressed very naturally and not looked styled. She will ride a bike and play the ukelele.

Malory Torr

We have chosen Malory Torr to be our artist in our video 'Life Happens'. We have chosen Malory as she has a background in singing and acting. We learnt from previous A level music videos that the performer was one of the most important elements of the video, if they wern't believable then the video didn't look very good. Therefore we knew that picking a person for our video would be very important. Having an A level drama student who is used to performing, out going and has the look we want for our video I have every faith that Malory will look believable as the artist as she also fits the genre look. An added bonus is that Malory can play the ukelele which we will use to our advantage and use this in the video. We wanted to include an instrument in the video and a ukelele is perfect to fit the folky / pop genre we have gone for.  Last year, luckily, our main character for our opening sequence was very reliable which made filming a lot easier - setting up times and following instructions. Malory is very busy setting up her music career but I expect this year will be the same in that she will give us the time we need and listen to direction.

 

Star image

CHERYL COLE http://ellabaker94.wix.com/starimage

Influential music video - Lucy Rose

LUCY ROSE - MIDDLE OF THE BED 

Lucy Rose - Middle of the bed, is very inspirational for the ideas behind our music video. It is one girl in different locations and costumes. It is very simple but, I feel, effective. Because it is just Lucy on her own with lots of close ups, the audience can feel close to her and because it is so naturalistic, feel like they know her. This is the kind of feeling we want our audience to have towards our artist. 

Lucy's target audience is similar to that of ours in the style of music and age of audience, therefore I feel it is important to take inspiration from this video to replicate the successful areas of it. 

The costumes throughout are very natural and real. This makes her relatable to the audience and therefore connects to them. She is a lot easier to watch than say Lady Gaga who you almost feel like you shouldn't be looking at and is a lot less relatable. 

 

The concept of this music video is very simple and easy to follow. It uses light really effectively and to their advantage which gives depth and interest to the shots. The video uses Lucy's face in the same position but in different locations and in different costumes. This is so simple but looks good. This may be something that we think about doing in our own video. 

New mood board and images

Influential music video - Jake Bugg

This video staring new artist Jake Bugg was really inspiring for our new idea of music video. It shows a young boy in white heart. It is very simple and naturalistic following him through the streets and seeing the sights. There is no real narrative, the video is more artistic which is what we want to go for. There is also no reference to voyeurism. There is no evidence of intertextuality however if audience recognises the location it has the same effect which we hope will show also in our video.

I like the shots of him in the record shop and of the bikes.

I think it's really naturalistic and we get an insight to his life making us feel part of his life.

There is a difference between the main action and his singing. Sequences where he is singing are in black and white where as the rest of the footage is in colour.

Audience questionnaire

I created a questionnaire in order to find out more about the music consumption of my peers.

Although all were aged 16-20 and students, the answers varied more than I expected. When asked to rank genre of music, no one put the genres in the same or similar order, all put a different favourite artist and only a few agreed on the importance of a music video. 

This surprised me because it shows that, although all of similar age, we are all influenced in different ways by music and how we consume it. 

From the questionnaire I learnt that it is possible that the genre of our product needs to be marketed in a different way to a video of a different genre. 

From this we created a group questionnaire which can be found on our group blog edify. 

Analysis of music video - Katy Perry

Katy Perry stars as geeky teenager Kathy Terry in her video Last Friday Night (TGIF). This music video was directed by Marc Klasfeld, also known for directing videos by Pixie Lott to Bon Jovi. This pop video is different to Katy Perrys' other videos, although all are light hearted and fun it is the first to be shown as a short movie. The video is clearly a Pop video from the upbeat tempo, business of the video and vivid colours.

The lyrics are illustrated by the visuals. The song is about a party on Friday night and the visuals are showing the party. We see 'Kathy' the morning after the party having a flash back to the party, we see this visually rather than through the lyrics.

Instrumentals are illustrated by people playing instruments, (Hanson and Kenny G).
The video does cut to the beat but not obviously. I think this is because they are making the music to be almost like a sound track to this short movie. Also because it is a messy party the fact that it doesn't always cut to the beat almost emphasises this.

There are a lot of close ups of the artist and her new image makes her comical. This makes a connection between her and the audience as they see her having a laugh and therefore feel like they know her more than they do as they can laugh with her.

Because of the nature of the video, it turns voyeurism on its head and the notion of looking. They are all 'geeky' characters and so there is not much view of the female body which is usually expected in music videos these days. There are however some characters for female gaze eg 'jocks' with six packs.
After her make over there are some notions of sexual displays as the boys are looking at her differently and she wakes up in bed with a guy.

The video is narrative based as we can easily establish a stroy line of a young girl going to a party, seeing a guy she likes, getting a make over, getting the guy and waking up in bed with him. We see this all through a party which could be seen as a performance.

Change of idea

During todays lesson we started listening to some new artists, sharing new songs that we had found. While watching a Jake Bugg video, we started to realise that actually the simplicity of it was very appealing and we really liked how naturalistic it was with believable people and hand held camera work. We then listened to Lucy Rose - Middle of the bed and really liked the song. We started to question the track that we had already chosen and after discussing it as a group decided that this was actually the genre and idea that we really wanted to do. Personally I really liked our original song choice but did start to question our idea as we pictured it as a happy summery sort of video however this is not possible to do during november/december. Therefore I am happy with our decision to change song. We considered doing Middle of the Bed, however thought it might be a bit slow and learning from the previous years work we wanted to stay away from slow songs.
We have decided to use the time of our year to our advantage and use the christmas lights and markets to make a simple video. The song we decided on is 'Life Happens' by Brandon and Leah. I personally hadn't heard the song before, but I really like it and think it fits our plan. Watching the video, I was worried that the song was too summery, however listening to it without the video I am confident that it will work.

Promotion and marketing of Morashele

http://ellabaker94.wix.com/morashele

Analysis of music video - Pink

P!nk - Try





I will be the first to admit that I am not a fan of the artist P!nk, however, being a fan of dance I love this video. The video has therefore changed my opinion of P!nk showing that a music video is more important to the product than I initially thought.




This video is quite different from from P!nks' previous videos and changes her tough girl image that is seen in previous music videos such as 'raise your glass' and we see her as quite vulnerable.
Most of her previous videos have been directed by Dave Meyers, however 'Try' was directed by Florida Sigismondi which is why it is so different to her previous videos.


This video uses dance to display the narrative of the song, the dance moves match the tone of the music. They move in time with the music to match the lyrics. The camera work also works along side to match both the lyrics and dance. The moves match the smooth gentle music, when the music becomes more beaty the actions in the video become harsher. Also as the tempo of the music becomes faster so does the dance and the editing of the video.
The visuals cut to the beat of the music.



Goodwin suggests that a good music video includes intertextuality and voyeurism. This video doesn't show any clear evidence of intertextuality but does however show voyeurism to some level. This is because the dance, at some stages, has sexual suggestions and also neither of them are wearing that much clothing. There are also notions of looking in the video, firstly in the mirrors and secondly there is a long shot of the two of them in the house and it feels as though you are looking in on them from afar.

The mise-en-scene is minimalist and bare. The house they are in is not decorated or homely and the other location is a large open space like a desert. This makes her look quite small and this along with her actions makes her look quite helpless which relates to the lyrics.
There are a lot of close ups of her face in the video which is important in selling the product and also to have feeling and empathy towards her which matches the tone of the video. The location and camera work make this video feel realistic which is important as it bridges the gap between the artist and audience.

I like this music video as it is different from other music videos in the same genre, however I think it would be hard to successfully produce a dance based music video as we would need professional dancers in order for it to look good.