Planning: How our video links with Laura Mulvey's theory.

Laura Mulvey came up with the theory of the 'Male Gaze', where women dress provocatively to attract male attention. Our video does to some extent follow this theory. For our video we are wearing short, skimpy outfits which do show our legs. Nothing too extreme. We also dance a little to the beat, again something typical with females in videos. We are a girl group and as with every girl group there is usually one girl in particular who appeals to most men, for example, with Girls Aloud it was Cheryl Cole. Our girl is Anca. Below is a gif showing other girl bands following the theory.

Production - Filming Session 1

Filming Session 1, a set on Flickr.

As I felt our first filming session was so successful I thought I'd post a couple photos of myself filming to mark the occasion and give viewers insight to the type of shots I was attempting to film - enjoy!

Via Flickr:
For our first filming session, we went out the Barbican in which we filmed the base-tracks for Larah's verse and a couple of choruses. We thought this was a successful filming session as we managed to get everything filmed efficiently and on time. Furthermore, it was a great moral boost as we were about to film in Dionne's house, perhaps the most challenging filming session out of our 3.

Analysis of 3 music videos that have influenced our final planning decisions

For the song that we have chosen to do there was no original video so I decided to analyse one of the sugababes other videos to get ideas

Sugababes Hole in the head

•  What I really liked about this video is the mise en scene and camera work. The mise en scene is similar to the type of location we want to film- urban setting. It also helps that in the video that they're on a night out because this is similar to our idea for the narrative of our music video.
• The camerawork is really good and I liked that the camera slightly moved with them when they moves especially when each member had their individual sections. Also the framing and the shot types used was something that could be incorporated into our video, there was use of many close ups and medium close ups in particular when they sang a verse and when they had their own sections.
• Editing to the beat and using transitions also when changing the shot

Mis Teeq Scandalous

What influenced me about this video is the mise en scene. As mentioned before, the urban gritty setting is something that would be good use for our music video. I also like their performance they really committed and had a good attitude.

The Saturday's Issues

The camera movement and the editing is what influenced me most about this video. It was editing to the beat even though it's quite a slow song which visually made the video more interesting and through this you get to see other members of the group not just the person who is singing. There was a lot of camera movement in this music video which I thought was good too.

Reflection on Progress

I think that with the planning blogs I was slower at getting the work done. With the pitch and filming I think I forgot about blogging until the last minute which isn't good. I think I still need to do more individual blogs but I struggled with that in terms of planning so I think it's something I still need to work on as well as better time management but I do think I've used more technology in my blogs, for example, the use of Go Animate. Two more targets I'd like to give my self are: Having better Time management and doing extra blogs. Even though they are two of the same (which sort of says a lot), I want to improve on them further.

Planning: How we could incorporate social network sites

Social networking sites are important as they are a good way to promote the music and brand and also a way to connect with our audience. We have created an Instagram and a Twitter page. Instagram is focus's on pictures and short clips so it would be show pictures of behind the scenes (for our fans)and a way to track our progress , especially during filming and Twitter is a good way to update our audience but also to update our teachers on where we are and how we are getting along.

Planning - Animatic

This is an animatic made in preparation for the pitch. Anthony made it on Final Cut Pro by using individual pictures from the drawn-up storyboard with the music playing in the background - the sequence we intend to film it in. Note - Each shot change is captioned and use of base-tracks is marked, too. With that said, enjoy!

Audience Task

In lesson we were asked to describe an average member of our audience and we were asked to point out specifics, for example, Where they would live, their age gender, ethnicity etc. We decided to make a Facebook profile to present our audience member. Constantly being on the Saturday's and Little Mix's website because of the research tasks I had an idea of their typical audience member, which is similar to ours. Some characteristics of our audience are: 

• Gender: Girl
• Age: 17
• Occupation:Student
• Reads Magazines like Bliss, Teen vogue and Cosmo Girl
• Shops at high street brands like, Topshop and H&M
• Favourite drink: Diet Coke
• Reasons for liking the band: Their music is catchy, likes their brand image, songs are good to dance to

Screenshots of the Facebook page

Our video in relation to Goodwin, Vernallis and Mulvey

Andrew Goodwin

• The artists in our video acts as the narrator (candihearts)
• There will be a lot of close up of the artist
• There will be repetition especially at the chorus and base tracks will be repeated
• Our video takes an illustration relationship as we are telling the story of the lyric - our interpretation - lives of single girls in the city

Carol Vernallis

• We will be using base tracks in our video, as well as, jump cuts and other obvious edits, like fades
• The camera won't be static but there will be camera movement
• It will be edited to the beat
• The artist will move to the music

Laura Mulvey

Our video contradicts Mulvey's theory as the artist won't be presented as objects of male desire. We won't be showing a lot of flesh as we have a young audience and we don't want to convey that image to them and we will be dressed in similar ways to them to relate to them. We are presented more as independent women who do not need a man in their life to be happy or to control them. There aren't any males in this video and this is to empower us more and this is shown through the many low angle shots. The is no dismembering of the artist in this video.

Planning - Reflect On Progress Blog

Overall, this part of the course has been a little more intense, I've had to put all this research into action and plan for my music video. For my previous 'Reflection on Progress blog' post, I set myself these three targets:

1. Do posts as soon as possible, giving myself more time before any deadlines 
2. Waffle less in posts
3. Do more supplementary posts

I feel as if I've only achieved target '2).' Making posts straightforward and informative, I've noticed that I spend less time writing posts, giving me more time to create supplementary posts. However, on this section of the blog I feel it was particularly hard considering almost every aspect of planning had to be included in the pitch earlier this month - I didn't want to overlap myself. Furthermore, I didn't post tasks as soon as I would've hoped to. Personally, I think it'd be best to keep a consistency to my blogging. 
Because of this I thought I could set myself another 2 targets, expanding on my other 2: 

1. Blog a minimum of 5 posts a week
2. Post at least 10 supplementary posts for the 'Production of music video' blog

PRODUCTION: Filming Day 2

October 23rd, 2013 - This was our group's second filming session, which took place at Dionne's house.
We shot a few cutaways for the second verse - either individual shots of each performer or group ones.
Looking back, I am hoping that we have shot enough close-ups - apparently, students like us often forget to get them. We will definitely make this a priority on the next filming days, although I believe we've been doing well so far.
Here are a few stills of the filming session:

 

Risk and Safety Assessment.

There are a number of things to consider with the risk assessment

Equipment

When using the equipment we must:

• Ensure we use it in a safe environment
• Protect it from bad weather, so maybe use it all under shelter
• Watch over it at all times-to prevent theft
• Set everything up correctly and safely
• Don't run with the equipment
• Don't mess around with the equipment-to prevent breakage 
• Follow all these rules!

If any equipment breaks then the whole group has to pay for it so we must take extra care.

Planning: Setting and location for video.

A few of us went out and got pictures of where we felt would be appropriate to film. We got pictures from the barbican as we felt that area would be good to convey the whole partying and coming home in the early hours of the morning lifestyle. We also got pictures from group member Dionnnes house as we will be filming there when we are getting ready to go out. This is a Slidely I created below showing some pictures:

Larah Yearwood's Slidely by Slidely Slideshow

Setting and Location

We have chosen to film at the Barbican and at Dionne’s house. Most of the filming will be done outside, either in daylight or at night time, but one verse will be filmed inside the house.

The beginning of the video will be in an alley way, the middle section will be filmed at Dionne’s house and the last section will be filmed around barbican and the tunnel at the barbican.

We chose these locations in order to give our video an urban theme, as the three girls are living the typical life of a young adult female in the city. The house will be used in order to show the girls as they get ready for yet another night out together.

Barbican

Dionne's House

Audience 2

For this task I went to Hmv in Angel and asked an employee (Stephan) what he thought he'd expect to see in a typical music video. I created an animated video of our conversation. The site I used restricted me to 30 seconds so the conversation is shorter in the animation.

Audience 2 by dionne.c on GoAnimate

Costume

There will be a total of 3 costume changes. 

We’ve chosen to go with a theme of monochrome with colourful accessories because we didn’t want to be too conventional with our costumes, but we wanted to add the colourful element that you usually see with girl bands and other pop artists.

With our look we wanted to be girly, but with an edge. A convention of girl bands is that they’re colourful and bright and also they wear similar clothes to their audience.

These are my costumes for the video:

This is the first costume which will be worn in the first part of the video. In this part of the video the girls are just on their way home from a night out in the barbican so we're all dressed up - leather skirt heels and white top.

This is the second costume where we are set inside the house so we chose to go with casual clothing - jumper, leggings and a white top.

Audience 1

• Our core audience are young females aged 18-25
• Wider Audience: females 16-30, young males
• I think what would appeal to our audience is that we’re young and our ages are close to our target audience's ages so we’re likely to have similar experiences and it’ll be easier for them to relate to us and vice versa.
• The band's sense of style is current and the girls will be styled according to today's fashion trends.

PRODUCTION: Filming Day 1

Yesterday was our first day of filming for our music video.
We travelled to our location at the Barbican and filmed a few cutaways for the first verse, individually and together.
Here are some still shots from the session, in a Slidely presentation:


Anca Alexe's Slidely by Slidely Slideshow

Planning: Group logo

This is just something I created on publisher. It is just an idea but it uses what we wanted for the logo. We talked about having a heart instead of a dot above the letter 'I' so I also put that in. It isn't the definite logo, just a rough outline to give everyone an idea of what logo we are going for.

Planning - Pitch

This is the presentation we used to present to the Media department and peers.

PLANNING:Synergy

The things we have chosen to have as an aspect of synergy across our video, digipak and advertisement are, monochrome theme and aspects of our costume being colourful to go with our genre of pop (e.g jewellery), some costumes from the video and gold rings. he reason we chose to do monochrome is because it is a current fashion trend amongst young people especially girls so it'll relate to them more.

PLANNING: Promotion of brand image and songs through the internet.

The song we're doing is by Sugababes and they've recently disbanded as Sugababes so there are no updated websites for this group. I did manage to find a Facebook Page. There isn't much on the Facebook page but some pictures and event information.

As there is no official website for the Sugababes, I am going to look at similar artists - The Saturday's and Little Mix

Their website is colourful, vibrant, fun and that is to represent their genre, Pop and them as young girls, also, to reach their target audience which is young teenage girls. Their site has many pages shown in the gif below ( Merchandise, News, Music, Biographies). Their individual logo's are used a lot on the website and this is a way to reinforce. One thing I noticed, is that in their biographies they're asked questions that would be typically asked by their audience which is clever as they get ask them before the audience and this can help audience members to relate.

The Saturday's 

The Saturdays have a similar site structure to Little Mix this might be because they're similar artists. The Saturday's are young but older than Little Mix so their website is less bright and colourful and much more sophisticated. The image below is a screen shot of the first thing that comes up when you go on to the Saturday's website and it's their latest video, which is before you enter the site, this is a clever method of promotion as every time you go on their website the video comes up.

Planning: Synergy

I had the idea that the group could use gold rings as part of the synergy. The jewellery looks nice and goes with what we are wearing. I took a picture of the rings and uploaded it below.

We will also be using the colour scheme as synergy. We plan to use a monochrome colour scheme in our video and have accessories to brighten up the theme, like the rings. We had outfits like those pictured below in mind.

We also plan on having bright lip stick/gloss as part of our synergy as well to again contrast with the monochrome outfits.

Our name: 'The CandiHearts' will have a heart instead of a dot above the letter 'i' as we thought this would go with the brand image. We will be using this logo in our 3 productions.

Planning - Brand Image

Our brand image will consist of:

• Gold rings
• Bright lips
• Leather skirts
• White vests
• Heels/boots

We decided that because this is what many young females wear we would follow the trend in order to gain more followers. 

PLANNING: Audience

As we plan our music video, we need to think about our target audience in order to make the video appeal to this target as much as possibile.
Our target audience includes females between the ages of 16-25.
I have created a Facebook profile of a possible member of our target audience.

Her name is Danielle, she is 18 years old and she is a student.
People her age often share things they like to their friends on Facebook and other social media websites, such as Twitter and Instagram.

I have also made a Twitter account for this audience member.

She tweets about her favourites, shares them with friends

She follows a lot of pop artists and groups

Planning - Synergy

For our music video, we're trying to appeal to all aspects, whether it be technological or materialistic. We're looking to incorporate three types of synergy:

- Jewellery (Gold Rings) - Worn on either side of the ring finger, this is used to reinforce - not only are the girls quite flashy (They take pride in their looks) - that they're living a bachelor lifestyle. Personally, I'm quite reluctant to using this as I don't understand what notions/symbolism rings contain aside from wealth or marriage. However, I trust my group have a better understanding than me.

- WhatsApp - Though I haven't consulted this with my group I thought WhatsApp (Popular IM application) would be a good form of technolog
ical synergy. I also took inspiration from the lyric video for Katy Perry's Roar. Considering the app's used by people everyday, the ident/layout is easily recognisable. Use of 'Emojis' are popular too. We would intend to use this in our video to convey that the girls are common people, there's nothing special about them.

Section of Katy Perry's Roar lyric-video. Something I think we
could easily incorporate into our piece. 

- Monochrome-styled Clothes - In attempt to step out of the modern notion of pop-groups, we try to avoid using loud colours. This noir-styled, making the group look classy will help us appear original and unorthodox as well as raising our target audience to young adults.