Initial Concept Pitch

In today's lesson we we asked to come up with a first idea of what we think our music video would be like. With this task at hand, our group got straight into researching the meaning of our song, and thinking about, ourselves, what the song could be about. After looking at the lyrics for quite some time, maybe 1/3 of the lesson, it was time to get some ideas down.

The first lyrics of the song are "Rushing in a small town" which straight away gave us the idea that the video would be about somebody trying to get somewhere in a short period of time, however as we all know, being in a rush makes time seem to drag, and this is perfect as the song is 3:23 minutes long and we are able to make a rush seem like a lifetime in this amount of time.

Another think that we picked out from the lyrics is that the artist seems to be talking in a mix between past and present tense which we thought would be good to feature flashbacks throughout the video to help drag out the actor running along. Also, the artist seems to be talking about a relationship between a male and a female, or so we think, and so the video should be a performance/narrative video that sees a man rushing to get to this girl, while thinking about old times that they have shared together.

"Heart Out" Lyrics

Rushing in a small town
I forgot to call you
I'm running low on know how
With this beat I made for two

Cause I remember that I like you
No matter what I found
She said, "It's nice to have your friends round
But we're watching the television with no sound"

It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out?
It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out?

Push your lack of chest out, look at my hair
Gotta love the way you love yourself
Your obsession with rocks and brown
And fucking the whole town's
A reflection on your mental health

Cause I remember when I found you
Much younger than you are now
And once we started having friends round
You created a television of your mouth

It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out?
It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out?

You got something to say?
Why don't you speak it out loud, instead of living in your head?
It's always the same.
Why don't you take your heart out, instead of living in your head?

It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out?
It's just you and I tonight
Why don't you figure my heart out? 

Twitter

In order to create a whole persona for our band we decided to create a Twitter page in which we can post regular updates of tour information, blog updates and general topics for our fans to follow and keep track of. We think that this is a good idea because it also means that when the website from our digipack is finally boxed off we can hyperlink the twitter page from our website. Also, what this means is that at the top of our website in view, we can have a tweet bar, which will update itself as new tweets have been posted so if fans do not follow our band on twitter then they still have access to see their tweets from the official website.

Our Band Name.. The Secret Nothings

Last week in our media lesson we sat down as a group and Olivia, Jack and I decided that we needed to brainstorm and put our minds together as a group to come up with a band name based on our research.

Together we decided that by looking through indie band names that we already know and felt were established enough to call good research, and we did this effectively and efficiently, coming up with bands such as The Killers, The Black Keys, The 1975 and so on.. It soon became evident that within the indie music genre a band name starting with 'the' is quite popular and gives the band a formal presence when announced and so forth. With that in mind we progressed on. Olivia, being the thinker of the group and Jack the litterateur both thought of the idea that even though indie bands give of a sense of formality and professionalism, they are often thought to be associated with rebellion and secrecy. I agreed with this and described also that this rebellion can give the impression of being wild and being free. With this idea present we came up with the name of 'Into the Wild' however something didn't feel right about it, and we came to the conclusion that in order to keep the professionalism that we want that our band has to start with 'The' as our research showed.

Name Choice
After coming up with 'Into the Wild' and disliking the name, and others such as The Little Castles, we decided to take the idea back towards secrecy and rebellion. Due to the fact that we had to have our band name starting with 'The' and we knew that indie bands give of a certain vibe of secrecy Jack came up with the idea of The Secrets. Olivia and I both took a shining to the name however we all knew that there was something missing. Eventually the band name 'The Secret Nothing's' was thought of and we decided that having done sufficient research that we would use this as our band's name.

We decided that we would dismiss the other two band names because after completing sufficient research it was inevitable that we had to pick a name that had connotations or a 'hidden message' as although our other choices gave of an indie vibe, they had no meaning.

Indie Song List... Our Song Choice

Over the summer holidays, I was able to get in contact with Jack and Olivia and we decided to form a group. Due to the fact that we all have fairly different tastes in music we knew that it wouldn't be as simple for us to pick a song as it would be other groups. Knowing that we had to meet somewhere in the middle, we decided to go ahead with the genre of Indie/Alternative Rock. Knowing only a handful of songs and artists from this genre, Jack was kind enough to let us know of a few of his favorites from the genre.

The songs on the list were:

The 1975 - Heart Out

The 1975 - She Way Out

Ed Sheeran - Nina

The Wombats - Schumacher the Champagne

Ed Sheeran - I'm a Mess

Ed Sheeran - U.N.I.

Tired Pony - Dead American Writers

The Fray - You Found Me

After taking the time to listen to each song carefully, we brainstormed together as a group and in the end we have decided to choose "Heart Out" by The 1975 as our song. We came up with this decision because we all feel that the song tells a very interesting love story about a boy who is in love with a bad girl and this story line would give us a good plot for our music video's narrative.

Vampire Weekend Website Analysis

Two Door Cinema Club Website Analysis

"Chocolate" by The 1975

Two Door Cinema Club - Changing of the Seasons

The first Indie music Video I have taken a look at is "Changing of the Seasons" - Two Door Cinema Club. The first thing that I notice about this music video is that that every single shot in the music video is black & white. After a further bit of research, I found out that this is not the only indie music video to feature this, and that black and white music videos actually conform to typical music videos of the indie music genre.

One thing that struck me as quite intriguing is that the band actually feature as the actors in their music video, as I find that a lot of the time now, artists like to hire high budget directors and actors to make a music video with a clear narrative and this is very easily achieved with high quality actors who can sell a story with their actions on screen. For about a minute or so at the start of the video, we are watching what looks like the band attending a press conference or hearing of some sort and the first question we hear addresses the band which is the cue for at which point the song starts to play. Recently, a lot of artists have been incorporating this into their music videos and this is because they can afford the production costs, so we would like to try and include this feature in our own music video.

History of Music Videos

Potential Target Audience