Final piece story board

This is our story board for our final piece. We stuck almost exactly to this story board, and where we left blank spaces we filmed the dance sequence and our clips. The dance also appears early in the final, where it is not included in the story board, this was a decision we made after filming, while editing.

Any post between the 2nd of November 2010 and the 11th of January 2011 are not included in our final project, but I am deciding to keep them as proof of planning, research and construction.

Research into a website

When we set to work on designing a website we had a look at usher's website www.ushernow.com as we liked the layout, three colums all giving information about usher, what he's currently working on, previous gigs, and all other sorts of media. When we looked at weebly (the website we are using to create our site) we realised we couldn't use this format.

The last few months

The last few months have been pretty hectic, after our last idea went down the drain we had to quickly come up with something original but also creditable, it couldn't be a long shot it had to be a reasonable plan, so after going through a couple ideas, including a poker game (which we decided would of been challenged on for underage gambling), we settled on this: A young male has had a party and a friend over, and made quite a big mess. He wakes up the next morning to the mess and a note from his mum saying she'll be back home from visiting family soon. So a young male has to get rid of his friend and clean the house in thirty minutes. We planned to speed the footage up once we'd filmed it We pitched the idea to our teacher and he said it was good, so we wrote out a story board:

and then worked out where we could do it and when, and then the filming got under way. It went reasonably well on our first time round, we got a handfull of mess and used the house of a friend, with permission of course. We showed the video to our teacher and he gave us a few things we'd overlooked: Our flash back scenes weren't obvious enough, it needed an up beat beggining to fit with the music, we still had to get some choreographed dance, we needed to reshoot our clock, and it lacked a definate ending. We went to work on mending these issues, and now only have a few left, the clock and the beggining, we will be editing in the dance soon. We shot the dance on tuesday, I spent an our doing the lighting rig (pics to be added), and we then got to work, it took about 1 hr 30 in totally, with some practice and technical issues (camera angle and such like), but we are happy with the clips we got by the end of it.

The above pictures are of the lighting rig in the studio where we filmed the dance sequence. The first 4 pictures show the coloured gels we used, red and green in the first, then yellow, blue and purple. The following two are pictures of how the lights looked when they we all on. The final one is myself putting the gels into the lights.

Filming people in pubilc

We wanted to film a selection of school students at busy periods of the school day and then speed the footage up, so we did some research into laws that might prevent us doing this and found that due to a law we would need to get written concent from every student involved, to protect their identity.

Story board

These images are our rough story board (which we did deviate from a little) and some shots to see how effective our designed shots would be.

Introduction filming

One of the conventions of dance music is a introduction section before the main music begins to play. Last week my group went out and filmed our introduction, as a rough cut, to see how effective it would and to show us what we need to do to improve it.

Things that went well:
After 15 minutes of planning we managed to get our final shot, where you see the main character walk into the assumed club, and as the door closes the lights switch off to signal that the music is about to start, in one take.

Things that could be improved:
We did not have any means to hold the handi cam steady at low angles, and as the first few shots of our introduction are low angle we had to drag the handi cam along the floor. This lead to some really shaky shots that we will re film using a simple but effective cradle, made of a steady base supported by string, to reduce camera shake. Also we noticed a continuity error so we shall have to re film this too.

Digipack research

Digipacks are a type of CD packaging made out of card stock or another form of hard card or paper. They can flip open like a book or have three section, with the CD always being in the middle section. Their purpose is to offer more information on the band or artist and/or the album, they tend to include a message from the band, perhaps a lyric book, as well as original band art, and a song list on the back.This type of packaging is atheistically pleasing but can get damaged more easily

Costume for artist

As the artist of the song does not wish to be in the film, we have had to create a persona to compensate. I shall be doing this. We plan to use a costume consisting of a baseball cap, a relaxed t shirt, sunglasses, jeans and some trainers. This should give the image that the artist enjoys going to the club himself, while still looking smart enough to show that he will be doing the music.

Choreographed dance

Last Wednesday (13/10/10) i saw the progress on the choreographed dance sequence. It fits very well, and although progress is slow due to the speed of the song, the quality is good.

Target audience research

By doing target audience research we hope to validate our initial beliefs of dance music, we have designed a questionaire to give to people with in the age range we wish to appeal to (16-25), and hope to get useful feedback from this. We have designed our project to be appeaeling to young adults, who enjoy social events with freinds. To do this we got an upbeat, fast tempo song, and are now working on a choreographed dance, with the help of a dance student at our school. We will put the questionaire onto facebook, and use the feedback to further our project.

This video is relevant to our project, as it sticks to the conventions that we wish to comply to. Watching the video has given me a few ideas on what sort of things we could include in our project, such as; Coreographed dance, slow motion, a mixture of colour and monochrome.

Ofcom

While planning our video, we researched what rules we would have to abide by if we were to air our video, and discovered that there are alot rules by a organisation called ofcom, who basically control what airs, where and when. Our sample video contains alcohol, so we would have to check carefully to see if it complies to all regulations. Also we would look into whether the alcohol companies who's product features in our video would sponsor.

Finding copyright free music

We struggled at first to find copyright free music but we found a site called Banditorecords. co.uk which had stlyes of music which suited our needs, it was a 'contact site' where instead of downloading the song you have to contact the site owner. Here is the process of how we found the email address.
1) go to http://www.banditiorecords.co.uk/
2) right click contact
3) go down to properties and left click
4) A pop up will appear and the email address is at the very top of this pop up mailto:info@banditorecords.co.uk?subject=Website%20enquiry , i have highlighted the email address in red.

Conventions (continued)

If we can't get a club/party sequence we will try to do something like this

Conventions

Goodwins theory of conventions

Andrew Goodwin has identified a number of key features in music videos. They are:-
A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
- A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music.
- Genre-related style and iconography present.- Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist.
- Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females.
- Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.
He says that music videos are often constructed by the link between the visuals and the song plus the artist. Relationships are built between these in the video, and the close-ups of the artists gives them the representation and publicity they require. Voyeurism is used to increase the video’s attractiveness, particularly to males, whilst intertextuality is often employed in humorous videos.Many of these features are present in all music videos, depending on the genre of the song and the aim of the record company/artist.

Our genre is likely to be dance/trance music so here are the conventions we shall try to comply with:
Dance routines
sometimes narrative
location-club/party
upbeat and fun
women are quite revealed
bright

although we would like to stick to these conventions some may be a little harder to do, so we will also include a bit of a twist

Definition of a 'promo music video'

The term "music video" first came into popular usage in the early 1980s. Prior to that time, these works were described by various terms including "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional (promo) clip" or "film clip".
(source wikipedia)

This seems to suggest that a promo video actually just means what my generation know as a music video. As promo stands for promotional, the term means promotional video, as in a video to promote the music that is incorperated.

Initial ideas

My group, after reading the brief, thought to write our own song, quite probably rock, as that genre of song allows for a lot of creative shots in the music video, such as heavy rain, extreme close ups, low angles and other such aspects of striking film. However once we started writing a song we realised that neither of us was up to a good enough standard to play a rock song, and we were in fact at least one member short of a good sounding track, this influenced us to perhaps do an acoustic country type song, which allows easy of writing and a chance to use the sunny weather and local fields to get a very relaxed music video. Although after a few more practice sessions we decided we would not have enough time to write a song that is good enough to be included in a music video, luckily however I knew an artist who focuses on the uk dance/trance scene, and we will approach him about using his music for our project. If he allows us to use his music, we would like to do a music video depicting a party that got a little out of hand, as this kind of video would ring true with a lot of teenagers, who are likely to be our target audience, and therefore they would watch the music video

Feedback:

We pitch our idea to the rest of our class, and they pointed out a few key flaws, such as how we would get the number of people nessaccary to do a club type scenario and whether that would allow for much creativity. The suggestion the gave to over come this was, film a relative calm sequence, maybe of the sea or something similar, and speed it up to the speed of the track we have. We might consider doing this as leads are running thin on the club scenario

After talking to the artist i know we have been allowed to use his music to shoot our video to, he will get back to me wtih a track asap.

Brief

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

A Website homepage for the band

A cover for its release as part of a digipack

A magazine advertisement for the digipack

My group chose to do the options highlighted in green to accompany the promo video