2 column storyboard - feedback

Today we have been experimenting with a 2 column storyboard. Which is basically a description of what shot is going to appear with what sound in the music video, along with the time code that it happens.

After writing about a minute and 40 seconds of our storyboard, we then swapped our storyboard with another group's and then looked over each others work before coming together to discuss our feedback.

The first thing that was said was that the narrative wasn't clear through the first minute of the video. It will be important to make the narrative clear before we start to film our music video.

It was also said that there needed to be more details about what shots were going to be used for which section of the video.

Using gimp

Today i have experimented with the service "Gimp" to see if it was what i wanted to use to create the logo for my band. As it is easily accessible from any mac which i have access to during most school time which would be convenient.

However, after experimenting with the service, I have realised that i am not able to get on with it and to use this for my logo would mean a lot of time which could be spent on a different service that i find easier to use.

First of all, i feel like it is not clear which icon does which on this service. It is hard to figure out which of these tools do which, and the actual tools them self are confusing and hard to use.

Initial band logo ideas.

I have decided to go with an idea that has something to do with the earth. Because I want my band to be a global thing that the majority of fans of my chosen genre will be able to recognise and be familiar with when they are presented with the logo of the band.

Questionnaire

To help gather information about our target audience's preferences in music videos, we have created a questionnaire on the website "SurveyMonkey" to hopefully give us some interesting information that we will be able to use to improve on our music video ideas.

To avoid hundreds of different answers, we have made the questionnaire multiple choice, so people will have to choose from a selection of answers to which one most accurately describes them.

One of the questions asked is about what type of music that person enjoys. If a certain type of rock is not ticked, we will still try to use that questionnaire in a different way to make that information useful. For example, if they put something they do not like about rock music videos on the questionnaire, we could try to include that thing in our music video, because it is likely that rock fans would like that aspect of them. Like wise, we could avoid anything that they like that we feel like rock fans would not like. Here is a link to our questionnaire : http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZX336C

The first question we asked was what type of music the person doing the survey was a fan of. Fortunately most of the people who took the survey were rock fans which meant that most of the results will be useful to us.

We decided to ask what music artist the people who took the survey were a fan of out of the options above. The most chosen artist was "Guns N' Roses'"which is one of the most iconic classic rock bands. And Wolfmother base their music on the kind of classic rock sound, as there music sounds a lot older than it actually is. 

As a group we have created some pi charts so we can understand the results of the questionnaire more clearly.

The majority of people who took our survey were of the male gender, this doesn't necessarily mean that the majority of our target audience is male, because this just means that we just asked mainly males to fill in the survey.  

The majority of males who took the survey were between the age of 11 and 17, and our target audience is people from the age of 16-22 so these results will be useful.

Lip syncing

Before asking people to perform in my music video, I took out a task of lip syncing to the song "Amarillo" by Tony Christie with my friend Connor. I decided to do this to get a better idea of what it would be like to be in front of the camera making a fool out of my self before i went out to ask another person to do it for me.

First of all, i found us both to be very lost in what to do next, as most of the video we were standing around watching the other person. I believe this is because we had no instructions for the video and just went straight into it without planning anything. I think it will be a very bad idea to not give the band instructions before filming the video. I also feel like we should give them instructions during the creation of the video as well.

Putting the music to the video after creating it, turned out to be a task. As it was very hard to keep things in sync whilst editing and cutting things out, without everything then going out of sync. I feel like it was good to get some experience with it before doing it on my actual music video, because it gave me time to make mistakes.

Alex Day - She walks right through me

In the blog post "Focus Group" I discussed how i thought it was a good idea to have contrasting performance and narrative elements in our music video, as i felt like this is what the lyrics of the song did ,and would be a good thing to bring over to the music video.

I found this song from independent musician Alex Day who has a perfect example of this for the song "She Walks right through me"

The narrative element of this video is very dark, and is about a man's relationship with someone who is not there. The video includes him getting laughed at by people and being attacked on the streets. The whole narrative is very serious and doesn't have many jokes put in there.

However, the  performance element of this video is completely different, with Alex Day in front of a cheesy moving background doing a silly dance during the performance elements. I took this to be a spoof of cheesy game shows where they had this kind of thing. Which i also find useful, as we did discuss doing a spoof of something in our music video.

I also find the use of costume in the performance element of this video interesting, as it is very similar to things we have discussed. Being smart and classy as well as out rageous. And believe this was intentional for this music video.

Focus group

Today we held the focus group so we could get a better understanding of the kind of thing we had to include in our music video.

We had a mix of 17 and 18 year olds in our focus group, as there were no other available people for the focus group we were holding. However, there is a questionaire that will be answered by some other age groups, so we can get a clearer response and find out truly who is our target audience.

After listening to the song, the first question the focus group was asked was if they enjoyed the song. The majority of them liked it, which makes me feel like the information wil

Before the focus group, our group were split on what genre the song would go under. Me and Renee felt like the song fit more under a indy/folky type rock song whilst Alisha and Andrew both felt like the song was more heavy metal. One of the first questions asked in our focus group was what you would classify the music as. The majority of the band replied with "Folk Rock" which i feel gives us a better understanding of the kind of thing we will need to put in our video, and who it is appealing to.

I feel like our group could have been better prepared for the focus group, as everything felt last minute and there were not really enough questions asked. If given the opportunity to hold another focus group, i would like to prepare more questions, so there would be less silences where people do not know what to say.

When asked about the narrative, the majority of the focus group agreed that they would not want a confusing ending where they do not quite know what happens, as they feel like it opens up the music video to be interpreted wrongly. I felt like having an ambiguous ending was a good idea, but it seems like the majority of people would not enjoy an ending like that.

It was agreed that there was an interesting contrast between the music and the lyrics, as the music is quite up beat and  uplifting, whilst the lyrics were quite depressing and dark. We will have to make sure to get an interesting contrast of these 2 things whilst creating our music video. I feel like having a light hearted performance element and a dark narrative would be a good way to approach this.

Band representation frankenstein

This is my frankenstein. A frankenstein is designed to help figure out how i want my band to be represented. The bands representation does not have to look exactly like the frankenstein, as this is an over exaggeration so there is no confusion about what the representation should look like.

Suit top - Shows the sophistication of the group. Classy individuals who like to look good when they go somewhere, and only wear the coolest looking clothes.

Hawaii Shorts - Shows that the band aren't all serious and can have fun and also be chilled about things. Contrasts with suit top to show that the band are classy, but are also ready to party.

Sunglasses - Hides the eyes of the band, whichs makes them mysterious to the viewer, because they have no idea what the bands eyes look like, and where they are looking. Gives the audience a way to choose what the band is like on their own

High Heels - Helps the band reach a further audience, by showing something in their videos which will help reach to a wider audience including people of both gender.

Boxing Gloves - Shows the aggression that most rock bands have. Says that they are here, and not afraid to step up for a fight.

Assorted Items - Assorted items, which help reach out to a bigger audience. Showing things in the video that all kinds of different people can enjoy.

Practicing with iWeb

Today I have experimented around with the service "iWeb". This is the service that i am going to be using to create the website for my band, so it was important to learn how to use the product.

I found using iWeb to be relatively easy and straight forward to navigate. The service allows you to move things freely and put them where ever you want, which is a good thing for positioning. However,  I found it irritating that i couldn't get the images to be the exact size I wanted them to be, which i feel will make it difficult to align pictures together for my website.

To add pictures to iWeb, you simply to have to drag an image from your documents and place it into the page, which is not complicated at all which makes inserting pictures into iWeb an easy task. This means it wont' take me long to put pictures into my website, and will save me time over all.

To add a youtube video to iWeb, you simply have to drag the youtube box over into the page, and then paste the link into the place where it asks for the "url" This was quick and easy, and a lot easier than importing the video into a service.

After practising around with Iweb, i decided to come up with a first draft layout for my bands website .

I decided to put the logo in the top left corner, because it is where most logos go at the top of a website which means people will know where to look to find the logo.

The links to other pages of the website will be found just to the right of the logo. This will help keep the page feel less clustered.

My idea for the performance element of our Music video.

This is my idea for the performance element of the music video for the song Vagabond - Wolfmother.

It is set in a recording studio type place with a drum set, guitar, Bass guitar and Microphone stand set up, but there is no body in the room. The lead singer walks into shot and grabs the microphone stand whilst staring directly into the camera he says "This is a song about the innocence lost". As the drum beat is heard the drummer appears in the shot all of a sudden. The guitarist and Bassist also appear into shot when their instrument is heard.

In my idea, the band would come across as both taking them self seriously and also having a bit of fun at the same time. So, they would be wearing a shirt, blazer and Tie but also be wearing a pair of hawaii shorts and sandles. I feel like this would bring some comedy to the music video and create an interesting contradiction with the other wise serious video, which would overall create a very memorable music video.

There will be close ups of all of the band and the instruments that they are playing, including a shot of the drum's bass pedal which will show the drummers sandles. There would also be a shot that goes from left to right of the band, which varies in different speeds  and is shown 2 or 3 times during the video. There would also be a point of view shot from each of the band members where we see 3 to 5 seconds of what that member is seeing.

At the end of the music video the band members will disappear one by one until the lead singer is the last person in the room. He will look around the room before then walking off set leaving the empty room once again.

Directing a music video.

Today, I have watched a band get directed to create a music video. I also helped film different shots for the music video and i feel like I have learned some things that will be worth considering when it comes to creating my music video.

One thing to consider is the fact that the videos them self will be muted, so it is fine for you to shout instructions at the band to help them improve the takes so that they perform with more energy or with certain moves to make sure you get the best takes possible.

It is also important to make sure to do more than just a couple of takes, because the first few times the band performs, it is likely that they will not be performing with a lot of energy because they do not have enough confidence to put forward a strong performance.

There was several camera's on the band at all times, which meant that there was a variety of different unique angles so that the final video would not be boring with just a few camera angles. Although our group will not have several camera's handy to make our video with, we should make sure to try to get a few different camera angles to make our video as interesting as it possibly can be.

These are things that i will try to take into consideration when directing our music video. I have learned that is  vital to give instructions to the band, because otherwise they will not improve drastically and have also learned that its important to have a variety of different shots for the music video.

Music video pitches

Our group decided to come up with a few different ideas for our music video, so that we had a variety of different options for the music video, so if we decide one does not work very well, we would not have to start from scratch again. We could also take certain aspects from different ideas and put them into one.  Here are our ideas for the music video

One idea was to have a normal stalker scenario where we know the whole time the man is stalking the girl. The video would include shots of him following the girl and eventually taking action at the end of the video. We discussed this idea and came to the conclusion that it was too simple and had already been done a lot of times, so we decided to not go with the generic stalker idea. 

We then discussed the possibility of having the video seem to be a normal love story, with shots of him helping her with her shopping and then talking to her for a while and him on the phone to her and then it would be revealed at the end that he was actually stalking her. This would be revealed through shots of him walking into a room with a variety of different photos of the girl. We felt like this was a good idea because we believed it was something that wouldn't leave the audience's mind and something they would remember for a long time after turning the video off.

Another idea for the music video, was to have a guy going round london putting up and giving out lost posters. You wouldn't see who was handing out the pictures and at the end it would turn out to be the person on the lost posters. We believed this would be a clever idea for the music video, because it would make the audience think and they would be able to interpret the video in which ever way they pleased. They could say that the music video was about a man trying to find him self again, as he has changed recently or they may have a different theory to the music video. I believe this would make the music video popular because people could talk to each other about different theories that they had which would boost the overall popularity of the music video.