Shooting Schedule

Our shooting schedule has been taken from the shots that we from Animatic, some of these shots are duplicated as these are the footage that we are going to use for the chorus. I have rewritten then in this schedule as it will help the organisation of the filming. We may also be ticking the shots off as we are recording then, this may be of help when we are filing. 

Casting Audition

Initially, we planned to carry out video auditions for our music video performers where we would get them to perform the song 'Fate' and from there we would then choose the most suitable to use in our studies. We knew that we wanted our performers to be members of our college, preferably students our own age, because it would shows those of similar appearance to Matt and Trevor from the band Our Last night.

While collecting names for those who wanted to audition, we watched Mat Appleyard and Doug Macaskil perform at the college open evening and had a strong feeling that the two would be the perfect performers for our song. After later investigation we found out that they both performed in a band together, often doing acoustic covers. We watched several videos on Youtube of them performing, the video below showing a performance by Mat.

From there we asked both of the boys if they wanted to perform for us, from which they said yes. They have been been learning the song 'Fate' where Mat takes the role of lead vocals (Trevor) and Doug is playing the acoustic guitar and vocals. There is a good connection between the performers we have chosen as they're both best friends that are used to performing together. This is one of the main reasons for us choosing these two. We wanted to have two performers that we comfortable working together so there are no signs of awkwardness between them in our music video. 

Recce Shots

These are the recce shots that we took of the tree that we are hoping can be our location of the music video. This tree was located in the North Cemetery, it had wide open spaces from all directions, so this tree would be appropriate to film around. This was the ideal tree for our music video. Although, we would have liked the tree bark wider, so there was the effect of each performer wouldn't know that the other character was on the other side of the tree. With the performers standing side by side then they'd obviously know each other, however the actor who plays the narrative side of the story, wouldn't know about the performers. 

Audience Profile 2

As mentioned in the previous audience profile, we intent to aim our music video based on those who would watch the original song's video, as opposed to just the acoustic song. When looking at the gathered data from our audience survey, it has been made clear that the genre of music that the band 'Our Last Night' fall under, is often listened to by those between the ages of 15-25. Our Last Night are often recommended for fans of Bring Me The Horizon, A Day To Remember and Sleeping With Sirens.

The second of our audience profile is for Pauline Wiley who is of the same age as myself and Beth. Pauline is a fellow college student who filled in our audience survey. Pauline has attended many concerts, ranging from Sleeping With Sirens to Bring Me The Horizon, both of which fall under the similar genres of Our Last Night. Both bands have been renowned for acoustic versions of their own heavier song, while covering more acoustic based songs. Pauline is 17 years old and after moving to college has broadened her circle of friends, thus meeting people who are into different genres of music. Pauline is a fan of heavy metal, while being heavily into pop-punk bands like Tonight Alive. Pauline expects to see long footages of live performance in the acoustic music video with a slow narrative to cross cut between.

Props And Equipment List

Props

Performers - These are the two people who are going to be lip-syncing

Guitar - For performer

Actor- this is the person who is going to be acting the main narrative. 

Box - For actor*

Lighter

Photos

Newspaper
Rope

                                                                  

Equipment                                   

Canon E0s550D

Tripod

We're not using any lighting, as we are hoping to record outside in daylight. When it does come in dark and we aren't finished, we will need to add another rescheduling date.

* You can see that I have crossed off the box for the actor, as this was depending on the tree that we were going to fim around. We found out location and the tree is within height for out actor. We thought that we'd need a box for the actor to stand on for the hanging scene, but the tree is fairly small. 

Audience Profile

Even though this is an acoustic cover of the original, it’s still by the original band. Because of this the target audience is still the same as if they were playing the song full band. This bands target audience is ranged from aged 15-25. Because of this we are also going to aim out music video to his type of audience. This means that we’re not that limited to the type of video that we can create. Our age range is quite broad, so this means that we can include certain elements in this music video as opposed to a younger audience. Pop music is aimed at younger adults and children, but some features that artists include into their music videos have to be censored even though they should have assessed their audience by now. For example, Rihanna has an extremely broad audience, her audience’s range from 8 – 30s, yet she still includes lots of promiscuous details into her music videos. This is most of the time misunderstood by the younger generation of her audience. This is something that I’ve never understood, in Rihanna’s case, why aim at such a young audience if she needs to, on occasions censor her videos?  At another example, why do the pop stars of today need to use explicit language in their music if they’re again targeted at audiences as young as 5.

The type of people that view music videos that are similar to what we are working on would tend to be the working class. By using hierarchy of audience types, these types of people would fall under the C1 and under grade boundary. So from the working class towards the unemployed, this also includes the skilled and unskilled worker. Types of people like the professionals wouldn’t tend to know understand music video or songs like this, or this is just the perception that people have stereotyped the professional people to be.

Katie Butterfield has offered to be our audience profile; so that the details that I have just described to match to the types of people that we are going to be aiming for. Katie is 15 years of age; she attends a mainstream comprehensive school, in which she is free to mingle with people who like different music tastes. Being with people of different music origins has taught her that she doesn’t like the mainstream pop genre that everyone is automatically categorised into. Katie also like the heavier sounding music, and is into all different bands from all over the world.  Katie also likes a range of pop-punk bands and some that are female fronted as opposed to the clique male fronted. She has seen a number of music events, from Our Last Night to whom we are covering. Because of this, Katie falls into our age range and the target audience range. 

Initial Ideas

We've used Prezi to present our ideas, at this stage. These are only every rough, and will be made more details for the Treatment or any other documents that we make about concept. 

Inspirational/Creative Music Videos

Michael Gondry 

This music video is made and directed by Michael Gondry,The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar.  It's a clever music video as when the beat comes up objects in the background  come up too. The audience can see the items when he beat comes. Michael Gondry is known for video's like this, as he has filmed and directed other video's for Kylie Minogue. Her video for 'Come Into My World' was ran on a loop concept. Where at the end of the video there was 4 Kylie's! We also took inspiration from another of Michael Gondry's creations, but this time it was The White Stripes' The Hardest Button To Button. This is a music video in which lots of pictures were taken and then edited together to make it look like the person is moving, this would be similar to our stop motion that we would create. All of these video's below are Michael Gondry's creations, we did take some inspiration from these and we might take some inspiration from these video's for our own. 

Something more our genre would be Frank Turners' Recovery. At the beginning of this course we watched this video and took inspiration for our own music video. We partially liked the split of the screen so that we could get more footage in one shot. We knew that in order to do this we would need three times a much footage than normal. We later realised that we didn't have the Final Cut (editing  software) in order to complete this. But we still took inspiration to this nonetheless. 

We had idea to incorporate a stop motion into the video as we had experimented with this before (as you can see in another post). We would only add chunks of stop motion as the experimentation stop motion was only 1 minute long and we had 550 photos taken to edit together. We thought that it would be hard for the audience to piece together the scenario will only a stop motion, so from here we thought that we would only include small amounts of stop motion. 

Another technique that we had in mind was a tilt shift. This is when the camera has height it then takes footage of the people, buildings and movements in general, then makes the perception blurred a little so that things look like models and not actually full scale things. At the initial design stage, we attempted to figure out a place to do this technique, but we are limited in Hartlepool of high enough places that weren't restricted to shoot. In the example video below, they also used a time lapse to speed things up so that it could be cut where necessary, this is a good technique to use and something that we are looking into for our music video. 

This physical music in this video is the oppersite genre that we are going to use, however the technique is there and it's something that we can take inspiration from. 

Andy Shackleford

Stop Motion is something that we might consider using in our own music video. After watching a few stop motion music videos we gained a greater understanding of how to make them look seamless. The more photos the better with the smallest of movements between each image that is taken. We looked at many different music videos including Newton Faulkner's 'Indecisive', Lisa Mitchell's 'Incomplete Lullaby' and Ryan Keen's video for 'Focus'. Below is the video for 'The Making of Focus' which is one we looked at in more detail. This was directed and animated by Andy Shakleford, who has worked with big artists creating music videos, but also in children's animations like: Fifi and the Flowertots, Postman Pat and Rupert the bear. The video for Focus won an award for the Best Music Video in the Limelight Short Fim Awards 2012. 

After speaking to Andy on Twitter I come to find out that 'Focus' took around six months to create, from the planning to the release. He also mentioned that the live action (briefly at the beginning and end of the music video) was filmed in a day and a half, but the animation took a whole month to film. The rest of the time was focused on the planning of the animation and the creation of the models and props. It is obvious from this that we would not have enough time to create an animation of this level, but we can use the same technique and the same planning to create something seamless. Below are the screenshots from Twitter showing the contact we had with Andy regarding the music video for Focus.

Stop Motion

Stop Motion
Love Letter


Upon watching many different music videos to contribute to my research I gained a particular interest in the process of Stop Motion (or Stop Frame) and created a short video myself. The video contains the track Love letter by artist Lisa Mitchell. Although the final video is not the full song, it contains approximately 550 still images.

Album Advert Moodboard

 Album adverts feature in all magazines depending on which genre the magazine is would determine which music genre was featured in their magazine. For example, an advert for All Time Low wouldn’t appear in Heat magazine, as the audience for Heat wouldn’t match up with the All Time Low audience. People who read Heat magazine wouldn’t know who some of the bands that are featured in this mood board are, this could be because they both have the opposite audiences.     

Most of these posters are featured in and on the back of magazine; some of these would be on display in certain music venues also. Music venues are the hosts of a lot of concerts all around the world; The venue wouldn't take down posters if the opposite audience was going to be present. For example, they wouldn't take the Bury Tomorrow poster down, for the sake of Lady Gaga fans. Printed posters like these are forms of guerilla marketing. Where people try and make an impact to people by a physical poster, they try and get an audience to do what the poster is telling them; in this case it would be to buy a CD. This type of marketing is also used to try and make people see that there are more genres than one, in an attempt to broaden people's musical options. 

In the opposite spectrum, there is viral marketing where nothing is printed and it relies upon word of mouth to spread the word but a certain album. This is a much cheaper way of bringing attention to a product, although sometimes the stakeholder is not guaranteed the recognition. Viral marketing excels on social media websites especially Twitter as people follow each other on Twitter because of personal interest. If one-person talks about an album, everyone looks and get's interested. This is sometimes a more effective way, as with a poster you can easily get away from, whereas viral it’s much harder especially when people are talking about it constantly. 

  

This mood board does feature bands from the Rock music genre, these do appear in magazines such as Kerrang, Metal Hammer and Rocksound. Even though some of these posters are black, not all are a rock clique. People expect rock to be dark and dingy, but this isn’t the case in some of these examples. For example the You Me At Six poster has a range of vibrant colours. Not all the posters here are just rock, some are Hard Rock and some are Metalcore, it’s obvious which posters are of the Metalcore genr