Progress Update...

A quick update on a recent problem that has developed which may hinder our progress. Exterior shots may become a continuity problem due to a sudden downpour of Snow. This will effect shots, location, and travel which will impede our progress and we may have to make adjustments due to the weather we may have to wait for the snow to thaw out.

Audience research

For our audience research we devised a Plan. We would make a questionairre and then voice record the conversation with each person. We used varying range of people with variables like age, gender and general types of people. We showed the song and then answered the questions, the questions related to target market research, what sort of people listen to the music and what age range would listen to it as well.  Below are the 5 separate interviews that were conducted.

Above is our First interview in order to 

Here is Interview Number two

Shooting Schedule

In this i will be describing in more details the different shots and the overall plan for our entire music video.

Shot 1:

• Location Weston College- University Campus.
• Shot type- Master shot, Wide shot
• Action- Performance based shot of an entire band playing (Bass, Guitar, Drums, Singer) Shot will last around 20 seconds
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 2:

• Location: Weston College- University campus
• Shot type- Panning shot, Close up or Extreme close up
• Action- Continuing with the performance aspect but with a close up shot off all the band members faces in a panning motion. Shot will last around 5 seconds
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 3:

• Location: Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type- Mid shot of the back, green screen for the mirror
• Action- First theme of narrative, Lead actor (me) looking into a mirror and sees a girl in it instead of him, it is the girl he is thinking about. Shot lasts around 3 seconds
• Date- 

Shot 4

• Location: Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type- Mid shot, Shot reverse shot
• Action- Close up shot of the "Mirror" and the girl in the camera. Shot lasts around 3 seconds
• Date-

Shot 5

• Location - Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type- Close up, Shot reverse shot
• Action- Reverse close up shot of the Lead and showing his reaction to seeing the girl in the mirror 
• Date-

Shot 6

• Location - Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type -
• Action-
• Date-

Shot 7

• Location - Weston college University Campus
• Stot type- 
• Action-
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 8

• Location- Weston seafront
• Shot type-
• Action-
• Date-

Shot 9

• Location- Weston College University Campus
• Shot type-
• Action-
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 10

• Location- Weston College University Campus
• Shot Type-
• Action-
• Date- 18/12/12

Shot 11

• Location- Weston-Super-Mare: Town Centre
• Shot type-
• Action-
• Date- 

Shot 12

• Location- Weston-Super-mare: Town Centre
• Shot type- 
• Action-
• Date-

Shot 13

• Location- Green Screen- Weston College
• Shot type-
• Action- Explosion
• Date-

Shot 14

• Location Green screen- Weston College
• Shot type-
• Action- Rio de Janeiro
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 15

• Location- Weston Super Mare: Town Centre
• Shot type-
• Action- Close up of two People
• Date-

Shot 16

• Clip from Youtube
• Date- 18/12/12 Midday

Shot 17

• Location- Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type- Low angle shot
• Action- 
• Date-

Shot 18

• Location- Hutton - 5 Weston way (My house)
• Shot type- High angle shot
• Action-
• Date-

Locations

For our music video we will need to use different locations in order to expand our ideas and to showcase our creative aspect. They will be a mixture of interior and exterior locations, each will be specific to our shooting schedule.

Below is the complete list of locations where we will be filming:

A- 5 Weston way- My house, Shot numbers 3,4,5,6,17,18

B- Weston College, Shot numbers, 1,2,7,9,10,

C- Weston Seafront, Shot number 8

D- Weston-Super-Mare town centre. Shot Number 11,12

Above is the Exact locations on a satellite view of the town and the immediate area. These 4 locations should encompass all of our filming. If for any reason we decide to do any other locations at the time of filming, I will update the blog with additional locations.

Michel Maffesoli- Urban Tribes

in 1985 , French sociologist Michel Maffesoli came up with a way of categorising different types of Social groups. He called them "Urban Tribes" which links back to Tribes from the past which were groups of people who shared something in common and banded together. Things like language, traditions, rituals, beliefs and styles of clothing. Urban tribes would link to modern day life but would still follow the basic principles of a tribe. Another word for this is a "Subculture" which follows a similar principle to Urban Tribes in that it is a group who share something. E.g. Ideologies, dress styles, pastimes.

I have been researching different Urban tribes in an attempt to find out which one i belong to and i have concluded that i probably fall under the Gamer Tribe. I think this because i do enjoy video games but i also enjoy films, music and TV which is apparently what the gamer is all about. Also there is no real emphasis on clothing styles which is something which i fall under as well. Now that iv established what I am, I can start to look at the specifics of this , i.e. music videos, practices and other things along those lines.

Below is a mind-map of the subculture as a a whole. It lists what there interests are, what brands they follow and what sort of iconography they hold.

Above is the iconography i decided to do for the Urban Tribe, gamer. It is mainly a mood board of different icons that are recognised by that particular group but also several brands that they recognise as an official part of the tribe.

Ideas for Songs

For our creative task We have to choose a song and make a music video for that chosen song. The choice of song is obviously critical to the effectiveness of the overall video. It has got to be a song that i like and also a song that is going to be challenging in the sense that it has lots of work and differing techniques to showcase what we can achieve.

After our choice the entire group gathered round and shared their ideas. Each had a definite potential but none were particuly of interest to me.

For our group I alone had to decide which song we had to do because my group was unavailable at the time. For a start I had to pick genre because if i could determine genre I could narrow down the song choices. I managed to narrow down our genre choices down to two. Pop or Indie Rock. I decided on these two genres because they had lots of adaptability and could be interpreted in different ways. Pop was one of the two choices because it was a good opportunity to have multiple shots and would be easier to enable quick shots, because of the natural pace and speed of the music. For pop we had  few choices for song which are listed below.

Rizzle Kicks: Down with the trumpets

However despite the choice of song we had i still wasn't convinced on it, because it was not a song that i wanted to portray due to the fact that it already had a video for it and i didn't want to make a copy. And i didn't exactly like the song so i wouldn't have been able to carry on with it.

In the end I decided to use the genre of Indie Rock because it would have given me a good excuse to use a narrative structure for this because many indie songs do have an element of storyline to them and because they are indie many of them are album tracks and don't have any music video, so we could be creative with our music video. After a lot of trial and error I decided on our song choice which was Arctic Monkeys- I bet you look good on the dance floor.

Album Artwork- Research

Album Artwork is taken fairly seriously in the Indie Genre.  Album covers is another product for sale in the indie world. It Differs from other genres because these songs aren't generally sought after as much as other genres so they have a lower Digital Download rate than other genres. So to sell they make the album a product, an artefact that you cant get on digital download (sometimes digital download features album Artwork but its still not physical). Also there are now usually much more than the CD now in albums. There usually now is something inside with additional information, something which you cant get through digital downloads.  Even here there are different approaches to albums, some favour drawings or paintings as there album covers, some favour photographs but all follow a common theme in that they are in someway in an artistic form. Here are a few examples.

Kasabian-Empire

Radiohead- Ok Computer

Sonic Youth- Dirty



















For our song we plan to do Arctic Monkeys- I bet you look good on the dance floor. Here it is below.

It comes from the Album "Whatever people say I Am, Thats what I'm Not" which has taken the simple photo approach to it. I think that personally this we should do something similar to this in the photo approach for multiple reasons. Firstly it is in my mind tricky to create a CGI artwork with the software that has been made available to us. This would make for a very poor quality of the finished product and this is not what i want to happpen. Also I have little artistic talent so coming up with inspiration would be equally challenging. Below is the album in question.

The main features of this particular album is that it is a Single photo. The colour scheme is almost non existant an it is a cooler black and white, compared with other indie Albums (see example album covers near top) are much more vibrant and colourful. This is the style that i would consider using for my own album covers. I think I would choose this because It is simple to achieve because all we would have to do is find a Costume and take a series of pictures at differing angles and simply take the colour out of it.

Below are the other three albums that the Band have released.

Arctic Monkeys- Favorite Worst Nightmare

Arctic Monkeys- Humbug

Arctic Monkeys- Suck it And See

As we can see, the band has taken different approaches to there album styles. The second album they released "Favourite worst Nightmare" has in my opinion taken strong influence from 1960's bands like The Beatles in the Font for there band name and the style that are in the windows also pay homage to the 60's style. Amongst that they have combined that with a more convention Urban scene which once again is dark and Cold coloured. On contrast the 60's is very warm and colourful. There Third album "Humbug" has also taken a retro approach to there album cover. By the look of it it looks like an old photo. The Font has a 70s style to it and it looks almost degraded and rough. This was probably the desired effect but it certainly differs from the other album covers because it uses this style, the others don't have any connection to it. There Fourth album "Suck it and see" is definitely unique because it doesn't follow any Album cover Conventions. Firstly it has no visual art of any form and it dosnt feature the name of the Band anywhere. This isnt smething i would consider using because it is a little to simple and doesn't showcase any real creativity or thought (unless there was actually some underlying message in this). All of there albums are different from one another in almost every sense so this prompts that a Indie album cover isnt predictable or "conventional" so we could do almost anything and claim that it is their album. Well this only applies to the Specific band and may not nessecerily relate to every indie band but because we have to do one for Arctic Monkeys , it's still aplicable.