Problem with, (and solution to) the music video

We have been informed by a band member that his job restricts him to certain times for us to shoot the music video. His job spreads from Monday to Friday so our original plan to shoot the video on a Thursday or Friday during the day has had to be altered. We search for other options and have now planned to shoot the video in the Sandgate Church Hall, where as a band we usually practice. It is not too far from the school stage we were originally planning to use, so our location look, based on our research should not differ too much.

Another problem we have found that due to Matt's work constraints, he is unable to film the section where he catches his drumstick before activating the whiteboard to show the animation. Instead, Aiden will take the place of not only Matt, but all the other members role's in relation to the whiteboard 'activation'. This way we will not have the time constraints of all five members. However, this will not alter the band members unique action during the video. For instance, Matt will still throw his drumstick off shot (this will be filmed at Sandgate with the rest of the video), but instead of himself catching the drumstick, Aiden will be there instead.

UPDATE: We again have decided to alter the video. Aiden will no longer feature in the video, but instead we are going back to the original idea, with a few slight differences. We saw it unnecessary for someone to catch the items to 'activate' the animation, so we have decided to show the unique items landing on a white background, most likely a large piece of card around A1 size, and be the starting point of the animation. From that background, we can use the same background to film the animation so it does not look uneven.  

Ancillary Tasks - CD/DVD & Magazine Research

Due to the weather conditions, we were unable to begin with the intial filming as George was not able to get into school. We saw this opportunity to make a start on some ancillary task, beginning with the research. We searched the internet for magazine adverts but had no luck, so we took the other option of actually purchasing a few magazines to find the adverts. We got two popular music magazines, known as, Kerrang! and NME. We managed to find a few useful adverts in these magazines that we could anaylse and depict the type of features, structure and themes we might want to include in our own magazine advert. Even though the bands featured may be of different musical genres, we can still use the adverts for ideas.

Bullet For My Valentine - The Fever Tour

(Found in Kerrang! Music Magazine)

On the left, there is an advert for Bullet For My Valentine's latest tour 'The Fever Tour', named after their latest album 'The Fever', featured in the centre. Straight away, there is an unmissable feature in the background of the advert. It clearly displays the same image as featured on the album cover of a semi-nude woman. This seems an obvious feature to include on a magazine advert, as it will inform of the audience of what album they will expect to hear if they attend one of the dates of the tour.

The image on the right hand side is the band's first album, 'The Poison' which follows a very similar theme of gothic, curved, sharp text; few but effective colours and another semi-nude woman. The gothic-like text is seen as fairly normal for bands of a hard rock or hardcore genre. There is a strong link between both albums, the theme and the magazine.

In terms of colours, both ablums use a little amount of standard colour. 'The Fever' has a blue colour to it whereas, 'The Poison' has a red colour to it. They also seems to be slightly faded or greyed over, with a grain effect over the top, again to give a gothic feel to the band, likely to appeal to the band's fans.

The magazine advert is full of the necessary information for anyone to find out about the band's new tour. This includes: the name of the tour; some of the dates and locations of the shows, with numbers to ring; the website of the band; and a caption of the album in the bottom left corner. The text follows the same colour themes as the album, but includes a 'red' for the dates of the tour. this could be used as a focal point for fans looking for the location of their next show.

Both of these products, the magazine advert and the related album follow the running gothic theme that the band aim's to represent and appeal to

Shooting Schedule

From the video planner, we have now been able to create a shooting schedule, which means we can plan and insure we will have all the props and order of which scenes we need to do is clearly presented to each of us. Therefore, there will hopefully be no complications when we decide to shoot the video. (By 'page' on the shooting schedule, we mean a A1 sheet of card we will use to form a background whilst we take photos.).
Here is the shooting schedule:

Video Planner

This is the video planner. These images show how we plan to shoot the video. Now that our storyboard is complete, we can concentrate on this aspect of the preparations:

Audience feedback to storyboard update

We recieved some audience feedback from our initial storyboard ideas. We took this into account seeing as our audience need to be happy with our production for them to rate it highly. A comment which read 'The shots before the song plays seem unnecessary,' raised a point that we took into account, since it was discussed amongst the group too, where we removed 30 seconds of none music based video before the music began. The final storyboard presents these changes with the shots at the beginning of the song. Instead, we chose to show the guitar playing the beginning guitar part to give it a quick snap to action, hopefully to interest our audience from the very beginning. Another piece of audience feedback caused us to decided to change the sweeping shots between each member and instead, change it to straight cuts to keep the audience in that quick snap of action, and instead utilise the other shots and transitions later in the video. For instance, tracking shots of the drums at 1:24-1:28

Here is the final version of the storyboard:

Storyboard updated

Here is the latest version of the storyboard:















The changes we have made were mentioned in the last post we posted involving the first draft of the storyboard. We decided to make it short and sweet with a sweeping shot of all the band members, whilst the music starts. Therefore, the introduction of each band member is still included as an integral part, but not dragging out unnecessary time. This hopefully will be more effective for our audience. At the start with an establishing shot, silhouettes of the band will be present until the start of the lyrics at 0:14 seconds. Later in video, when we decided to implement the animation, the drummer will throw a drumstick out of shot, where we would cut to a whiteboard with another person who then catches that drumstick to activate the animation section. This is the current stage we are at with storyboard so far.

Animation Experiment (unfinished)

Since we are considering implementing animation into our music video along with live shots, we saw it important to see what the type of animation we would be using (stop-motion animation) would look like in a basic form. The quality of the video isn't very good, but this due to the phone camera we were using, where as we would probably be using a high quality camera in the real product. This is only a test so the animation bares no relevance to our actual product.

Storyboard Idea

As a group, we have been thinking of a few ideas, which we decided to move into the style of a storyboard. This is an image of that storyboard so far.














The ideas shown in the picture we did decide to change, so another image will be posted later on. We are not changing too much from this idea, however, the initial 30 seconds of the each band member getting hold of their instrument we believe could be an extended 30 seconds before the video actually starts that is very unnecessary. It may prove to be tedious rather than a interesting beginning. Each band member instead will start with their instruments in hand, playing along with the music. We believe this to be easier to watch for our demographic, especially for possible new viewers who have never heard of the band, they are more likely to want to get straight into the music.

'Lonely Hearts' - Belingo

We have come to a final decision to use 'Lonely Hearts' by Belingo, (George and Myself's band) as the recording to use for our music video. We believe the recording quality is far better over the other option of 'Let Us Be Known'. Moreover, we find that 'Lonely Hearts' is far easier to generate and create theme for the video, for instance, following a theme of a heart break in reference to the title. As we feel that animation will be best suited for our video, we believe that this song would be the most appropriate for that technique, as well as any others we decide to use along the way.

Main Product Planning - Flowchart of Stages

The brainstorm sheet has allowed us to gather our ideas, and we have now processed them into a flowchart, which we can now use as a guideline for our production tasks.

Update: Aiden noticed that the storyboard was not mention in the flowchart. We decided it will be the next stage after choosing the song and features that it will include.

Main Product Planning - Brainstorming of Ideas

After researching various different forms of audience and product details and information, we began to start planning the main product of our A2 production. Here is an image of our brainstorm sheet:

Belingo - The band for the video

Belingo, the band George and myself happen to be a part of, are the most suitable band for us to use for our A2 production. As we have a recording of the song we wish to use and own the rights to it, we will avoid any issues or problems we may have had trying to find another band, song or performer due to permissions and licenses. The music is original, therefore, it follows the brief. Initially, when George and myself asked the three other members of the band about their thoughts of doing it, they were happy to help out. We spoke with them again recently to confirm this and it was okayed. George sent an e-mail to Aiden informing him.

(Click to view an enlarged image)

Things are going according to plan so far with the band willing to participate.

Questionaire - Graph Results

After recieving a fair amount of data from our questionaire, we have collaborated our entries together to gain an understanding of what the audience would like to see in a music video. This post shows the graphs of results, the anaylsis that follows and our decision whether or not to use the audience feedback provided for our video.

The graph displays the results of the age of the participants. The majority of them chose between the ages 16-19. This provides us with the information that this age group are the most important to us when creating the video, and have to keep them in mind as a top priority, as they are more likely to be the judges of our production package. Aiden found some secondary research that supports our graph's results. The research found that the age bracket 12-19 on average spend £37.55. (Found from http://www.theregister.co.uk/). Our graph results, and the secondary research suggest that our demographic is going to consist mostly of this age bracket.

 Evidently, the graph above shows the results of the gender of the participants, which are clearly shifted to being mostly male. There are a few females however which will hopefully keep a reasonable balance.

The results of our graph put the majority of the participant in the region of £41+, with an almost equal amount from £11 - £20 & £21 - £40 collectively. This is likely due to digital download and access to music videos. No one in the questionaire selected £0 - £5. If we were to sell this single, we would have to give the best quality that we could do to insure that we would satisfy our demographic.

Over half of our participants agree that music is more accessible when it is accompanied with a supplementary video. Obviously, we cannot ignore the section of people who choose 'no preference', showing that the music video is not important to them, in terms of accessing music. But, to please the majority, we will need to make our video to the best quality that we can.

Like the previous, this graph has the majority in the categories 'yes' and 'no preference'. This gives us evidence that people would more likely prefer to have a video that accompanies the music, as it would help them feel more involved with the music, as the question suggests. The minority that answered 'No' lets us know that music videos are not always considered necessary to be part of the music. This may be from a selection of people who do not usually listen to music with a music video, or music that has no music video (e.g. On the radio). Although, according to our graph results, it is more likely for our following to buy the music along with the video.

This graph shows that people usually watch videos fairly frequent during a week, in some cases, daily. Although the previous graph showed that people do not find music more accessible with it's music video, this graph helps to prove how useful music videos are in the distribution of music and its accessibility. It is important that we create the best possible video for the best possible results.

From this graph we discovered that 84% of people that completed this questionaire use the internet or the TV to watch music videos. For us, the internet would be the only realistic option, seeing as gaining access to TV music video can be highly expensive and far to complicated for time we have left. However, the internet is by far a sufficient enough medium for our group to distribute our video to our demographic. It has proved to be successful for other musicians.

This graphs displays the participants response to their favourite types of genre. The results favour Rock & Indie, but do display a fair amount for all of the others. Belingo, being of the folk/indie genre, generally fits quite well with these results. As our group also like folk, indie and rock music, it will be enjoyable to try to create a video based on these genres.

This graph presents us with almost equal results. 43% prefer it when a band is directly invovled with a music video, leaving a large percentage who did not mind whether the band were directly involved with the video. Therefore, we are considering implenting roles for each of the band members, seeing as our demographic find it a popular convention.

Animation is a feature our group all like in a music video, and as the results show, so do the majority of the participants. It is also a lot easier to implentment than other categories, such as, special effects and fantasy. Realism is another feature that is popular in the results, we could try and use this in conjunction with the animation, to maximise our production to how our demographic would enjoy it.

 

According to these results, it appears that the participants prefer the music to have some sort of story line intergrated into the music video. Story lines are a common theme, along with animation. 42% however, have said they have no preference or prefer it when a video does not contain a video. So it is up to our group to decide whether we think it is necessary or not. Looking at the previous graphs, I think we prefer the idea of animation and/or realism as a feature.

The questions we added at the end that required the participant to write an answer opposed to multiple choice. This meant we could not create accurate graphs for the wide range of response we got from the wriiten answers. However, we analysed them here:

What is your favourite music, and which feature(s) of it appeals to you?

After sifting through the different answers we got to these questions, two videos stuck out clearly and popular. The videos were 'Here It Goes Again' by OK GO, a popular music video involving stylised movements on treadmills which became hugely popular on Youtube, and the other 'Feel Good Inc' by Gorillaz, which Gorillaz are well known for the animation based videos and characters, which this video also provides. The reasons these were popular were because of the creativity and originality, and the quality of animation. Animation being our group personal favourite, we are considering it a lot. 

The questions based of the representation of male and female overall gave a general 'no preference'. This gives us freedom to representation both genders as we wish. However, we will aim to display both genders as close to how typical media texts of this genre do, to help draw in our demographic, of both sexes.

Product Research: Forms and Conventions - Progessions of Band Music Videos

Our group and I have furthered our research of forms and convention, specifically into the progression of music videos that bands produce. Undoubtly almost all signed bands have more than one music video, and these music videos can show the progression of the band into the fame and recognition by the public. We can see this by the type of video, inclusion of special effects and band members visable in them. For instance, an example we researched, that I will go into further detail on is the band, Bloc Party. The progression of their videos start with the band members visable, so the viewers can fimilarise themselves with the band. The videos then gradually change, from the band being seen, to animated, to not in them at all. This is just one example of bands that, with the increase of fame, start to choose different forms and conventions, such as, actors, storylines, computer generated material, possibly even world events or other videos. Here are some examples:

BLOC PARTY

Silent Alarm - (First album)

So Here We Are - There are various close ups of the band. This allows us to familiarise ourselves with the band
.



Pioneers - Features members of the band in animated form, similar to the music videos by Gorillaz. It is possible that Bloc Party maybe trying to recreate the success of Gorillaz’ videos; since they’ve won 11 major awards since they were established in 1998, and been nominated for a further 24.





Weekend in the City - (Second Album)

The Prayer  - The first song released from their second album, features several other actors in the music video, though still revolving around the band members.



Hunting for Witches - This contains shots of the band only, in a dark area.



Intimacy - (Third & Latest Album)

Flux - One of the bonus tracks on the album. This video does not feature the band, and instead, displays robots causing chaos in cities. With the band fully established at this point, having been nominated for several awards, and winning the PLUG Indie Rock Album of the Year in 2006, they no longer need to play a role in the video as their fan base has been established, and are aware of who the members are.






THE TEMPER TRAP

Conditions - (First & Latest Album)

Sweet Disposition - Being their first single, Temper Trap have used computer generated images with at one stage or another, included the faces of each band member, allowing the viewers to see what the band look like, as at the early stages of their career, it will be unlikely for them to be recognised.



Fader - The video includes the band once again present, insuring that the audience can still familiarise themselves with the band. They are in dark setting with bars of light pulsing and flashing on and off.


Love Lost - The band do not appear in this video, an example of there growing success and their ability to be recognised by their audience. The initial success of their first two singles (Sweet Disposition won Drum Media Writers’ Poll’s ‘Single of the Year’, as well as Time Off Writers’ Poll’s ‘Single of the Year’, and also APRA Music Awards’ ‘Single of the Year’) allowed them to explore and experiment with different types of vidoes and techniques. 'Love lost', their third single, contains a story motivated video of young boys running for their P.E. lesson in a country area. Actors lip sync the song and perform actions. These conventions can be seen in many music videos, such as  Bombay Bicycle Club’s video for “Evening/Morning” and The Drums song “Let’s Go Surfing”.

Ancillary Task - Discussion

My Group and I discussed last week what our ancillary tasks involves, and what would be the most suitable choices to go together with our final production. Earlier in my blog, I showed the brief for this product, which contained these three possible options (to go together with the main music video production):

• A website homepage for the band;
• A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD);
• A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).

Our group had no trouble in deciding which two of the three choices we should proceed to create, those being; 'A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD)' and 'A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).



Why we chose ''A cover for its release as part of a digipak' and ''A magazine advertisement for the digipak' over the task 'A website homepage for the band;'



There are many factors for our group to decide against the website task and choose the other two tasks over it. The most important of the factors, we all have a previous experience in either creating a magazine advert/CD/DVD in one form or another. This means we shouldn't have any problems when we come around to creating the Cover and Magazine ancillary tasks. The website, however, is a different matter. We do not have experience in this field, and simply attempting it will cause problems and waste valuble time that could be used in the creation of the other two. The chosen two will not be a learning process but a development and collaboration of our groups previous work, skills and talents. Personally, I think a website (unless done professionally) could look slighty tacky and not up to the standard we hope to achieve. The final group decision was undisputed.

Questionaire

We have decided to gain an insight into our audience's thoughts and preferences on music videos by means of a questionaire, available to all to fill out. Aiden created the first draft of the questionaire which was later discussed over with George and myself, eventually concluding with a finalised version (displayed below). This is for the benefit of our production, as the decisions that are made may affect and determine any features or ideas we may want to include. Please fill out as well as you can, it would be much appreciated:


1. Which of the following age brackets applies to you?


[ ] Under 16 [ ] 16-19 [ ] 20-25 [ ] 26-30
[ ] 31-40 [ ] 41+


2. What is your gender?


[ ] Male [ ] Female


3. How much do you spend on music per year?


[ ] £0-£5 [ ] £6-£10 [ ] £11-£20 [ ] £21-£40 [ ] £41+


4. Do you find music more accessible when it has a supplementary video?


[ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] No Preference


5. Do music videos help you feel more involved in the music?


[ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] No Preference


6. How frequently do you watch music videos?


[ ] Daily [ ] Weekly [ ] Fortnightly [ ] Monthly
[ ] Rarely [ ] Never


7. Via which means of media do you watch music videos? (Tick all that apply)


[ ] Music channels (TV) [ ] Internet [ ] Portable Media Player
[ ] Games console [ ] Other (please state):

___________________________________________________________________



8. What is your preferred genre of music? (Tick all that apply)



[ ] Rock [ ] Rhythm and Blues [ ] Hip-Hop [ ] Blues [ ] Jazz
[ ] Folk [ ] Indie [ ] Hardcore [ ] Punk [ ] Pop
[ ] Pop-Punk [ ] Drum and Bass [ ] Electronic [ ] Other (please state):


___________________________________________________________________



9. Do you prefer music videos which have a more direct involvement of the band? (E.g. live shots of the band, members of the band acting, etc.)



[ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] No preference



10. Which features of music videos most appeal to you? (Tick all that apply)



[ ] Special Effects [ ] Animation [ ] Realism
[ ] Expressionism [ ] Fantasy [ ] Other (please state)


___________________________________________________________________



11. Do you prefer music videos to have a story line?



[ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] No Preference



12. What is your favourite music video, and which feature(s) of it most appeals to you?


___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________



13. How do you prefer males to be represented in music videos?


___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________



14. How do you prefer females to be represented in music videos?


__________________________________________________________________

Research into music videos

Today, My group have been researching into music video to help us decide what we want to do in our own music video for this project. Our preferred choice of genre of the band and music we have decided to be one or more of the following: Acoustic, Indie, Folk, Rock.

Out of the videos which we have searched through, we have found a few that really stand out. They have also given us a few ideas or shown us techniques, in which we may include and utilise into our own music promo video.







First of all, we decided on the type of venue we wanted to film it in. 'Little Lion Man' by Mumford and Sons was filmed in a venue that appeals to us the most. The warm and comforting atmosphere that is produced by the lighting and setting was a feature we would like to reproduce.







'Balloons' by Foals really distinquishs itself as a style of music video we would like to do. The shots of the band playing together as a whole are something we are very content on having, as well as the set the video is filmed, a room that is rather compact.



Animation is a popular feature found in various music videos. It was recurring theme in many of the videos we researched, even with those videos being of different genres. It is a possible idea for us to include within our video, whether it be, stop-motion animation to computer-generated animation.







'Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl?' and 'Heartless - The Fray' are popular videos that have used animation, which gives them a unique touch to the song (usually because the animation is related to the lyrics in some form). This type of animation we believe is possible for us to achieve ourselves.

'Crazy - Gnarls Barkley' is another very popular song with computer designed/generated animation, but seems a bit far out of league to be acheivable.








'Airplanes - Local Natives', a personal favourite, was a video that gave us lots of ideas. From 0:23 in the video, there are pictures of the band members that are made transparent so that you can see their 'skulls'. This transparency technique is something we are very much considering for our video, as we all like the idea of it and could so how it may draft into our video. However, we are still in the research stages of the production.







Stop-motion photography was another concept we saw a lot of, and the band, The Maccabees, used this technique throughtout various of their own videos. 'Precious Time' used a combination of photographs, drawings and the movements of a human. We all agreed it was an appealing style and a possibility for our own production. 'Latchmere', another Maccabees song, includes stop motion. At 0:27, we see the paper run up the wall. That effect is something we would like to be able to include.

Advanced Media Studies Portfolio

Media Production Brief

Welcome to the start of my A2 Media Studies blog, a factor of my A2 Media Production that will show the progression of my groups thoughts, processes, production and ideas throughout this project. Our group consists of myself and two other members of my class, them being, Aiden Booth and George White. I have chosen these two partners because of not only our friendship on a personal level, in and out of school time, but they both possess helpful and worthwhile skills for our project that are necessary to creating the production. George and myself are also part of the same band, Belingo, which we hope will be useful later on in the product, if necessary.

This following brief is what I have decided to do for my A2 Media Production. This blog will be a record and prove as evidence for my and my groups work throughout the creation of this production. The brief states:

A promotional package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

• A website homepage for the band;
• A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD);
• A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).

We have chosen the underlined choices to do with the music promo video. We have an idea in mind and willing band to participate and allow us to use there music.