What I'm doing at the moment...
We have been assigned the A2 Media task of creating an original music video to a song, using all our own material in the video. In the production stages, we just began thinking of any ideas that we could have in our music video. But this was a lot harder than we thought. We wanted to choose something that all our music tastes combined to, and a video that suited the song, so to make things a bit easier, we turned to YouTube for some relevant ideas!
The starting point...
The starting point...
If we were going to be creating a music video, the first step should surely be understanding what a music video is.
Music video definition: A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song.
The above definition is very basic and so to further the understanding of a music video, we then had to research into the makings of a music video, which included the codes and conventions.
CODES AND CONVENTIONS...
What are codes and conventions?
Can be divided into two separate categories: Technical and Symbolic.
Technical: How equipment and technology are used to construct meaning.
Camera
Editing
Lighting
Mise-en-scene
Symbolic: Meaning created beyond what is obvious to see
This can be done in a number of ways including mise-en-scene e.g. wearing black to symbolise death or editing e.g. adding a fade on a person to symbolise the death of something/someone.
This can be done in a number of ways including mise-en-scene e.g. wearing black to symbolise death or editing e.g. adding a fade on a person to symbolise the death of something/someone.
Camera
Variety of shots depending on style
Crane shots
Low angles
Pans
Tilting
Editing and sound
Jump cutting
Scenes edited to match music
Split screens
Diegetic sound
Changes in sound level
Mise-en-scene
Props
Costume
Location
Character – if narrative is included
Different styles of music videos: Music videos can be classified into terms of style.
Performance: Where the artist or band are playing
Narrative: Includes a storyline
Mixture: Which includes both a performance and narrative
Cameo: Where a band or artist appear in a music video but they don’t perform
Animation: Which is produced digitally
Different types of music video
MUSIC INSTITUTIONS...
This is the analysis of a music video that the people in my group did. We analysed the different camera angles, editing, mise-en-scene and sound. This was important in order to gain a more in depth knowledge about a music video and all the things it entails
In order to create a music video myself, I thought it would be important to analyse one first, so I could see typical things that it was important to include, as well as analyse how a music video was constructed. Although the song and video I chose to analyse is Pop, the codes and conventions of many videos are the same and only vary when it comes to clothes, the chorus, setting amongst other things. For example in this video the clothing is very pop orientated i.e wearing bright colours, whereas if it was a rock video you would typically expect to see dark colours like navy and black. Background
Taylor Allison Swift is an American pop singer-songwriter. At age 11, Swift made her first trip to Nashville, hoping to obtain a record deal by distributing a demo tape of her singing with karaoke songs. She gave a copy to every label in town, but was rejected. Fearless, was released in the United States on November 11, 2008 and the song You Belong With Me comes from this album.
Swift's lyrics are highly autobiographical; she has said that "If you listen to my albums, it’s like reading my diary." For instance the song "Forever & Always" was inspired by her relationship with Joe Jonas, while the song "Hey Stephen" was written about a guy who opened some shows for her. "Fifteen" was written about her freshman year of high school. It has been said that her lyrics "can be tinged with acid: the quiet loner girl getting one over on the cheerleaders, or a caustic payback for the boy who dumped her." She's also indicated that she tries to write so her fans can relate to the lyrics, saying "My goal is to never write songs that my fans can't relate to."Analysis
This is something that most pop artists try to do, as a song that their target audience can relate to is likely to sell more singles than one that is just part of the manufactured side of pop, where artists just sing songs to sell records and have no personal experience of what they are singing about.
The genre and style of the music video is a narrative and pop video. It tells a story to the audience, through the lyrics and the visuals.
You Belong With Me – The story that Taylor Swift tells is about a girl that likes a boy and she thinks that she is right for him instead of the girl that he is going out with, so the song tells the story about how she feels. The line “But she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts, She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers” shows the contrast of the two people and how different they are both in appearance and socially. One is very popular and conforms to the stereotypes of what it is like to be “cool” but the other girl is clearly less popular and wears “geeky” clothes. This is also portrayed in the video as the “geeky” girl wears big glasses and baggy clothes and the way she is acting is seen as geeky. In contrast to this the popular girl is well dressed and well presented, her hair is neat and tidy and she is driving a red convertible. The look that exchanges between the popular girl and the geeky girl is one of disapproval, like the popular girl is making sure that the geeky girl understands that she would never be popular, therefore can’t obtain a good looking boy, like she has. However in the end the geeky girl gets the good looking boy. Many teenage girls can relate to this, and I think that’s why Taylor Swift decided to do the video the way she did. She chose the American cliché of the “jock” dating the “head cheerleader.”
The lyrics “But she wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts. She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers” shows the differences between the girls and it something that the target audience can identify with – when you like someone but they like someone else who is the opposite of you.
The repeat of the line “you belong with me” reinforces the point that she thinks they belong together.
The lighting of the video is very bright. You Belong With Me has very high key lighting, to show the cliché pop atmosphere, which links into the storyline of the song as they have very stereotypical roles.Similar to the lighting, the colour of the You Belong With Me video is bright and colourful which most pop videos have. They do this because the pop genre targets the young female audiences and the conventional colours that are associated with young females are pinks, purples, yellows and reds.
The props that Taylor Swift uses in the You Belong With Me video all help to portray the stereotype that she is trying to depict. The geek glasses and the unfashionable clothes all help the geek stereotype and the good looking, sporty jock dating the beautiful, seductive cheerleader is the typical American stereotype.
Where I am now...
There was only so much researching that we could do, so after my group and I researched fully into the codes, conventions, mise-en-scene etc we had to move onto the actually planning of our music video.
The first step was choosing a target audience. This may seem like something to do after you have chosen the song, but we thought that if we narrowed down our target audience then it would be easier to pick a song from it.
The second step in this was choosing a song. Although this may seem easy at first, there were many things we had to look into when deciding on a song. Some of these things included the lyrics of the song and whether they were suitable to the target audience we had chosen. The symbolism of the lyrics was another important factor as we knew that we wanted to include symbolism in our music video. The relatablility was also important as we thought there was no point in creating a music video about something our target audience knew nothing about or couldn't relate to!
Ideas...
Me and my group are now discussing what idea to have for our music video. Instead of deciding on a song and then writing a narrative towards it, we decided it would be easier if we had a general idea of the narrative behind the video and then looked for a song that suited our idea. We began looking at YouTube video’s for certain songs and asked around to see if anyone new of any good songs that would fit in with what we wanted to do. The general idea of our video was to have someone find out that their partner was cheating on them and for them to find this out, either by mistake or on purpose. After searching and searching on YouTube for certain songs, we then found ‘Simple Plan – Your Love Is A Lie.’ We decided on this song but then after watching the video we discovered that our idea was too similar to the music video that the band had already released. So we were back to square one, with an idea for the song but no song itself. From this, we went back to YouTube and looked for songs that fitted our idea. These included 'Go Audio: - So Quiet You Were.' and 'Plain White T's - Hate (I Really Don't Like You.)' After looking for ages for a song we found ‘Go Audio: - Made Up Stories.’ Although this was originally not like the song that we first had, we adapted our ideas to go well with the song that we had chosen. After deciding our song, we then watched the video to make sure that it weren’t the same as our idea; an after being satisfied that it weren’t the same, we started storyboarding our idea. Instead of going straight in and storyboarding the ideas onto paper, we thought it would be appropriate to dissect the song, to see what we were going to do for each section of the song. We decided to cut out the last chorus so that the song wasn’t too long and we didn’t go over. Once we decided what we were going to do we put our ideas onto storyboards and started thinking about locations and people to be in our video.
Final song choice
Final song choice
Planning stages of song...
Once we had decided on a song, it was time to plan the music video to accompany it. To do this we printed off the lyrics to the song to enable us to plan the video around the lyrics. This was very helpful and allowed us to include and make changes based on the lyrics of the song.
Storyborading
After deciding what we were going go be doing and writing our ideas around the lyrics of the song, it was time to storyboard our ideas so we could see how long it was going to be and what we were going to be doing. This allowed us to plan our schedule around the scenes that we had storyboarded, saving us valuable time to edit the footage afterwards.
If we were going to be using the song from another music artist, then we had to write a letter asking for permission. Although the band we are using have now split up, it was still important for us to do this because of copyright laws and we didn't want to get sued! So here is the letter asking for permission...
Dear Sir/Madam at Rubix Records,
We are writing to enquire about a song that Rubix Records own.
We need copyright permission for the song Made Up Stories by Go: Audio as we would like to use the track as part of our A level course work but without permission for use of the song we will be unable to use it as our option. We will not be making any profit from the video as it is a school project, and the coursework requires us to create a music video to the song and we would very much like to use this song. You can email us the decision if you wish at the email address below.
DAshtonWellman@holytrc.bham.sch.uk
We look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
D. Ashton-Wellman
J. Williams
L. Koryang
Questionnaire...
In order to understand what we needed to include while planning our music video, we composed a short and simple questionnaire to ask our target audience so we would know what things were imperative to include and what things were expected to be seen in our music video.
1. Would you prefer to see a performance based music video or a video containing a narrative? (15 answered narrative. 5 answered performance based.)
2. In a music video of the indie/pop genre, what do you typically expect to see? (General answers included something to do with the band and the people in it i.e. indie looking people. (Check shirts, jeans, longish hair etc.)
3. Do you think it is important to match the lyrics to the video itself? (16 answered yes. 4 answered no.)
4. Do you think it’s important for indie/pop songs to have scenes of the band playing? (20 answered yes, 0 answered no)
5. What is your favourite feature of a music video? (General answers consisted of things such as: featured star persona, the band, narrative, and setting.)
Characters...
The characters featuring in the music video are one of the most important things so it was of the utmost importance to get it right. If you look at music videos of the indie/pop genre, or even rock, the main characters are mainly men. Bands like The Killers, Arctic Monkeys and even Go:Audio themselves (who are the artists of the song we picked) all have men as main singers. As we were going to have the main character and singer as the same person, we decided it would be better if it were a male. However, there are always exceptions, with bands like Paramore and Flyleaf who both have females as main singers.
To create music video:
For filming:
• To film the footage, we will be using high mega pixel Nikon cameras to take pictures and to film the footage we will be using Sony Handy cam camcorders.
• For some scenes we had access to high watt voltage lights which made the overall effect of those scenes look professional, however for the scenes that we shot outside of school, we had to improvise with as many lights as we could with lamps amongst other things.
• We also had access to tripods, however when the tripods didn’t extend as far as we need, we had to manage by standing on chairs or tables to get the shots we needed.
Extra research...
As we were doing an indie/pop song which included a band, I thought I would do some extra research into how shots were composed by professional artists, and the type and variety of shots used in their videos. I have already analysed a pop video - Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me (located above,) but because the genre of our music video is indie/pop I thought it was also important to analyse one of the same or similar genre.
Planning for our music video...
Choruses
These are just a selection of clips from the entire footage that we have taken. We are considering whether to use the above clips in our music video. We wanted to challenge some of the codes and conventions of a typical indie/pop music video so in order to do this we are looking into things which we can change.
Timekeeping...
In order to construct a music video in the available time given, we constructed a schedule so we had enough time for filming and editing as we knew it would take a long time. This ensured that are music video was of the highest quality we could possibly make it in the allotted time.
Diary of events
2. In a music video of the indie/pop genre, what do you typically expect to see? (General answers included something to do with the band and the people in it i.e. indie looking people. (Check shirts, jeans, longish hair etc.)
3. Do you think it is important to match the lyrics to the video itself? (16 answered yes. 4 answered no.)
4. Do you think it’s important for indie/pop songs to have scenes of the band playing? (20 answered yes, 0 answered no)
5. What is your favourite feature of a music video? (General answers consisted of things such as: featured star persona, the band, narrative, and setting.)
Characters...
The characters featuring in the music video are one of the most important things so it was of the utmost importance to get it right. If you look at music videos of the indie/pop genre, or even rock, the main characters are mainly men. Bands like The Killers, Arctic Monkeys and even Go:Audio themselves (who are the artists of the song we picked) all have men as main singers. As we were going to have the main character and singer as the same person, we decided it would be better if it were a male. However, there are always exceptions, with bands like Paramore and Flyleaf who both have females as main singers.
As the song we picked was about infidelity, we concluded it would be odd for a female to be the main singer for a number of reasons. It didn't follow the typical pattern of the male being the main singer and within the indie/pop genre it is mainly males who sing about their partners infidelity, examples being You Me At Six with "You've Made Your Bed" and The Script and Justin Timberlake with "Break Even" and "Cry Me A River" (although the last two are more pop orientated.) We wanted the main singer to have an indie-ish look to them in order for them to fit in with the conventions of being in a band and we also wanted the female to have a slight indie look towards them. We wanted to achieve this through the style of clothes they wore. However for the person she was cheating on with, we weren't to strict about the dress code, as they weren't as important but we preferably wanted them as close as possible to it. With all this in mind we began looking for suitable people who fit most, if not all, of the criteria we had planned.
List of technology we will be using:
For the promotion poster and music DVD:
• Adobe Photoshop to edit the pictures - you can do many things including changing lighting and adding effects such as an outer glow
• Websites with tutorials for different effects in Photoshop.
• Final Cut Pro – its advanced software allows us to edit the music video to a high standard. With its many different features such as overlapping, split screens and many transitions, you can turn short scenes or clips into a stunning success.
For filming:
• To film the footage, we will be using high mega pixel Nikon cameras to take pictures and to film the footage we will be using Sony Handy cam camcorders.
• For some scenes we had access to high watt voltage lights which made the overall effect of those scenes look professional, however for the scenes that we shot outside of school, we had to improvise with as many lights as we could with lamps amongst other things.
• We also had access to tripods, however when the tripods didn’t extend as far as we need, we had to manage by standing on chairs or tables to get the shots we needed.
Extra research...
As we were doing an indie/pop song which included a band, I thought I would do some extra research into how shots were composed by professional artists, and the type and variety of shots used in their videos. I have already analysed a pop video - Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me (located above,) but because the genre of our music video is indie/pop I thought it was also important to analyse one of the same or similar genre.
The song I decided to focus on is Mr. Brightside by The Killers.
As I was watching the video, I noticed a few things about the way that they shot the footage. In our original plan, we decided to film the chorus in blocks. The first couple of lines were going to be several shots of the band followed by the next few line of our narrative. However, while watching the above video, I became aware that they integrated shots of the band with the narrative of their song. I looked at different music videos of similar artists to see if this was specific to this video or if this was a general thing and noticed that this was a general consensus of indie music videos. With the knowledge of this, my group and I decided to change our plans to incorporate this, so our music video looked professional.
Another thing I was aware of was of the different shots that they were doing. They use a number of shots to make the music video. When they shoot the footage of the band, as well as cutting from one shot to another, they zoom in; focus on the main singer amongst other things. I was surprised to notice that as well as shooting the main singer on his own, they shoot other members of the band playing their instruments. In order to make our music video look as realistic as possible, I think this is an idea that we will be using.
Following on from this, another thing I noticed was that the shots were no longer than 3-4 seconds before they cut to another one. They use a number of close ups on the main singer to illustrate his importance.
Finally, another thing of importance I noticed was that the narrative of this song is similar to ours in a way. I think the singer is singing about the infidelity of a girlfriend or a lover. I admire that they have shot the music video as if it is happening in front of the boyfriend, and so when he sings he is getting distracted by the lover. I think this is a clever way of shooting it and would like to incorporate a similar idea into to our music video.
We want our music video to be original and not a “copycat” version of another band/bands so with the knowledge that I have acquired, we will use certain things to incorporate into our music video such as the zooming in and the shots of the band.
Planning for our music video...
Choruses
These are just a selection of clips from the entire footage that we have taken. We are considering whether to use the above clips in our music video. We wanted to challenge some of the codes and conventions of a typical indie/pop music video so in order to do this we are looking into things which we can change.
Timekeeping...
In order to construct a music video in the available time given, we constructed a schedule so we had enough time for filming and editing as we knew it would take a long time. This ensured that are music video was of the highest quality we could possibly make it in the allotted time.
Diary of events
