Music Video First Draft

After only a short period of time we have been able to produce our first draft music video. We say this is our first draft because although we are pleased with how well the music video is coming along, it is nowhere near ready, and we are going to ask for some feedback so that we are able to make adjustments in order to come up with the best possible video we can.

Editing

In today's lesson, we had the chance to sit down at the macs and get used to using iMovie again. As we do not yet have all of our footage I used title slides as inserts for where certain shots will be used.

Editing Technique practice

This short clip is a preview of an editing technique which I am likely to use in my final Music Video. The technique includes the performer appearing to be singing in slow motion while still being fully synchronized with the real-time audio (the original song). 

First Day of Filming

For our first day of filming, Olivia, Jack and myself took the the streets. As bad as that sounds, the streets are in fact one of our main locations for our music video, as for the narrative, there will be multiple shots of our male lead running.



Above is a shot you are likely to see in our finished video, however it appears shaky. This is only because my hand was shaking while recording this short clip from the computer. the raw footage is filmed with the use of a tripod so the footage is steady, and our lead is running up a hill so the shot looks slanted, which it is meant to. 
Below is another shot from we believe will feature in our final video.

Planning - Shooting List

Actors

• The Secret Nothing's - Role played by The Spares (James Carne, Dean Carne, Shaun Hough, Adam Bond, Shaun Pearson.)
• Female Lead - Role played by Beth Draper.
• Male Lead - Role played by Callum Birchall.
• Saxophonist - John Hatton.

Schedule

• Tuesday 4th November - Male Lead Shots
• Wednesday 5th November - Band Shots
• Thursday 6th November - Band Shots
• Friday 7th November - Extra footage (flashbacks etc.)
• Weekend of 8th and 9th November

Planning our Actors, Locations, Costumes and Props

 

As a group, we decided to have a conversation about our location and this further led onto a conversation about costume and props. Originally, we wanted to use the location of Hebbie Jeebies which is a small, indie night club in town. We thought that this would be a great idea for our video shoot as it gave off all the right vibes, sort of mysterious, eerie, funky looking room with a small stage big enough for the band. However after some enquiring we were unable to actually use the location. In the pictures above you can see that Olivia came up with the idea that we should use the school stage for our band to perform on. Jack and I agreed with this as we felt that the stage would make the band look professional.

Female Lead Update

As you know our group faced some problems with regards to the female lead who would be appearing in our music video however Jack put out a casting call on Facebook and Twitter hoping that somebody would accept the offer. Luckily there were many girls interested in the position and after considering our options we have decided to pick Bethany Draper. We feel that Bethany has the features required play the part that we are looking for.

Casting Call

As we get closer to actually shooting our video, we are now faced with the problem that the girl meant to play our female lead in the video has had to pull out due to commitments elsewhere, which has left us needing a new actress, because of this I have asked Jack to put out a casting call asking any girl between the age of 15-18 if they would like to feature in our music video.



Shooting List



Below we have put together a list of everything that we feel will be needed for our week of filming. So far we are yet to find our everybody's schedule so until that point this is just a filming plan between the 24th October - 2nd November. 

 

 

Finished Storyboarding...

Reflection Post 13-17th October

Throughout this week many steps forward have been made in our planning stage. This progression is a great forward move because it has enabled us to start actually story boarding. Although we have only managed a few shots, progress is being made and that is one of the main things. To story board, we used a decent sized wipe board and then used post it notes to write each shot on and place them in order. Post it's were a good choice because it meant that they could be swapped and placed differently if need be.

Something else that i managed to come up with this week was my logo for the band. I felt that enough valid research was done and therefore I could create what i feel is a professional logo for an Indie/Alternative rock band of the 21st century.

A link to the official website of The Secret Nothings

Now available above my blog archive is a direct link to the official website of The Secret Nothings. Click on the band logo and you will be taken directly there in a new tab.

Band Logo

As a music band, it is very important to have something that represents you as an icon, so that when people see this icon as such, they instantly associate it with your band. To do something like this, we decided to create a band logo.

By completing extensive research on the topic, I was able to think of some indie bands that are already world famous and had a look at how they pieced together their logo using things that represent them so to speak. The bands I looked at where: The Killers, Arctic Monkey's, Two Door Cinema Club, The 1975, the Fray, the strokes and so on. 

 

 

One thing I noticed that each of these bands had in common was that every single one of their logos seemed to be created in black and white, and that this was done on purpose. As I know from earlier research, black and white is a very popular choice for indie bands as a lot of music videos created are solely done in black and white. 

Having a band logo is highly important because as well as becoming an iconic symbol a band logo is a way of helping promote your band. Band logos can be placed everywhere from t-shirts to badges and stickers. Plastering stickers everywhere helps spread your bands image and name and wearing band merchandise helps with the growth and popularity of a band, which is why I have come up with two logos; a shorter one for badges and top corners of t-shirts, and a larger one for general use.

This particular logo I feel stands out as sometimes less is more, and the simplicity of the design and the text is rather quite eye catching, which is what you want from a logo.

Story Boarding...

As you can see from the picture above, this week in our lessons we had a go at story boarding. This is nowhere near finished and will not be exactly the same as what our music video looks like because there will be many things that will need modifying under certain circumstances, but bare with us...

Band Merch

As part of our band's promotion we have decided that it would be a good idea to try and create some suitable merchandise for our band. Our research shows us that bands rely on the sales of their merchandise to keep their profits coming in because people can only buy their song digitally so many times and after a few years the purchases of their songs don't really matter anymore. Therefore they continuously release new products that their fans can purchase and wear which also helps promote their band.

The Spares

As we have decided to create an Indie band we needed to make sure that we picked the right band to represent The Secret Nothings. As Olivia, Jack and myself all know an upcoming indie band from Liverpool, we reached out to them to ask if they would act as the Secret Nothings in our music video. This band is called The Spares and fit the part perfectly as they are a very 'indie/alternative' band.

"Only by the Night" Album Cover Analysis

"Only by the Night" is an album released by Kings of Leon on September 19th, 2008. It gained awards for; Juno Award for International Album of the Year, NME Award for Best Album, Brit Award for International Album. As well as being a fantastic album, Kings of Leon gave their album artwork a very creative twist.

 

Above, you can see that the artwork is compiled of 4 images, these each being a section of a band members face. By taking pictures from the same range of each member, the designer is able to create 1 face from 4 which I think is very abstract and is straight away eye catching.

 

The album is titled "Only by the Night" and there are plenty of features which hint at this title on the artwork. First of all, notice that within the face you can see what resembles an owl. Remembering that Owls are nocturnal and are therefore mostly active "Only by the Night" this is a clever play on imagery. Another way they have done this is by sort of green scaling the art. What this does is give the image a look of "night" vision, once again a good use of colour.

 

The band name and album title are not the first the you notice when looking at this album cover however this does not matter as the designer has used a direct mode of address in order to instantly create a bond/relationship with the audience so they are drawn the the album this way, only to then see that it has been composed by their favorite band, bonus.

The 1975 Album Cover Analysis

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

Finished Prelim Task

This is our groups final prelim task. We understand that the camera quality is not the best, and our editing skills are not quite yet up to scratch, however we all feel that we have done a fairly good job at syncing the clips correctly with the song as it was our first time using iMovie to create a video, which means that we were newcomers to such software. I feel that by completing a task such as this, I have managed to grasp the concept of editing with iMovie and feel that it should be sufficient in order to create a professional looking music video of my own.

Busted - What I Go to School For

Today in our media lesson, we were set a preliminary task in groups of 3 and the task set was to work as a team in order to correctly lip sync to Busted's "What I go to School For" and have a go at editing the recorded clips so that it looked as if we were performing the song ourselves. 

It was a good task to get us started, thinking about what it actually feels like to be behind the camera and how you should perform in order to achieve the correct look when trying to lip sing a song.

After recording each person sing the first 2 verses of the song and the chorus, we then took our clips to the iMac's, were each member of my group had a go at editing their part of the song so that it was correctly synced to the track being played. We are carrying on with this task in another lesson but so far, so good. Our group for this task has done fairly well on getting good quality clips of lip singing and syncing it correctly to this track.

Introduction

I recently found out that this year in Media Studies, we have been assigned the task to create a music video for a particular song which is due to be completed over the course of the year, if not December. We will be creating a music video for an already produced and published song, however we are aiming to come up with a music video of our own that matches the professional, creatives styles of those already famous around the world.

The music video that will be created will be part of a promotional package for an album release, which will also include two of the three following:

-a website homepage for the band.

-a digipak for the album's release.

-a magazine advertisement for the digipak.

In order to achieve a level 4 blog I have to work as part of a team/group, in which we will all have the same amount of responsibility when it comes to getting our final product finished to a high standard. I feel that I have a fairly good knowledge when it comes to camera work and editing, which I feel is an essential part of creating a professional music video as close as possible to the real thing. 

Although it has taken me 2 weeks to finally get my blog up and running due to being extremely busy with home life, I plan on catching up as quickly as possible on my blog, while maintaining a high standard of work.