Our Preparation for our Animatic

Our Animatic

What is an animatic?

An animatic is a preliminary version of the music video, which is produced by shooting successive sections of a storyboard and adding a soundtrack.

Preparation for our animatic

One of the members in our group, Liv went to Loz the peforming arts secretary who deals with the costumes for all of the school musicals/plays/concerts and of course music videos. Liv left this letter (as shown in the image below) on the teacher's desk to see if she had any facial paint that were light blue, white red and brown in colour so that we could test them to see if we liked them for the tribal like look on our dancers.

We had spoken to our performers to arrange a meeting with them on Monday during our freetime so that myself and Lauren can teach our choreography of the dance to them, also so that we can film Bethany and make her lip sync in front of the camera to check that she is confident in doing this and doesn't turn shy when she is put in the spotlight infront of the camera, as if it came to the shooting day and she was quite shy when we film her; this would be a disaster.

Polydor Records

Polydor Records

Today, two members of the British label company, Polydor Records which is owned by Universal Music group based in London, came in to talk to us about the process in which they go through to produce a music video. Throughout the talk they gave to us, I made some notes. 

• ·      Work closely with A&R, they sign the artist, gives them a clear image in their head and then they will market the artist, they come together and sit down and see what the artist wants to do
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• ·      Video is the biggest marketing tool that an artist has and there is a lot of pressure, some people rely a lot on the music video
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• ·      The directors opinion is key
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• ·      They worked with 1975, the singer Matty puts together the idea, and he has a very strong image what they want to do in their music video
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• ·      The marketing director sets the budget and then they can begin from there
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• ·      They send the idea to about 10 different directors
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• ·      Performance based/animation/narrative/purely conceptional- plenty of different options
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• ·      Any artwork references the artist might of put together
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• ·      They put their ideas out very openly- the first visual that anyone will see
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• ·      They get back treatments and read through them with the artist, director and the label, budget, they send a contract, prep the video, shoot it
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• ·      It takes about a month long to take, but animation normally takes a bit longer
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• ·      Normally one day to shoot
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• ·      Its hard to get the artist in with their busy schedule
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• ·      £5000-£150,000 budget scale
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• ·      Average budget is £10,000-15,000
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• ·      Sponsored money
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• ·      Very time consuming in a 16 hour day
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• ·      Most of the videos go on vevo as they get funding from that
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• ·      Youtube- vevo- radio 1…all linked
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• ·      Previewed the music video for Ellie Gouldings video shoot in LA- it took 6 months to get the idea across
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• ·      With a more established artist and more money- its put across how she looks, the performance and beauty is more important than the actual music video itself
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• ·      Bipolar sunshine- Deckchairs on the moon… there was about 20 elements in the music video

    Ellie Goulding- Goodness Gracious

      The first music video we studied with them was Ellie Goulding's 'Goodness Gracious' Music Video that Emily (one of the Polydor members that came in to talk to us) helped in producing and filming. We were first given a photocopy of the original treatment- which is a booklet containing the distinct theme and visual styles that can be seen across all of the elements within the video. The booklet had very little words on the page; it was mainly images demonstrating the location, the costume, the set and the starring cast.

    Bipolar Sunshine- Deckchairs on the Moon

The second music video we studied with them was 'Deckchairs on the Moon' by a new artist Bipolar sunshine. The director was relatively unknown, but he showed a lot of passion and had a clear set vision for the music video. This young director had previously made two addidas commercials, and Polydor gave him a chance to show what he can do.

La Roux- Kiss and not tell

Locations/Setting for our Music Video

Locations/Setting for our Music Video

We have some key locations which we are definitely thinking of shooting in. One of those being the woods which surrounds our school, we own so much woodland that it is easy to get to and will look really effective because all the plants and trees will be real. 

 

Another location could be in our studio at school, here we can create a set which can look like the woods/ a jungle. In our studio we were thinking about having a back drop, this back drop may consist of loads of bold tribal paintings and patterns that stand out.

In the studio we could easily find leaves and bits of trees to place around the room and on the floor, and it is a safer option as we never know if on the shooting day it is going to rain or not. For our musical theatre showcase, we have also recently done a production which used lots of fake bushes/leaves/trees that we could use for our set, which would look extremely effective as they are exotic plants that look like they are from the jungle. In either the forest or the studio, which ever one we choose we hope to use a white smoke machine as it was look extremely effective and to add a freaky, mysterious atmosphere. In the studio, it is more easier to use lighting, we have more of an advantage in the studio as we can use much more technology, and if we used lighting on the smoke that would look quite effective. We looked up tribal colours and a lot of the main colours were: yellows, greens, browns, reds, oranges and blues.

In the forest we wouldn't really need that much extra props as the forest would be powerful enough itself, but I was thinking to create that sense of tribal/community, we could hang wood chimes and dream catchers, paint and carve things on the trees etc.

Although we thought this music video looked quite amateurish and unprofessional, we quite liked the visuals such as the lighting in the forest and face paint on the characters etc.

Timeline

This is our Music Video timeline so far, we are still in the process of working on it.

Casting for our Music Video

Casting

So we have now got to the stage where we can organize a casting session for next week. We are looking for around four strong dancers to be in our music video, so we have arranged a time and date for the casting audition, where a group of dancers will come and audition a small dance routine that myself and Lauren have choreographed. The choreography will be to the piece of music we are using for the music video; we will teach the girls and then assess which dancers are best suited to this genre of dance. In the process, Livvy and Bella will be taking photos and videoing the audition process, and they will help Lauren and I to pick the four best suited dancers. During this task, we are all playing to our strengths and this hopefully will make our video very successful.

This choreography is similar to what we want our dance to look like, and for the dancers we choose to have a very similar style and attire to this video.

The audition is to be held on Friday 3rd October 1:20-1:40pm

Our Final Concept Idea

Our final concept idea

For our final concept idea, as a new group we have all decided to go with the tribal music video idea to the soundtrack 'Stranger' by Skrillex. We have made the choice to go with this idea, as a group we all agreed that it was the most visually interesting; compared to the majority of music video ideas, ours was very unique.

Currently, we are now at the stage of drafting our timeline of every shot we want in our music video for every 2 seconds. We have now also added in another element that a young boy will be walking in the woods and he will be chased after by the tribal dancers and changed into one. The concept of this idea is that it is mainly performance based, however, it has the slight narrative at the beginning where we see the tribal women watching this average man who is wondering the forest by himself. We added this element as we thought by just having dancers dancing around in the woods would get very dull and to make the music video more interesting we'd have to add in a performance element.

I did a rough sketch drawing of the costumes we want our dancers to wear. For the female dancers, we want them wearing tribal like clothing, but we want to show flesh on both the male and female, so that we can add tribal markings from paint. As you can see the drawings aren't very detailed by the females dress consists of either a skirt and an off the shoulder crop top/ 3/4 length trousers and a crop top. For the male who walks into the forest we want him to have a complete contrasting image to the tribal costume. We want him to look clean, pure and innocent, so we decided that he should be wearing a white shirt and 3/4 length trousers/ shorts.

My Final Development Group

My Final development group

After a lot of moving around and changing groups, we have finally all made a final decision with who we are working with and with what music video idea we using. My group is a group of girls; Lauren, Livvy, Bella and I and we all have agreed to use the tribal music video idea of Bella's. 

Music Video Inspirations

INSPIRATIONS

All three of the music videos I have chosen are unique in their own way; however they are all bizarre. We really liked the idea of a grungy, run down theme like in tribal context; we also really liked the idea of using a bath at some stage in the music video, the bath would be full of dirty, black water, as we thought as a group that it would look very effective and add to the tribal theme in the dark, dirty woods.

   We want our music video to stand out from normal popular pop music videos; we want to go for an edgy, trippy appearance for our star image. We also decided as a group that we want one female star in the music video that is very diverse; our female protagonist has bleach blonde, curly/frizzy hair; we could utilize this feature and style her hair to a crazy, tribal hairstyle similar to some of Lady Gaga's hairstyles in her music video 'Bad Romance'. 

   As a group we came up with the idea of having our main female star (Bethany) to represent this God-like figure, dressed in white, as though she is distinctively the leader, where she would have random arms coming from behind to portray that she is in control like in the Princess of China music video

Bad Romance

I Fink Ur Freeky

Princess of China

The Pitch to Luke

Pitching out final ideas

Today in the lesson was our group pitch to Luke, who has had many years experience of creating successful music videos, so he knows what will and what wont work. Each group today had to stand up in front of the class and in front of Luke and pitch there idea and we had to sell it. We had to pitch our two ideas, on the prezi's we made a few days ago. This is a really important part of promo process as Luke will tell us if our ideas will work or if we have to scrap them and think of a different idea, which would not be good at all.

I recorded the feedback we were given from Luke whilst pitching our two ideas, our first idea we presented to him was Stranger- Skrillex.

• filming it in the studio is better than filming it in the woods- just in case it rains
• Luke said that people coming out from behind trees may be seen as comical and people may laugh at this idea in the music video, he said this as Bella (one of our group members) suggested the idea, straight away she laughed at it- which we do not want, we wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable and disturbed as its so weird and different 
• we had focused too much on the set design and how its going to look rather than the performance elements themselves- however Luke likes the idea he just said we need to expand on more than just some dancers dancing in a woods, we need to think more about the visual performance and how we can make it really interesting to watch
• Luke liked the idea of the tribal dancing as it is very unique as no one else is doing it

Our second idea is R U Mine- Girls on Drugs (cover)

• The first advice Luke gave us which I found quite surprising, was that he didn't find the idea of the 'Beauty and the Beast' rose in the glass case very interesting and he said "its a bit cliche" and to think of another idea like rotting fruit in a fruit bowl or ice melting.
• We weren't really clear with what we were saying with the music video. Laura said the video is about love/lust but we were questioned to how would the audience understand this element of the video and he questioned us to whether we thought the audience would understand the idea of it being about love or lust- he said it would work but we need to be more obvious about it
• They didn't like the jazz bar idea, he said just to use a stylized background, we are thinking too theatric
• he liked the red colour theme throughout and the 'sin city' idea, but we need to develop our ideas and create a meaning for this idea

To conclude, Luke said that he liked both ideas; he saw them both being successful and having potential to be a good music video, but we needed to make sure we had enough detail. In the next stage we will be working in a lot more detail so that we can see which one will actually be more of a success. 

I think from the feedback the jazz idea seemed to have more potential, however even though the Skrillex idea needed more work, I think it could look more effective on the screen, its more unique, also I can see this idea being more fun and creative to film and design the set- one of the main parts of making a music video is that you enjoy creating it, then leading onto the video to become a success.

Creating Prezi's around our concept

Today, we went into our groups to start finalizing our two final concepts and creating two prezi presentations to present and pitch. Prezi is useful for a task just like this as it allows you to portray your ideas in a very different interesting visualised way, it is a cloud-based presentation software and a storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. On friday, my team and I will be pitching these two totally different music video ideas to Luke. We had to research into a lot of detail exactly what we wanted the video to look like and what the star image of the music video was going to be. As a group we managed to get together all of our ideas and now we are ready for our pitch, and more importantly for Luke's critique so we can then build our promo video from there.

Genre

Research into Music Video Genres

As the planning and research continues, we are now starting to get close to our main idea of exactly what we want our music video to look like. In the lesson today, we discussed in detail what we were specific concepts were going to be combined into our music video and we also drew out the main conventions for both contrasting music video ideas...

Our pop-jazz idea;

Our dubstep idea;

• clubbing/raves
• electronic dance music 
• dark
• dancing 
• rebellious 
• grime
• drum and bass
• flashing lights
• strobe lighting
• alcohol/smoking
• young adults/teenagers

Artists whos music falls into the Dubstep genre...

1. Skrillex
2. Knife Party
3. Flux Pavilion
4. Chase & Status
5. Sub Focus

Our development groups

Today, as a class we decided to separate ourselves into groups of four, so that we could develop our own ideas and start to work as a team to continue the promo project.

From this development group, we all started by refreshing one another with our three different music video ideas, so that we have 12 different ideas to develop from.

Pitching my initial concepts to the Class

 Pitching my initial concepts to the Class

Today I pitched my three music video ideas to the class.  Here is a picture taken by one of my classmates of me presenting my ideas to the rest of the class.
 
 Here is a video showing the feedback I received from my class straight after telling them my ideas...

"I really liked the fast car idea because not many people know what the track is about"- Bella (17 years old) 

"its an extremely famous song and it is a bit of an issue when you cut to one of your friends singing instead of Tracy Chapman"- Phil (media studies teacher) 

"I really like the 3rd idea (the band idea) I think the song works and its a bit different to what everyone else has chosen... the idea of time is a good idea, I don't know whether you could you use shots of like sandtimes, that'll look quite visually interesting" - Harry (17 years old)

"my favourite idea on a whole is the second one but I dont know if we can actually do it well as you want really big landmarks.. but the third one will be a lot more doable" - Chloe (17 years old)

Here is the feedback on recorded on my phone:

Overall the feedback I received was very positive. My favourite idea is still the first idea the 'Fast Car' idea about the family of three and the story of the young teenage girl that goes through a hard life in poverty, as her dad is an alcoholic and her mum and dad have a bad relationship between one another, so she decides to leave her family and start her own life. She meets a partner but he starts to be taking the same path as her dad did and it reflects the exact same scenario that her mum went through with her husband. I wanted to portray the message of poverty to show how hard it is once you are in poverty, it is extremely hard to get out of, its like a chain, that keeps going on and on.

After presenting this music video to the class, I found out that the idea was well thought out and very detailed, however the idea of a narrative is a big ask, and will be quite difficult to make, although if it was created to a very high standard it would be a success, as there is no original music video anywhere that has been made, so I am determined to create a very successful music video.

The other music video idea of mine that was popular was the idea about the band in the garage with the music 'Time is running out' by Muse. My classmates gave me a lot of good feedback about this- they liked how different my idea was and how no one else really has the idea of a rock band in a garage

Target Audience Research

Target Audience Research

In today's lesson we each wrote down our favourite music video on a piece of paper, without showing one another. Phil chose three random music videos, our task then was to analyse the music video and to make notes regarding our thoughts on the video.

Here are the notes I made during class:

The three music videos we studied and analysed in class are the following;

1. Holding onto Heaven- Foxes

• four students liked it abit
• dizziness effect- the camera moves a lot- echoing, arrangement-voice (sounds similar to Florence and the Machine
• visual style
• fashion, quirky style
• choreography 
• this music video is aimed at 14-25 year olds- teenage/ young adults- definitely a female stewed audience

-innocent 

-feminine 

-girly

-fairytales

2. Crazy in Love- Beyoncé

• four students like it a lot (all girls)
• three like it a bit (all girls)
• they said they liked watching Beyonce dance
• it has rhythmic editing
• liked looking at her body- fantasy for girls to be as beautiful as her 
• sexual 
• costume- reveals her figure-desirable clothes/ fahsionable

The main appeal of the music video is that the girls/ gay males think that Beyonce is amazing and "goddess-like"and love to watch her perform.

The young female audience idolize her beauty and performance.

3. 30 Seconds to Mars- Up in the air

• six like the music video (5 girls and 1 boy)
• they found it visually interesting- especially how they used the camera and then edited it
• the singer is attractive
• the lighting they use is visually appealing
• the art design is very intricate 
• decadent - leather

This particular music video applies to a broad variety of people.

Background to the Music Industry

Background to the music Industry