Research and planning -Mood Board

Here is a mood board, that i created using the website , glogster.com. This website gives us the opportunity to paste pictures and texts easily. The mood board i created represents the events and emotions that will take place in our video.

Further developed ideas.

Since our last meeting, our group has come up some more ideas for our video.

• We have decided that to add drama to the video, at the beginning of the song, one of our shots is going to be a girl jumping form a lake. This point will be in reverse, so when filming, the girl will have to jump into the lake, and when it comes to editing, we will reverse it. 
• We have also decided that we want ALL of the video to be filmed outside, rather than some inside and some outside. 
• We have decided that no specifically fancy costumes will be used in the video, as the story is supposed to look like a general love story/tragedy, the people will be dressed in normal, casual, everyday clothes, that we will try to keep simple, so that not much attraction is brought to them. 
• We also decided that at some point in the video, we would like to have a close up shot of the girl crying, but will also reverse that, so that the tears are going upwards instead of down. 

Information about copyright.

If something is copyrighted, it gives the creator or producer of the object or idea, exclusive rights to its production and sale. Its gives the owner 'rights to copy' and makes sure the owner is credited for their work. It also restricts other companies or people taking and using the copyrighted idea and earning money from it.

This realised this is important when creating our music video, as if we break any copyrighted rules, we could be persecuted. This is one of the main reasons we have to ask for permission for the songs we use.

Planning our filming : The weather.

Due to the fact that we have to film outside, the weather is an important factor when it comes to filming and making the film look good.

As we wanted to film some more this week, we decided to take a look at BBC weather to see what days offered the best weather for us to film.

We have decided that we are going to film on thursday, friday and saturday as they are the best days.

Although we know these websites aren't completely reliable, they give us a basic idea on what is best for us.

Shooting Schedule : Day 1

Day 1 :

Shots: Shots of forest, nature and some lip synching.

Location: Hainult Forest

Equipment: Camera, Tripod, Mini Speakers.

Costumes: Katy (Lip Syncher), wearing simple casual clothing.

Props: None for any of these shots.

Cast and Crew: Katy (Lip Syncher),
                         Conor Wilkins (Cinematography and mise-en-scene)
                         Tori Wheatley (Cinematography and Sound)

Treatment

Group Roles

Cinematography: Conor Wilkins and Tori Wheatley.
Mise-En-Scene: Tori Wheatley
Sound: Tori Wheatley.
Editing: Conor Wilkins.

Title: Gabrielle Aplin- Home.

Synopsis: A love story between two characters, as the boyfriend films the girl.

Key Genre Conventions: 

Dramatic editing to the beat,
Slow motion movements,
Black and white shots,
Shots of nature,
A romantic storyline that matches the lyrics,

Target Audience Survey

This is one of the surveys we created to assess our 'Target Audience'. This information is key for us when coming up with ideas for the video, digipak and magazine adverts. We created this survey on www.surveymonkey.com as this website allowed us to create the survey for free and allowed friends and family to access it easily.

Bands or Artists Similar to Ours.

Birdy, is an artist very similar to Gabrielle Aplin. She is a signed artist, with two albums out, who uses music videos similar to Gabrielle Aplin, along with music that is also similar to Gabrielle Aplin. This will be one of the videos that we use to base our video on.

Analysis Of A Magazine Advert

Most magazine covers all contain very similar features that are visible in the example i have used. 

• They all contain the name of the magazine that is recurring on every magazine that company produce. 
• They also usually specialize their magazine cover on a particular celebrity, meaning the cover usually consists of a photo of them. 
• The cover also usually contains information about what the magazine is going to be about. 
• A barcode is usually always on either the packaging of the advert, the front page of the advert or the back of the advert. 

Audience Research: Facebook.

After discussing our target audience further, the issue of gender was brought up. As our artist is a woman, singing a reasonably slow, feminine song, it may deter males from wanting to watch our video.  During our research, many of the males stated that the song was too 'girly', and they believed that it was mainly directed towards a female audience, so we went to survey more male friends, using websites such as Facebook.

Here is what we believe as one of the best responses from the research that my group did. In this screenshot, we are shown that romantic story lines and and young, female artists do not always appeal to men, meaning, it is going to be difficult for us to direct our video towards both the male and female audience.

T.A.R : Focus Group No 1- Music Videos Part 2.

After researching with a varied selection of people we decided to illustrate the results that we see are most significant when it comes to our own personal music video. A few of the questions that we asked are 'What type of music videos do you like?', 'Why do you like them?'









The general response from people that we asked was originality. We discovered that a lot of people prefer seeing a music video that is not similar to anything else, or perhaps is something that they have never seen before. For example, one person stated that Justin Bieber -Beauty And A Beat is an exceptional video as it comes across that he is filming a lot of the video himself, and this has never been done before.

T.A.R: Focus Group No.1 - Vox Pops on Music Videos.

What is a Vox Pop?

A vox pop is a short one sided clip of a random member of the public who voices their opinion on a particular subject. For example, if a new television show was to be released, but the director wanted to know what made the public laugh, he would take opinions from the public and a Vox Pop is how they would show this opinion. Ourparticular Vox Pop was about peoples favourite music videos, and why they are so good.

Along with teaching us about what a Vox Pop is, making the Vox Pop , also helped us get more practice when editing videos.

Through the audience research that we did, we found that the videos are often made soul-ly in mind for one particular target audience, and that it would be difficult to try to make a video that appeals to everybody.

Possible Locations.

We are planning to film a lot of our video outside, so that we can use the benefits of nature to represent the song. Here are some shots of our local forest, a location that we are considering using :

We think that this last picture is a particularly  interesting place to film, and plan on filming a lot of our video here. 

Product Placement.

A lot of directors, of not only music video's but also of full feature length films use product placement. This is when a certain labelled product is subtly displayed/advertised in a clip. The maker/company that produce the product pay the film company to include their product in the film, causing subliminal advertisement, making the audience want to buy these products.

Examples of music videos that contain product placement are :

Both of these pictures are taken from the same music video, (Telephone by Lady Gaga and Beyonce) and are only a few examples of the many types of product placement in the video. Product placement also helps to fund peoples costumes and huge factors of the video, which then helps the director when it comes to making a high quality video with a low budget.

How we would expand/broaden our audience and increase sales.

For many artists and directors, it is very difficult to attract new kinds of audiences and to increase sales. However, there are many ways for them to do this, and if we were trying to do this too, we would use many different forms of advertisement and production skills. 

• One of the main things we'd use is Youtube. As an artist or director, Youtube is a critical website when it comes to getting your work seen, and the more songs and videos you have, the more they get seen. This is a way of attracting many different types of people and also gets lots more people to see it, opposed to MTV or music channels. 
• Another way we could attract a new audience and increase our sales is by creating a video that either 'suits' many different types of people, or that doesn't suit a particular person at all, and is suitable for everybody to watch. 
• We could also publicise the video or song by creating advertisements for billboards and magazines, leaflets and posters. This would increase our sales as more people would be aware of the video.
• We could also use channels such as MTV that appeal to a wide audience. This would increase our audience and would publicise the song. 

Detailed research into artist.

After lots of research into Gabrielle Aplin, we realised that she is a reasonably low-profile artist.

Apart from having her own website, there is not much information on the internet about her. The website tells details of the labels that have signed her, her current tour of europe, her new releases and albums on sale, and any videos or personal information about her.

She also has her own youtube channel, that releases all of her own new music and videos.

Preliminary Exercise - What we have learned.

What we did:

-First we found a place that we felt suitable to film. We tried to make sure that we used a place where the wind or weather would not affect us.
-We then filmed both of the characters singing the duet.
-Then we filmed the characters singing the song individually.
-After attaining all the footage we had, we began editing.
-However, we had to re-film some shots, as they did not look as good as we expected them too.
-While editing we used the toggle clip overlay tool to arrange the clips we had in the right order.

What we learned:


Throughout our preliminary exercise, we learned many valuable lessons that will come in handy when making our music video.
1) We learnt that learning a song with short notice and attempting to lip synch it in time with the music is very difficult.
2) We also learnt that editing the video in time with the music is extremely difficult.
3) We learnt that the weather has a huge impact on the effect of the video, as if we shoot the video on 2 separate days and one of the days is raining, whereas the other day is sunny, the video does not match up and looks bad.
4) We also learnt that taking the video seriously is a huge factor when filming. If the people starring in the video are laughing and joking around, it looks bad and unprofessional.
5) We also learned to take into consideration what is happening in the background of the video. When we were filming our preliminary, somebody else was filming their preliminary in the background and it looked unprofessional, confusing and immature.

Rough Outline Of Our Initial Ideas.

After many long sessions of getting together and brainstorming our ideas, we have finally come to a conclusion about how we want our video to look.


As our song choice is extremely slow moving, calm and is about love, we decided not to go for an upbeat type of music video, and instead put a love story behind it and make it slow paced and reasonably simple. We found that making an upbeat music video in winter, without the benefits of things such as sunshine, it would be hard to match the mood of the song we were going to use. So we decided that we will make a simple love story.
Here are some of our brainstormed ideas for our video :

• Having black and white shots that add to the emotional factor of the video. 
• Having a strong story line that suits the song and accompanies the lip syncher. 
• To match the song, the storyline will be about love and tragedy. 
• Editing to parts of the beat that will emphasise the emotion in the song. 
• Contrasting settings that exaggerate certain points of the song. 
• Taking ideas we have seen from other music videos such as Coldplay-The Scientist and changing them to make them our own. 

                                                           

Initial research into artists target audience.

Gabrielle Aplin started off as a youtube-r, covering songs buy the band You Me At Six. This hints towards the fact that she'd like to target the same type of 'indie' audience that You Me At Six attract. You Me At Six also attract a reasonably young audience, usually between the ages of 13-19, and Gabrielle Aplin, as a young artist is able to do this successfully.

Preliminary task

Here is our preliminary task that we did a few weeks ago. We worked in a reasonably large group, so decided to have some fun with the video.

The task of the video was to edit to the beat, and to create a good lip synching effect. The video took us about 25 minutes, but i think we did it succesfully.