Changing Ideas

Today, me Sinead and Susannah had a meeting about our recent  filming at wansford and discussed about how that would fit into our idea and song choice initally we wanted to do a film about Partying and teenage life, the postive aspects of it anyways. However this is going to be very difficult to film it will mean that we will have to involve as many people as possible and with us all having diffent commitments such as work and holiday’s, Me and sinead will both me going on holiday for a week tomorrow, so we won’t have much time to film together as a team let alone getting lots of people gathered in one place for a night to get some film for the idea. Therefore we have decided to go away and consider all the other song choices from our intial ideas and see what we can come up with. I’m going to see if I can get any footage from my holiday to see if we can compose that into a new idea.

Costumes: Wansford Bridge

We looked into the costumes for the shooting and we wanted to be practical but obviously wanted it to fit into the video so we just decided to try get some colourful bikini’s for Alice and Sinead who were the actors partaking in the jump. We chose bikinis because we wanted to portray the girls as being attractive to the audience.

Here is a photograph of Alice in her costume during the filming of the bridge jump we took a few shots of Alice under the bridge, as you can see from the picture we gave Alice a Leopard print bikini, and gave Sinead a Blue and Pink bikini which I will show in the video in my next post.

Below is just a photo of Susannah capturing different angles and testing the lighting for the jump, we were trying to use the sun as an advantage in the shoot so we decide to just test out some shots to see how they came out.

 

Risk Assessment: Wansford Bridge

I thought the best idea before we started filming was to undertake a risk assessment of the area because I wanted to asses what risks would be involved apart the obvious  risk of the bridge jumping itself.

The first risk I found was the coloration of the water, the dark dirty colour made it hard to assess the depth and items or rocks that may cause injury during the filming, however as you can see from the picture there was not much of a current which was an advantage.

The second risk I noticed was a sign attached to a tree with the words ‘Danger’ with not much more information it didn’t tell us what to be in danger of and it didn’t look like a legitimate sign placed by someone with authority. However we still took the sign seriously and took it into consideration.

The 3rd risk I found was when I was investigating if the actors in the film would be able to get out of the water safely, what I found was that the ground near the edge of the water had lots of small stones and pieces of glass and the participants would be walking out of the water barefoot which means that this could possible hurt their feet, to over come this Holly decided to wait by the edge with the towels and shoes to make sure that they didn’t injure their feet.

Also, what all of us felt was a good idea was that we was all prepared to go into the water in case something went wrong.

 

Possible Locations

The weather this weekend predicts that it is going to be one of the hottest so far this year so we thought we would take advantage and try to start filming this weekend to see what we could come up with and see if this will inspire the rest of our video we have come up with 2 possible locations: Ferry Meadows- White stone bridge and Wansford- A1 bridge, probably not the safest of ideas and yes i agree there will be a high risk involved within partaking in Bridge jumping this weekend, however I’m hoping that this will pay off when it looks amazing in the final product. Our mutual friend Holly Finding has offered to drive us to the locations this weekend which means transport wont be an issue.

Here is some maps and location spots i found using Google.

1. WANSFORD BRIDGE

 

 

2. FERRY MEADOWS- STONE BRIDGE

 

In the end we decided to use Wansford Bridge as the location for the Bridge Jumping because the water below and depth was a lot safer.

Brainstorming Ideas

Since we have now come up with our idea of our song I thought it would be best to brainstorm different ideas that we could include into the video here is what i came up with 

Initial Ideas

Today Susannah, Sinead and I met up in order to discuss the research and ideas we had for our music video and these are the videos we came up with:

Lily Allen- LDN

Example- Last ones standing

Flux Pavillion feat. Example- Daydreamer

Avicii-Silhouettes

As the majority of the ideas we came up with happened to be dance/electronic genre we decided it would be better if we chose on of those songs, this way since it is summer we could use this as an advantage with the parties and summer nights and days. Our initial instinct and discussion brought us to choose FLUX PAVILLION’s song DAYDREAMER.

Research into Genre and target audience

After researching a few genres, I knew with my time limit I couldn’t physically research every single one so I decided to create a questionnaire to hand out to people of all ages to gather opinions and statistics on what people like. Although I am giving out the questionnaire I think that teenagers are more likely to watch music videos therefore I will most likely use them as my target audience, therefore the majority if of questionnaires will be given to and completed by them. I am hoping that this questionnaire will establish the most popular genres which will allow me to make a more successful music video. Below is my questionnaire and the results.

The results of the questionnaire showed that the majority of people preferred Dance and techno/electronic music.

Investigating into Genres

A music genre is a category that identifies pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions.

I thought it would be a good idea to brainstorm all the possible genres of a music video and followed that up with research into the different conventions and examples of the genres.

POP

‘Pop music is the abbreviation of popular music.’ So-called “pure pop” music, such as power pop, features all these elements, utilizing electric guitars, drums and bass for instrumentation; in the case of such music, the main goal is usually that of being pleasurable to listen to, rather than having much artistic depth.Pop music is generally thought of as a genre which is commercially recorded and desires to have a mass audience appeal.

An example of a ‘Pop’ music artist who has more recently come to the attention of the public but yet has been extremely successful is ‘Jessie J’

This is just a couple of screenshots from her music video ‘Price tag’ which follows the typical conventions of a pop video leaving the audience with that ‘feel-good’ emotion

ROCK

The sound of rock is traditionally centered around the electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularization of rock and roll. The sound of the electric guitar in rock music is typically supported by the electric bass guitar pioneered in jazz music in the same era,and percussion produced from a drum kit.

An example of a Band that produces Rock music is You Me At Six

For example in a typical You Me at Six video which tend to be performance based, guitars and percussion makes up a lot of the record. The video features classic rock conventions, such as head banging and low key lighting to create an edgy rock atmosphere.

INDIE

Indie (or independent) music is music that is released on smaller labels that operate independently from the mainstream music business. But more often “indie” refers to a specific genre of contemporary music that is based on combining aesthetics of classic rock, punk, garage and art rock.

An example of a Indie band would be The Kooks, here is an example of one of their Digi-pack covers from their album ‘Inside the inside out’

As you can see from the picture the band’s image is represented as being indie with the guitars, the typical long hair and preppy clothes.

HIP-HOP/RAP

Hip hop music, also called rap music  is a music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of  hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing /rapping, DJing , break dancing, and graffiti writing  Other elements include sampling (or synthesis), and beat boxing.

An example of some artists who have been well know throughout the 21st century who recently collaborated on an an album is Jay-z and Kanye West.

 

Lip syncing task

So this is the first time since my AS work that I have messed around with the cameras,  I worked with Susannah and Sinead for our lip syncing task and decided we would do Nicki Minaj – Superbass. We decided to have a little bit of fun whilst doing the task and this lead to the satirical element of the video.

 

 

 

We used the editing software ‘final cut pro’ so we could match the song to the lip syncing. The aim of this task was too give us some insight to how difficult it may be when we are doing it for our music video, from doing this I learnt that it takes a lot of patience and editing in order to make sure the lip syncing matches the timing of the song lyrics also that in order to make sure the editing is effective the lip syncing has to be accurately and perfectly in time with the music.  All together, I think this task ended up being moderately good, the lip syncing could of probably been better and more in time. When we pick our song we will make sure that it is a song we know all the lyrics too and pick the emotion of the song correctly so we can put that into place in the actual music video.

Technical Aspects of a Music video

What I thought again was important to research was  the technical aspects of music video, which Pete Fraser states is ‘really essential’. This includes all aspects of camerawork, movement and angle, mise-en-scene, editing, and sound. Pete Fraser sums up the technical conventions of music videos as the following:

1)  Speed; visualised by camera movement, fast editing and digital effects.  – Camera movement; often motivated by the running, dancing and walking of performers.

– Fast Cutting and Montage Editing; creating a visually decanted experience that is crucial in the consumption of music video, with the images occasionally moving so fast that they are impossible to understand on first viewing; working on the idea of repeatability.

– Post-Production digital effects; images can be coloured, multi split screens  can be added to complicate and intrigue the audience; providing entertainment again and again. However, it is not all about speed, with some artists using slow pace through dissolves and static shots. This type of editing is affective as it ‘sets the song apart from the hustle and bustle of most pop activity’.

2) The ‘Meat’; this is mostly a cut to the close-up of the singers face, as the voice is seen as the most important part of the pop video.

3) ‘Beats’; the video will try to represent the music through the use of cuts in time with the beat of the rhythm.

4) Lighting and Colour; used to emphasise key moments in the song, using techniques such as lighting live performances for dramatic effect. Colour can show a development in the narrative, such as going from the past (black), to the present (white).

5) Mise-en-scene; crucial in offering an authentic setting. Often, mise-en-scene creates a concert hall or rehearsal studio to emphasise the reality of the band’s performance. CGI is also becoming  popular  as it does not rely on reality, but spectacular digital effe