On the days of filming, a range of props will need to be used in order to make our music promo look as realistic and professional as possible.
DAY ONE
Drums/Sticks/Stall
In order to ensure that our music promo looks believable, we need the right equipment to be on set as it needs to fit in with the soudn track of our song.
Guitar
Instead of having any old guitar to appear in our band, we needed to ensure that the style suited the indie pop genre we have chosen to show. For example, a heavy metal guitar such as this would be a big NO in our music video, as the aesthetics would be all wrong and our band would look wrong and like we don't know our genre at all. In order to make it look realistic and believable, a guitar such as this will need to be used:
Microphone/Stand
In order to make the singer look realistic we need to use a real microphone. The stand will need to be adjusted to the right height to fit Kingston to ensure that it looks effective and realistic.
DAY TWO
Picture of the couple
If the audience haven't by this point recognised that the girl and boy used to be a couple, by seeing a photo of the pair together and the girl reminicing the memories of them both, they will soon see the narrative which we are trying to put across too them.
Bathroom mirror
The bathroom mirror which we are using needs to have a lot of light around it. Luckily my mirror at home, in my bathroom does. Two bright lights are placed next to it, this will allow us to create that sterile look which bathroom's sometimes have, making the dark eye make-up of Kingston stand out, allowing the audience to recognise his character as unhumane.
Mascara
This will be used when the girl is looking into the mirror at herself. She will be putting on make-up as this is seen as an every day task, whilst doing this, the ghost like figure of Kingston will appear in the mirror, but he can NOT be seen from the back via the camera, merely his reflection has be seen. This gives the impression that he isn't really there and that he is only a figure of her imagination.
We will use a male watch when filming our narrative performance. This is a prop which the female will look at whilst reflecting on memories of her past relationship. The watch symbolises the idea of time passing by throughout the video, and by reviewing an object of a male shows the audience how she is longing for the male to return.
These should be FULLY charaged and cleared in order to fit as much film on as possible without having any technical issues.
2x Black Tripods
We need to check that both tripods have the clip at the top, in order to attach either camera to the tripod for a steady shot.
1x microphone
1x Microphone stand
1x Drum Kit
Due to none of us having played the drums before, we have arranged to borrow the drum kit from one of our peers, who is acting as the drummer for our promo.
1x Pair of drum sticks
1x Drum Seat
1 Guitar
This is being borrowed by the guitarist in our promo as none of our production team have any past playing guitar.
6x Hi Viz Jackets
These will be provided by the company of the warehouse where we will be filming on day 1.
3x 50m extensions leads
1x Ipod (which will contain our chosen song)
1x Speakers
1x Double headed flood light
This will be used along with natural light and normal electrical lights in the warehouse to give a back lit effect.
1x SLR still shots
1x SLR Video Shots
1x Large A3 sheet containing the lyrics
If Kingston has forgotten any of the lyrics, or is unsure of a few words having them held up for him throughout the song will ensure a smoother take.
2x STD pallets with top boards
2x STD pallet trucks
Lastly, it is also very important that we bring the wires which our instroments need.
The guitar will need the adapter which goes into the amplifier, so that when we take shots of the guitar it looks realistically plugged in, so that it is working electronically through the amp.
The microphone will also need to have the adapter brought, in order to make it look like it is plugged in as well. A real band would have this wire in order to volumise the singer voice over the noice of the instroments.
When discussing the type of effects which we are going to add to our music video, we looked back at our prelim. This was our first attempt at a music video and we managed to use some things well, and others not so well.
On the programme final cut pro, you are able to add an effect to make a shot look like it is a home video.
We discovered however, that it looked wrong when using it for a performance purpose. To get the best from this effect, we would have to use it for narrative. This can easily be built into our plan, as our narrative shows a couple in love juxtaposed by the couple not talking, and the lead singer haunting her through her memories. This home made video style will work well when showing the happy side of the relationship, due to couples filming each other to then watch back in years to come. It also makes a shot much more interesting than just having two people showing signs of love, as it gives the audience an experience through the eyes of the home video camera.
The performance part of our filming will be set in Bicer. It is a 20 minute drive away from Bourne. Luckily, after two of us had passed our driving tests we were able to make our own way down to our location and put all of our equipment in the boots of our cars. This will give us a lot of freedom, as we won't have to rely on public transport, and only be able to take selected items due to the weight of instroments and other nessecary items.
The warehouse that we are using is rented out by Henry's dad. This allows us to be able to arrive and leave when ever is good for us, and have no particular time that we need to be finished by. By having this freedom, we are able to try out different things and have the luxury of time on our side.
Inside the Warehouse
This is the layout inside the warehouse at Bicer. The production will take place against the grey coloured brick wall at the front. Throughout the warehouse, packaging and boxes are piled high and so we need to ensure that we have arranged the selected wall to be clear so that our background is only one texture and the shots remain tightly set and effective to look at with no exteriors interfering in shots. There are toilets for both males and females and food available so we can have regular toilet stops when needed and lunch when when we are hungry.
Costume for this day
Lead Singer
Our lead singer will wear a white polo tshirt. This give the idea of him being a normal every day male character, which will help the audience to relate to his character as they will recognise him as a normal person who has fallen in love. White will also show us against the grey coloured background which we have chosen to use, and allows us to clearly see him on camera.
Blue chino's give the lead singer a modern look, and add colour to the costume, blue and white go well together and give the actor that young immature look which the indie genre often includes within performances.
White Nike high tops, not only go with the white polo t shirt, but they will also be easily recognised on the camera during any camera shots taken from the floor. They also stick to the fashionable style of the costume. Pop promo's have behind the scenes people working to organise costumes so they appeal to the band's target market. As our target market is indie pop, mostly aiming at student, we need our band members to look stylish, young and very on trend in order for them to inspire others.
Entire bands outfits.
Drummer, Lead Singer, Guitarist.
DAY TWO
Location
Day two will include the filming of the narrative side of our promo. It will take place at my house in Thurlby, a secluded village just off Bourne.
There are many aspects within my house which we will be able to use to our advantage. For example, the stair case splits in the middle into two different directions. This will allow us to try out complicated camera shots as we have the luck of having many different levels which we will be able to use throughout the house due to these stairs.
We will also be able to control the lighting in a much easier way, due to having each light switch on a dimmer in the rooms of my house. This will allow us to intensify the light if we need to, or reduce the lighting if it appears too bright on camera.
We also have many different mirrors throughout the house, due to my dad liking the different patterns which they can all come in. The mirror in our bathroom has a light on each side of the mirror, which will give additional light to the ceiling lights, allowing us to create two different effects. We are interested in looking into "The Unknown" and getting shots of mirrors and windows and other parallel objects which are seen as supertiscious.
We will have to film between 10 o'clock and 4 o'clock in the day time, in order to use the daylight to our advantage and avoid further complications of lighting.
Costumes
Characters
Girl and a Boy (lead singer)
Monochrome colours to be worn by the female character, in order to not stand out against the lead singer. He should be noticed over her, due to him being seen as a ghost like character.
Casual black skinny jeans for the girl, in order to look like everyday wear of the teenage years.
Bright green polo t shirt, sticks to the idea of remaining current and modern to the target market of students, and allows the lead singer to stand out when shots of the boy and the girl appear. Bright colours demand the audience's attention and allow to notice him even when partially hidden in a shot.
Grey chino's or plain denim jeans should be worn during this day, however it is unlikely that a shot below a mid shot will be taken of the male, unless new ideas occur on the day due to him being more of a background figure in the narrative than a foreground figure.
This is a mid shot/two shot of characters of equal importance. The script, like our selected band are known for being an indie band. The location which they have chosen to film in looks like an abandonned warehouse, this has a clear similarity to our third pitch idea by keeping the location simple but urban. Danny (lead singer from The Script) is wearing black skinny jeans and a casual lightly checked shirt. This is what we should base our costume on as simple is often very effective. Although The Script have chosen to wear monochrome tone clothing, we have decided to wear coloured clothing. We will do this to make the band stand out against the dull coloured brick wall which will be our background.
This shot in the song, is an extreme long shot. This most effective thing in this picture is the lighting. In order to make out music promo look effective, we need to think about lighting clearly to make the best out of our shots. Lighting will allow us to set a mood, intense lighting will give a sterile, uncomfortable feeling to the video and dull lighting will give an eerie feel making the song appear dark. The mood which we create throughout the song will be vital to the way the audience inerpret the lyrics from our visuals. This shot also shows the use of German Expressionism. The monochrome shot, with the red petals shown makes the colour stand out against the dull background. This colouring effect makes the audience notice the flowers, which may symbolise the love and appreciation the girl has for dance. In our video, we will try to use monochrome background's and put a key element of a shot into colour, making it stand out more and become much clearer that it is important to the audience.
Like The Script, before appearing on camera it is important to make the nessecary preperations. Whilst being filmed, it is known that a person's complexion will turn very white. Appropriate make-up should be worn in order to improve the finishing image. In our narrative, we are thinking of showing the lead singer as someone who isn't there anymore, a ghost of the girl's memories. In order to show this ghostly figure we are thinking of also putting black make-up around Kingston's (lead singer) eyes. This will indicate to the audience that he is not a normal being during the narrative performance.
This is how we want our lead singer to look during the filming of our narrative. It gives the impression of him being a figue which is seen as haunting. This works with the idea of the character haunting the female. The audience may interpret this haunting as a metaphor, the memories of the pair haunting her mind, or his physical self coming back to haunt her. We wanted to keep these two idea's open without a conclusion, to allow the audience to make up their own minds up about what it could mean, in order to gain an emotional connection to the characters and video.
When we first thought about what to include in a music video, we wanted to still create a dramatic effect. Idea 1 was seen as too similar to our foundation production last year, when we made a thriller opening. We would also find picking a location hard, due to the privacy act's in public places and not allowing video camera's to record people without permission before hand. This would be another challenge we would need to over comne in order to make our music promo as good and believable as it could possibly be.
After discussion with the group, it also became apparent that we were focusing our ideas for music promos completely on our market being students. Although this is true, we do not want the video to have an immature feel to it due to the serious nature of the song. As well as this, it would also be hard to successfully film a "stalking scene" keeping the actors in the right frame of mind without laughing, and shot organisation to make this look believable would also be a big challenge and take time to plan.
This idea also has the issue of obeying the laws of privacy in public places. Permission from the owners of the pub and the people in the pub for leisure, will both be needed before filming. This takes time and could easily be stopped and not allowed because somebody inside doesn't want to appear on camera.
The song "Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift has given our media group inspiration. The way she has shown the performance of the band, through the narrative has influenced us to do something completely different. By performing within a narrative, it would be something people will appreciate due to how challenging it will be, however the clip would have to be done in one take. This would be extremely challenging to fit everything into place and have it looking professional at the end.
After the group fed back to us, we think that filming late at night would be very challenging for us due to issues with lighting. It could also be very cold that day, making us unable to wear the appropriate costume for our genre of music promo, rain and fog outside could also distort our footage. This has made us realise that it would be too big a risk to rely completely on the weather.
This was the best pitch we had made throughout the lesson. People could relate to the video due to the narrative being set in a familiar location (house) and a warehouse would give the urban feel to the promo, which is a typical convention of what we want to make our video look as professional as possible.
RESEARCH
Our indie pop target market, is a niche market. It includes mostly people aged 16-24. It appeals to both genders but in order to make a band stand out, they have to be liked by a large proportion of students. When looking into a market we need to think about:
Lifestyle - records for our chosen genre will be sold mostly on a student disposable income.
Education
Attitudes
Knowledge
Expectations
Latest fashion/trends
Social backround
We need to show our band as current/up to date/on trend. They need to inspire the average student and show themselves to be that something different in the world of music.
Our main influential band is "The Script", they like to keep costume choise simple by usually dressing grungey in dark colours. In this photo, they have kept to the very dark colour theme and stuck to only one colour to be worn by all 3 members. They are also a typical 3 piece band, which is what we want to turn our band into when making the video. They possess the original indie vibe through posture and stance in this photo and have been hugely successful as a band. Putting your hands in your jean pockets is a typical indie convention, this will influence us to use this typical stance when creating the digipak for our band "4 Kicks."
TYPICAL INDIE-POP LOCATIONS
URBAN
Due to the Indie genre being the first to record and produce their musisc by themselves, the locations which their video's are set in are urban. They show that the band doesn't base their music on expensive video's and other pleasing aesthetics which would cost lots of money, but make it more about the song.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH Questionnaire
When forming our questionnaire, it was important that we left the questions open to people, and didn't ask anything which could be classed as misleading. This would make people answer with the things we wanted to hear, rather than their true feelings, thus, making our results unreliable and dishonest.
Out of all the people which we interviewed, 50% of them said that indie music was their prefered style. This results has worked to our advantage, as we thought the most popular style of music for our own age group would be indie, thus reflecting our preference to look into the Indie genre.
Over all, this quesiton lead to us recieving very mixed feedback. Each individual segment all have a large percentage of people saying they would expect to see the above things within an indie genre video. By having no definitive winning answer, as a group we will decide the best things to put into our video as our data was inconclusive.
By sticking to the urban conventions of an indie genre video, the use of gritty colours have been voted the most likely to appear within the video. As a group, we have decided that using these colours would not only be most conventional, but would also
Many people said that the typical indie promo would take place in a live gig, where the audience is stood there watching the band. A complication with this, would be that in order to film our music promo, we need to have two days off school. The audience would need to be shown as our target market (students aged 16-24) it would be extremely hard to get a large amount of students off of timetable to miss their sixth form lessons.
The majority of people thought that within the music promo, it was very important to clearly show individual instruments in order to allow the audience to make a connection with the band and admire their skills as artists. Instruments also make the music promo look much more realistic, as though they are actually performing throughout, rather than having visuals attached to an audio track.
Indie music promo's often centre their outfits around the modern fashion. Today's fashion shows indie artists to wear either skinny fit jeans, or chino's. These two types of trousers will allow the audience to recognise the band as current up to date fashion idols.
Many of the people we asked were most interested in "The Script" this beat all of the other bands by at least 20%, showing us that this band is hugely successful and would help us to develop a very successful promotional package by using them as inspiration.
This theory was influenced by the 'Queer Theory', and the work produced from
Focault Madonna is seen to be emphasising on Feminist critiques, particularly
one in particular eing Judith Butler.
One quote Paula Robertson stood by was:
"Is Madonna a
glamorized fuck doll or the queen of parodic critique?"
Roland Barthes
He stated there was an enigma
code. This is when you hold back sufficent infromation frow the viewer
being the audience in hope that it will enable them to ask questions and to
hopefully consider their own explinations of what could have happened before
finding it out.
He stated there was also an action code.
This is when the producers attain interest and tension from the
audiences persepective when they are not aware of what will happen next.
Andrew Goodwin
He believes that 6 main features make up a successful music video.
A relationship between lyrics and visuals should be shown. The visual could completely contradict what the song is trying to say, but as long as a type of realtionship can reach the audience, the music video should remain successful.
There should also be a relationship between the visuals and the music itself. Not only taking lyrics into consideration, but the tempo of the song should also be backed up through visuals.
A considerable amount of close-up's of the lead singer should occur through the music video. This allows us to connect with the singer and concentrate closely on what they're trying to say.
Genre's of music are often very diverse and complex to explain within music, the video should show this through iconography.
When females are used in video's, it is effective to show them through voyeurisms, as it shows a female being a "part of a whole" which is often shown as the male in the video.
Many references of intertextuality will occur within music videos to give the audience different ideas and meanings behind their video.
He believes that this can be achieved:
Through beats, hearing the sound
Technical aspects of music videos i.e. editing pace etc
Narrative and performance
The "star image"
Relation of visuals to song and/or lyrics
Steve Archer
A strong relationship between performance and narrative needs to occur.
The video should flick between the two.
A choreographed dance may occur throughout the video, to show the band/artist can perform to a high standard, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing in order to attract their audience and impress.
Band members should be shown for similar amounts of time throughout the video so that each individual is seen, not just the lead singer.
Close up's on instruments are important to
John
Stewart
Says that the music video which is being made must include the aesthetics that
could be used on a TV commercial.
Should also include large amount of close ups of the artist/band. Front lighting should
be used in order to focus on and clearly show the stars face.
Visual references should come from a range of sources, mainly from
cinema, fashion and art.
The video should allow more access to the performer than a stage
performance could do.
The mise-en-scene should be used to show an inspirational lifestyle
which the audience would want.
PaulWillis
Paul Willis
(Sociologist) did a study of 12 working class boys from a comprehensive school
in a comprehensive school in the midlands.
Willis states that
the vast majority of young people involved with particular genre's of music such
as pop are from working class backgrounds. Therefore, knowing this he states
that these pupils have an inability to process and articulate the meanings
represented in a verbal manner i.e. discussing it.
Willis states that the rise in popular music culture is an way of expression
for working class youths, who are inable to express themselves in other forms.
He states that popular music could be classed as a new form of media
literacy and learning for groups that are traditionally seperated and
marginalized.
Sigmund Frued
Known for his work within Psychology, most theories proposed during a time of sexual repression. His theories on sexual relations and the way in which people look into sexual things is often seen as over reaching, however this theory can be added to music promos when reviewing certain objects.
He refers to the notion that pleasure may be attained by visualising sexual objects, in the case of when the object not aware they are
being watched. This technique is used vastly in particular genres of music
videos and is refered to as Voyeurism.
Laura
Mulvey
Feminist theorist who states that in sterotypical main
stream Hollywood films, that women are gazed upon by males and judged
on the sexual presense they display, rather than their inside beauty.
This theory see's all females from a stereotypical males perspective as "disposable pleasures" rather than any other real relevannce to society.
The gaze of the camera is always shown from the males perspective.
This theory can also be shown in things such as television and perfume ads.
However, this theory is a dated theory due to theory
linking back to artists such as Madonna, whereas there are other
female individuals to date e.g. Rihanna
In order to make the singer look realistic we need to use a real microphone. The stand will need to be adjusted to the right height to fit Kingston to ensure that it looks effective and realistic.
