Christmas Music Video Project

Here are some screenshots of the Christmas music video that we created for our school as an extra curriculum task. It help us to get to grips with filming techniques and editing styles. It also allowed us to do some casting for teachers and students. It took two double lessons to finish as we had to film and make sure every line had been sung or was used.

In the shot above I walked with the camera from the front gate to the entrance door to our school, in editing we speed this right up so that it only took a few seconds and looked very effective as an intro.

As you can see above we also had some good uses of last minute props so it had a more festive feel to the whole video. Every teacher from every department was keen to get involved which made filming and camera shy no problem at all.

Overall this task enabled the whole group to use our different skills in technology to create a fun christmas music video. We can now take all the things we’ve learnt and practise to go towards our own A-Level task of creating a music video.

First Day of Filming

Here is a short extract for our first day of filming, we managed to get the introduction done and some of the first verse as we had thoroughly planned this through the anamatic and storyboard. We found it fairly easy for Connor to be able to lip sing to the lyrics and so the fit very well in my opinion.We managed to get a lot done if a short space of time today, overall very successful.
 

Anamatic

Here is our Anamatic for our introduction ideas. As you can see we made images on Photoshop to show how we wanted the shot to look and have briefly edited them to be black and white on some showing the main characters negative side. As well as this we have positioned them to where we want the shots to come in, in time to the music which has been under laid in.

This will save time and help us a lot with the actual filming and editing of our music video.

Storyboard

Here are the scans for our storyboard, that we all participated in drawing out each shot that we wanted to appear. Due to the quality of the scanner it is fairly hard to see the lines.

However because we have planned this thoroughly we will be able to get the filming done fairly quickly as we already know what we want and where we want it. Locations were a big part of this planning as we had to consider where we good actually film.

Costume Ideas for Connor

Here are some images taken by Arran to give us an idea of the type of costumes we think would suit Connor's character.

We decided that Connor would wear white for his past-self, signifying purity and happiness and dark colours for his portrayal of himself today, negative and neglected.

Planning Meeting

During this meeting we dicusses locations, costumes and casting for the music video. We have all had ideas and have decided to use the stage at our school to recreate the performance sections of the band. As well as this we have had ideas about using a messy room full of empty alcohol cans/bottles and substances representing drugs, for the intro- this will be a room at Arran's house. We have also discussed using a local park so we can produce memory shots and contrast them with the main characters life to the day. The next thing to do with locations is to produce a recce.

For casting of the main roles, Connor will be representing the main character/singer and taking on this role for the band. This is due to the fact that the members of the band are not possible to film. This is because one is in China, another is travelling and the third is in the Navy based on a ship. Connor will play the main character in two ways; His more innocent, 'pure', uncorrupted past-self and then again as a neglected soul, addicted to drugs and struggling with the effects that they have pursued on his life. 
I will be playing  the role of Connor's girlfriend when they were together and also as Connor's hallucination of her. This will have the effect of  looking how Connor sees her, like himself (addicted to drugs, depressed, negative, etc.). It could also be seen as a vision of how she would have become if she had stayed with him.

In terms of costumes, we have decided to have two sets of outfits which reflect the two roles of the actors; Connor will be wearing one costume of bright or white colours to reflect the 'good' past version of himself and also one to reflect him when he has become addicted to drugs. Similarly I will wear a more relaxed lounge wear of bright colours, to reflect the positive relationship for one role. For the second role I will be in negative, dark colours, with running mascara and looking scruffy.

The next thing to do with our planning is to produce a recce and start on filming concept shots. This will allow us to get visual ideas of the whole music video so that when we come to constructing we can get the filming done quickly; leaving more time for editing. 

Story Board Shots for Filming

Here is a story board I have made briefly by creating these shots through images on Google and editing them on Photoshop:

First shot appears in the left hand corner of a black screen.

Appears on first chord sound.

In black and white as shown

Screen quartered.

This will emphasis his solitude and where he is in his life at the moment (depressed)

 







This second shot will look at his isolation from a side view and become closer to him.

This will come in on the second chord being strummed and again is in black and white to convey the darkness of his like at this time.




The third shot will appear on the left bottom corner of the screen.

It is a close up of a hand clearly participating in drug use.

Again its in black and white and will come in on the third chord being strummed.

Again this will allow us to show how he is dealing with this depression through the use of drugs.

This shot will come in on the fourth chord being strummed.

It will appear in the right bottom corner of the screen.

It is to show his emotion of depression and desperation as well as his use of drugs.

During this shot we will get the pupil dilating and then shrinking back again as light is let into it.


In shot five this will appear over the top of the last four shots as they slowly fade out.

He will sing the first two lines of the song.

Will be fairly close to the camera to bring his sad emotion across.

Still in black and white.




In the 6th shot he will be singing the next two lines: "Bring me back into your arms. Your sweet embrace."

This shot will act as a flashback to his happy life before with his woman.

This will be in over the top bright colours to show the clear contrast.




In the seventh shot we see the same mirror image but of him now.

Back in black and white.

And the girl has gone from the sofa to show his loneliness and reminiscing.

This is the storyboard so far, for the intro and first verse of our chosen song. I will now take the images and the ones that we will create for the rest of the song and make an anamatic. This will allow us to view our music video ideas as still images and where they fit in the song. This will also make it a lot quicker and easier to film as we will already have the times and shots set up.

Storyboard (Rough)

Here are the first pictures for our storyboard in rough. We discussed the intro and first verse and came up with the first few shots. In me next post I will be reconstructing these images on Photoshop and show each shot and how we want
to convey them.

Type of Music

In today's lessons we discussed what type of music video we will be creating. Based on the chart information we have from our target audience, we have decided to create a narrative based music video with a hint of performance. This is what our target audience wanted and so we will be suiting their needs.

We then went on to start to discus some locations for our recce; which is the next stage of our planning. This will allow us to link places and images to form the narrative as a whole picture.

Annotating Lyrics

Here is a recording/ film of our group discussion we had whilst annotating the lyrics to "Elevator". We all had some great ideas about the meaning behind certain lyrics and discussed how these would fit with certain shots and locations.


Here are the notes we wrote throughout the discussion on the lyrics:

These are the notes Arran and Harry made throughout the discussion.

These are the notes Connor and I made throughout the discussion.

Both are very similar with the same basic ideas about what the lyrics could be. Connor and I however have also included concepts we could use in the actual video and where we could really make a story line come to life.

The next task then is to discuss the type of music video we will be making...

Planning Spider Diagram

Here are my groups and my original thoughts for our planning stage and how to go about planning are presented here in the spider diagram we created. As you can see there is a lot to consider and get done as well as always focusing on the needs of our target audience. We then went on to creating a To Do List and order our work so that we can go through the process of planning successfully.

This is the To Do List, from looking at this you can see that our first task is to allocate roles to the group within the planning and filming stages. My role is to be responsible for locations and props which I feel I'll be good at because of my knowledge of the song (as it's my brothers) and the area they were thinking of when creating the lyrics; I am also creative so can link lyrics to places and images I feel will be effective. Harry another member of my group is responsible for casting and costume; this is ideal for him because he is extremely educated in current fashion and can spot talent from a mile. Arran will be in charge of editing however we will all help and put ideas in for this; he is perfect for this as he has a lot of experience in this area. Finally Connor is the Camera man as he also has lots of experience in this area due to studying film and he enjoys it so will put in a lot of effort in creating each shot.

Our next task is to annote the lyrics...

Creating our Production Company Logo and Name

Whilst researching and planning for our music video production we decided to create our own name and logo for our new production company. This way we can make all our work more professional and actually email the chosen band to use their song for our A-level work. Asking them if we can create there music video, magazine poster and digipak for their album; as well as promoting them through social media sites such as Facebook by improving their own page. This will allow us to establish and full blown marketing project for the unsigned band BOCA.

Here is the final piece of our logo for our production company. I created this on Photoshop from all the ideas we came up with and looked at. The paint relates to what happens when paint touches speakers (bass); this is the musical element. We chose the name Wight Spark because we are the production company on the Isle Of Wight and the word Spark is the beginning of a fire and therefore the beginning of something great (a bands career). Finally it is bright and colourful to stand out just like music.

We can now make our project a lot more formal by representing BOCA officially.

Digipak Template

Templates:

Here are some templates of digipaks that Arran found form a website. As you can see there are many different designs for a digipak; these pictures show 4, 6 and 8 panel designs but we will focus on the 6 panel ones for our bands digipak. All of these designs are very similar in layout except for where the disc is held.

These are some things we need to consider when creating our digipak: How many panels?

Where the disc should be? What images should we include? What our main image should be? The album name? How to link it with the poster? How to feature the conventions of the genre Indie Rock and there digipaks/posters?


For our group finding these templates have been very useful as we don't have a budget to spend when creating our digipak and so having free templates at our use is very fortunate.

Digipak Research

Here is a Prezi presentation on Digipaks done by Arran and Connor. As you can see first they have defined what a Digipak is and shown this with examples such as Rihanna's Loud Digipak album. They have then  analysed their examples further highlighting key areas that would be effective to an audience appeal. They have featured different genres of music and their Digipak so that we can pick up on key conventions and what we would need to include for our chosen band B O C A. Finally their last slide of information about what we should consider will be very useful through the production of the Digipak as we can gather a rough idea of what needs to be featured.

Indie Rock Poster Analysis

After going into detail of two Indie Rock Band posters, harry and I also looked at these posters to see if we can spot any conventions for the genre.

Some conventions that can be see throughout all or most of these posters are:
-The band name is always the biggest text and the highest up the poster.
-The image takes up the whole background and is also the main image of the album/digipak.
-The image is not necessarily of the band itself.
-Promotes the music more than the band image.
-Album name comes second to the band.
-Some have themes.



Overall we can take into account these conventions so that our poster will be similar to those in it's genre "Indie Rock". This will then help us to draw in our target audience.

Magazine Poster Research

Poster Analysis:

Magazine Poster Research

Poster Analysis:

This analysis was done by another member of my group, they chose the band Panic at the Disco an alternative rock band. This is a good band/ poster to analyse as they are of a similar genre to B O C A (our chosen band). As you can see he has analysed every aspect of the poster; main image, main text, theme, layout and even its use of language relating it all to its target audience. This will allow us to create our own magazine poster advertising the band B O C A to the full extent of hooking our target audience.

Independent Musicians Research

Here is a post taken from Connor's blog:

During today's lesson, me and Arran went into some research on independent musicians and focused on what 'Indie' music actually is and how they distribute their music to the audience through digital copies and solid copies like Vinyls, CD's etc. 

Through the use of a helpful website called Bandcamp, we were able to discover a wide range of Indie artists and research their music to see how they present themselves to their audience as an independent artist. 

Funny enough, during research on the genre 'indie' me and Arran discovered that the word 'Indie' is actually another word for labeling someone as 'independent' as in someone who does everything themselves for the music which includes album artwork, record labels etc. Through discovering this, I have now come to realize that Indie is used in conjunction with another genre like rock to tell the audience that the audience basically did everything themselves. This can tell you a lot about how different an independent artist is compared to other artists that are partnered with large music companies like the big three.  

Going back onto the Bandcamp website, we discovered many artists from different genres that were all a good example of what an independent artist is. Some of these artists were called Hardwicke Circus, Barstow Bats, Sarah Grace, luciensghost. These all came from very different genres and were all on Band camp presenting their music, through Bandcamp they were able to advertise their albums, merchandise and artwork for anyone to view. Discovering this has shown how important small companies like Bandcamp are with getting independent artists the publicity and views they need from the audience in order to become successful. Having Bandcamp enabling independent artists to sell their merchandise directly online is also counted as a very important benefit in my opinion as having a good income can allow the artist to expand faster and expanding is a very important part when starting a music career.

I think the research that Connor and Arran found here will be very useful as we are promoting an independent band so could also use some of the websites discussed in the post. So overall we can use this information found to help promote our local band as it looks cheap and easy to use yet still enables a large scale target audience. 

18 Rated Music Video

 Arran create this music video to show an example of audience perception towards an extreme music video; which has recently become the only one rated an 18 by the BBFC.

As you can see my reaction is the worst, as i found it extremely shocking at times. However all of us at one point did laugh due to the randomness and over exaggeration of the violence. I thought some parts linked to the film Scary Movie, which is almost a parody of scary films.

From this we can take away the fact that we can't just include anything within our music video as then it may be certified and some of our target audience might not be able to view it.

Music Video Age Rating

Arran found this BBC article online (dated the 18th August) regarding new age ratings to be given to music videos to "protect children from viewing inappropriate videos on the internet". However, it has also stated that "International artists... won't be affected." because it will only apply to "music videos produced in the UK".

This means that if we are attempting to recreate a conventional music video, we need to be aware that these restrictions are in place, following the guidelines. However these are at the moment only for Sony, Universal and Warner music production companies, so won't affect an independent company; which is what we are.

Ofcom- Music Video Research

Here is a Powerpoint presentation of the information I found from the Ofcom website in a PDF file. I have read through the PDF and found everything on music videos and the rules of broadcasting. After that I simplified the information so that it is easy to understand and clearly highlights the main issues faced when creating and broadcasting a music video. Hopefully this presentation will allow the group to create and show a good music video but following the guidelines of Ofcom.

Ofcom music videos from Jammydodger97

YouTube Artist's Music Videos

Here is a video that Arran, one of my group members created to show the conventions of low budget YouTube music videos.

As you can see from those short clips, all the artists mix different camera shots on screen and it is only them performing due to the low budget. This is still very effective and significant as it allows layers and harmonies to develop as well as seeing multiple members of a band (Xplore Yesterday) on screen at once.

As we are not going to have money to spend on the creation of our music video we can take into account some of these conventions so that we can promote B O C A to their full potential; getting them known like these YouTube artists are now.

Types of Indie Rock Music Video- Analysis

B O C A Research

About the band:

B O C A as I have said is an independent Indie Rock band. They come from the Isle of Wight and have an EP recorded by (insert record label). They have also already created a Facebook Page, Twitter Page and Website for themselves. They have agreed to let us promote them and create their music video, Digipak and magazine poster. 

Band Members:

The members are Tom Batchelor, Charlie Nolan and Aled Harris. They are all 23-24 years of age and have been school friends since middle school. The band came together about a year ago but before then Tom Batchelor has been a part of three other bands that have now broken up. They all have there own careers along side playing their music together. 

Profile of Band Member:

Name: Tom Batchelor

Age: 23

Birthday: 10/02/1992

Band Role: Main Singer and Guitarist

Career: Naval Diver

Tom Batchelor wrote the lyrics to our chosen song "Elevator". He and his other band members decided to create the band as they all have a love for music especially Surf and Indie Rock genres. They started out playing on the local beaches with acoustics as it suited their style of music. They have gained more fans since and developed their music and have played at Platform 1 at the Isle of Wight festival and performed at the Bestival in a local tent. 

We as a group are thrilled to be promoting them further and producing this music video for them. 

B O C A

Our chosen artist is the three-piece band known as BOCA.
A local unsigned Island band, who's musical genre is indie-rock mixed with surf. We chose to create this bands music video, as where they are an unsigned band it would be a great opportunity to format a whole advertising campaign for them. As well as this they don't have their own music video already so we will not be influenced by watching this and can interpret the lyrics of they chosen song "Elevator" ourselves.

We can also start creating their own Digipak for their newly recorded EP and there own band poster incorporating images of the band such as these:

Taking it further we can include using social media to promote the product of B O C A. As they already have some pages on Facebook and Twitter we can easily post our own things to these sites of the work we are doing for the band and adapt the way some of their pages look to suit our advertising ideas.

So our group is going to formally email B O C A to gain permission to create their music video, digipak and poster; as well as gaining access to their social media sites and include them in everything we do so that they are pleased in the way we advertise them.

Because they are an indie rock band, we will now be focusing our research on the indie rock genre. This will allow us to apply the conventions that are shown in the music video of this genre.

UK Top 40- Record Labels/ Music Industry

Here is a short Radio Chart Show I created to show the record label companies of the UK Top 10. As you can pick up from listening, the majority of the record label companies that produce the top 10 are owned by Universal, Sony or Warner; these are part of the Big 4. We can also see that there are only some songs that use an independent company to help produce it. As well as this the main genre of all the top 10 songs are dance tracks.

Overall this took a couple of lessons to create, throughout the process there were some problems with the equipment. This has reminded me of some of the issues that can occur; so whilst planning our time for filming we needs to take this all into account and have a contingency plan. I used an audio recorder to create my speaking parts and I downloaded the music clips from the internet. I then uploaded them all to my computer and used Adobe Audition to edit each clip and made sure that the sound volume levels were even throughout. As well as this I used a fade in and fade out affect so that all the speaking parts could be heard over the top of the music tracks and everything flowed too.

Here is some further analysis of the Uk Top 15 done by Harry, a member of the group. As you can see there are some trends such as: Most of the artists are from the UK or USA, they are mainly males in the top 15. As well as this the main genre throughout this list seems to be pop/house music. All the artists are fairly young mainly being in their twenties. Also the majority are a recent artists having their active singing years late 2000's. This will help us in promoting an artist as we can see what is trending in today's music market and where there are gaps with certain genres.

"Musicians Guide to Social Media" Analysis

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByILRFFbTrxAVklkazc5UXU1WjQ

The musicians guide to social media is a PDF file we found, it provides useful information and advice for independent musicians on how to promote themselves through social media; such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter E.T.C. This was very useful to our group as we are hoping to create a Music Video for an unsigned band and post it to the world through YouTube. As well as this we already know that the band we are looking to promote have already tried to advertise themselves through Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and creating their own official website. So we are hoping to gain a better understanding of free promotion through social media so we can improve their advertisements on the sites they are already a part of. 

The document highlights the importance of a personal website over a page on social media. It says that it is almost a main hub for your online presence. Therefore the first thing we will look to improve and develop is their official website. However the pages on social media sites are where they can promote their website and it is more world spread with more of their target audience connecting to these social media sites.

BOCA's Social Media Now:
http://bocauk.bandcamp.com/releases
https://www.facebook.com/bocauk
https://twitter.com/bocatheband

Overall this PDF file will be very useful throughout the rest of our marketing process; as it offers lots of relative information which we will need in the later stages of this project. However as my team mate Harry mentioned it doesn't stress any evidence that the information actual works in practice. Therefore may be slightly unreliable as is only based on theory and hasn't shown any examples of it working for any independent musicians.  

Branding a Band

Here is a powerpoint the whole group made by selecting an artist mentioned in our questionnaire and see how they brand themselves as a band. I chose to look at the band Biffy Clyro and found out that all their products (album, posters, music videos and photoshoots) never take away from the branding of the seriousness of the music.

Questionnaire results

Here are our results from our questionnaire. We asked 30 people between the ages of 17 and 25 as we felt that this would be our target audience age range, but we didn't specify genders because with music genres and gender, especially Indie Rock, both males and females can listen to similar things unlike film. These are our interactive pie charts to show the results for each question asked:
This first chart has shown that we are aiming at the correct audience as most of them have put one of there top three as Indie Rock, being first to Rock. Therefore we will still aim our music video at 17-25 year olds.


This second chart shows that again our target audience of 17-25 do watch music videos with the majority tied between: A few times a week and Once a week, the second highest being Everyday. This shows again we should be aiming at this audience due to the fact they are the ones watching music videos.


Here is the third chart, interestingly there were four options the last being the Artists Websites but 0 people said this option. Therefore as a clear 90% watch music videos on YouTube this is definitely one of the options we will use for our music video to be accessed.


Our next chart shows that over half the people we asked prefer watching narrative based music video; therefore this will be the main theme throughout (trying to tell a story). However because 25% said that they liked seeing the artist perform so we can also include the band performing to widen our target audience range.


This final chart shows the most popular artists from the 30 people we asked. Imagine Dragons, FooFighters, Biffy Clyro and Red Hot Chili Peppers all making the list being considered Indie Rock artists, the first two making the second highest scores (8.8%). Therefore we have chosen the correct audience and will look at how these bands brand themselves and music as well as being influenced by their music videos. We could also take a look and consider how Ed Sheeran brands himself and the music as he got the top result (11.8%).

Finally we had a question asking: Are there any music videos that stand out for you, if so how? The results from this question can't be put into a chart as it was too open but most of them said they liked music videos that were creepy as thats why the stood out. Some people said music videos that suit the song and show a narrative through it. Others liked iconic dances in a music video. An interesting comment was: Music videos that parody stereotypes, or music videos that make them laugh/cry/show emotion. Lastly music videos that show animation as well as real-time footage. Therefore we will look back at the results for this question to see what we could realistically include that suits the theme of our music video.

Questionnaire

Here is a questionnaire we made to help us establish our target audience. This then enables us to create the music video, magazine advert and digipak so that it suits our target audience and clearly gets promoted to them.

Figuring Out Genre Conventions Through the Music Video Analysis

Genre:

Heavy Rock music video conventions-

(Linkin Park- Crawling)

Performance based:

 .          Sinister

·         Gothic

·         Fits with lyrics

·         Sexual appeal of women

·         Shows the band

·         Fantasy surroundings

·         Mise-en-scene = dark, gothic, it relates to lyrics and emotions

·         Uses one main character. Only features the singer and band

·         Cross cutting

·         Editing fast pace (flying glass)#

(ACDC- Back in Black)

Performance/Concept based:

·         Simple/ one shot- 30secs before first cut

·         Features all of the band

·         Concert staging

·         Mise-en-scene = clothes more of the era rather than a social group, less sinister.

·         Fast paced cuts

·         Camera focuses on the musician soloing (e.g guitarist during guitar solo, singer during main lyrical parts)

·         Unusual angles (birds eye view, upside down)

·         No narrative

·         No women feature

·         No audience shown from concert scene

 Country music video conventions-

(Dolly Parton- 9 till 5)

Narrative based:

·         Relates to reality

·         Follows lyrical meanings

·         Follows women characters stories

·         Boss is male, shown as dominant and bad guy

·         Images of clocks

·         Women sex appeal

·         Whole narrative with song over the speech

·         Features Dolly as a character

·         Cartoon characters feature (animation amongst real life setting)

·         Turns the story of snow white into its narrative

·         Death of boss wanted (feminist video)

·         Also shows stereotypical traits of women

·         Mise-en-scene = fashion of era, dated, no fast cuts or SFX

(Rascal Flatts- Life is a Highway)

Performance based:

·         Shiny classic cars, band driving them to park

·         Links to film it was featured in (Cars)

·         Mise-en-scene = makes it look before its time (old film real)

·         Editing- cuts, screen effect (film)

·         Shows all band members on stage (in front of the actual film)

·         Shows main singer singing to camera

·         Lyrics about reality again

·         Completely separate narrative and then them singing

·         Links in cartoon characters

·         Clothes- main artist doesn’t fit with genre

·         Standing in classic cars and concert orientated

·         Song slows and romance of cartoon cars is shown at this point (features girl car as desirable)

·         Focus on guitarist through solo

·         As the song comes to an end so does the film

Rap music video conventions-

(Eminem- Stan)

Narrative based:

 Sinister, lightening outside, speech between two characters (male shown as violent).

·         Song starts 30secs in (dido part) starts as muffled, then camera moves through floor and sounds live.

·         Mise-en-scene = dark/musty green colour scheme, clothes fitting with genre

·         Rap being angry and expressive relates to narrative..

·         1.15 rap starts.

·         Storyline- guy (stan) obsessed with Eminem, makes himself look like him and has posters everywhere, writes constantly = Eminem plays himself and is singing his rap; however Stan is made to look like he is rapping.

·         Editing- fast paced cuts and 2.36 mins in stopped with depressing scene and goes to concert of Eminem.

·        Not just fan, obsession nearly in love.

Rap lyrics are narration for the story.

.    Sinister areas in the video.