Filming has begun! Our first project has to been to gather some of the more difficult and challenging footage first being any that involved people other than us in our group and the use of equipment here being balloons.
These are our first shots we managed to get. After blowing up many balloons and then realising we didnt have enough to fill up a room we opted for the bath!
The footage worked really well, the bright colours add life and depth to the footage and the lights beneath them make creative lighting. We have rewound the footage is it creates and interesting flow of the balloons.
We have already decided that as an intro in to our song and music video will create a kind of flast flashing monatge of events to build the ofundations of the narrative in our video. A recent video where this has been done is in Lady Gagas new video marry the night.
At the end of this video there is a series of fast paced flashing clips. This is exactly how we want ours to be produced in paticular we like the speed and variation of the clips.
Here we have storyboarded the first few shots of out production. We have labeled the sketches with how long the each shot will be, rough descriptions and other notes such as use of lighting and movement of the camera.
This has video has a similar concept to ours. The themes of fun and youth are apparent all the way through as the artists is promoting an image of fun. How this is achieved
The people involved are all young an what appears to be happy
There is a use of bright vibrant colours in particular the balloons
The shots are kept short and the pace is fast
The setting is rural which suggests the natural nature of young people and adds an innocence to it
Now there you go again You say you want your freedom Well who am I to keep you down It's only right that you should play it the way that you feel it But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness Like a heartbeat, drives you mad In the stillness of remembering What you had, and what you lost what you had, and what you lost
Chorus: Thunder only happens when it's raining Players only love you when they're playing They say, women, they will come and they will go When the rain washes you clean you'll know You'll know
Now here I go again, I see the crystal vision I keep my visions to myself It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams and Have you any dreams you'd like to sell, Dreams of Loneliness, like a heartbeat drives you mad In the stillness of remembering What you had, And what you lost What you had, oh what you lost
Thunder only happens when it's raining Players only love you when they're playing They say, women, they will come and they will go When the rain washes you clean you'll know
Oh thunder only happens when it's raining Players only love you when they're playing They say, women, they will come and they will go When the rain washes you clean you'll know You'll know You will know Oh oh oh you'll know
These are the lyrics to our song
The first part talks about freedom and dreams which is obviously a theme of our video so we will be able to relate our video to the lyrics in our song.
Other ideas we have in terms of using the lyrics as inspiration it the use of weather on the lyrics 'thunder only happen when its raining'.
This is our prezi that we presented to the rest of the class. It discusses some of our original ideas and the themes we want to include in our video. We also presented various things such as costumes, locations and concepts. It effectively gave a general idea of the type of music video we want to make and how well it will fit out genre.
Location is an important part of the concept of our video and we have already established that we want to have an URBAN setting. Urban settings are very common within music videos of our genre for example this is a print screen take from an Example music video.
Some of the locations we want to use
Skate parks
Industrial sites
Tower blocks
City environments
Tunnels
Housing estates
Urban areas
Shoreditch
Brick lane
These are some inspiring images we found
Primary sources
These are some images that joely took on her travels of locations we could potentially use.
These
These are image of a skate park she came across in south-bank central London.
These are images she took of a tunnel not far from where we live.
These are shots from some footage I took while out in shoreditch location scouting.
Our idea is that as the members of hunt the noise our identities should never be revealed similar to that of Deadmau5' as it fits our theme of identity.
So wherever we may appear in our video we will be wearing these masks.
Joel Thomas Zimmerman better known by his stage name deadmau5, pronounced "dead mouse" is a progressive house and electro house producer based in toronto. He is a very successful Dj and presenter but most significant about him is his hidden identity One of our themes is identity and how this is a significant part of youth and Deadmau5 wears a mouse mask to mask his face to hide his identity and make his image purely based on his sound and his music.
We like this idea and think we could use the idea of masks in our production as they would represent identity and freedom to be a certain person, age and of a certain lifestyle.
Having finally chosen our song we have begun to look at what kind of concepts, themes and subliminal messages we want to portray in our video. Taking in to consideration our genre and style of the song we have chosen we have decided on.....
YOUTH
YOUNG LOVE
IDENTITY URBAN FREEDOM
we looked at a quote by banksy that said
"A lot of parents would do anything for their kids except let them be themselves"
This inspired us to also explore the idea of youth against adults and how youth is displayed so badly in the media.
Overall our main concept is being young, youth and how freedom to be young is paramount over the control of society, parents, boyfriends and negative media.
This is a new video by Coldplay, one thing i really liked about this video is the use of lyrics on signs which is also a good use of voyeurism. We have dicussed doing something like this in our video.
Looking at various music videos we decided that we would like to include a fast pace opening montage in our music video. The reason we want to include this is because it is really effective in giving a quick introduction on to the narrative of the music video.Having decided on our narrative we found that in order for us cut straight to the most interesting part by having this montage in the beginning it will tell our audience the story so the rest of the video makes sense.
We have found some examples of some videos that also have done this.
beyonce if i were a boy
maverick sabre look what i done
a team ed sheeran
Also h aving decided to use a remix of a song the actual length of our song is only 2 mins 30, so we started to research way that we can add length to our video. We found that many videos feature a 10-12seconds intorduction without music and different uses of sound.
Now we have chosen our song we have started to consider our narrative with our themes and concept in mind.
Most music videos in our genre are very different to each other and it would be difficult to find one particular reoccurring story line so we decided to form it based heavily on our concept of youth, freedom and identity. Our idea is to create the story of a girl that escapes from a destructive relationship.We want to create the illusion she is taken in to a completely different lifestyle by the three people in hunt the noise who will always conceal their identity. We want to create an idea of her escaping at the start of the video them have majority of it made up of the life our of it. We are still unsure of how it will end but we do know we want it to be dramatic and mysterious.
An example of this story line could be Rihanna and Calvin Harris' 'We Found Love'
So far we have our chosen song and have started planning our video.
We have had to change our song as we decided we didn't really like it. Our new song is a twelves remix of fleetwood mac dreams.
We have also started researching editing technique and are currently working on this aged effect and the colour grading similar to this print screen from Lana Del Reys video to 'Blue jeans'
Having chosen our song we started to draft some idea for our band name. We wanted the name to fit the style of music and video.
One idea we had is to include the word noise as we liked the child like association and playfullness of it.
We created a chart and asked the members of our class which name they preferred as it is a really good form of audience research.
Knowing in depth how the Audience theory is applied will help us greatly in keeping a clear idea of our target audience. With a clear idea of who is it we are trying to appeal to with our video we can generate an idea of the codes and conventions of our genre to either subvert the stereotypes attached or stick to the expectations.
One reason it is so important to have a clear target audience is to know who we want to buy our product. It may be watched and viewed by many different kind of people but in order to be successful we need to generate a band of followers that will consistently purchase our product.
This also helps with our marketing, advertising and promotion by using specific iconography and generating a synergy between our products.
Stuart Hall
Developed the idea of audience positioning. He created this after looking at new reports on industrial strikes. He claims that media representations create a kind of basis or framework for particular responses. He claimed they would fall in to three categories.
Dominant readings - Audiences respond to a narrative or plot and adopt a point of view based on what the plot implies.
Oppositional readings - Audiences do the opposite so they challenge the narrative and point of view implied.
Negotiated readings - Audiences partially except but are not completely persuaded and are open to other views
*Aberrant readings - is an additional idea where the narrative is read in a deviant or an unexpected way
The song we have chosen is a remix of a the Fleetwood Mac song 'Rumors'. Although this may seem like a strange choice working from the alternative genre we used our imaginations and found a song that would probably be completely different to most A2 media students would have done before which is what the alternative genre is all about, being different. The original song is a classic and so fairly well known but by using a modern remix of our song it creates the perfect basis for our concept of age and youth by mixing two sounds from two different ages of audience. This paticular remix also has no current music video which helps our audience be completely free to interpret our video as they see it with no idea of what amusic video to this song may look like.
So we've got busy and started searching for another song. Looking mostly at the pace and what we can really fit our ideas with. What we are looking for are songs that appeal to our age, songs that are reasonably unknown so we can be completely original with our ideas and that our viewers don't already have a preset idea of what out theme and style should be similar to, a song that we can keep in our genre which is the indie/alternative dance, preferably a woman singer as it would be so much easier for us to find characters and film and one we can all agree on!
Our first discoveries.....
this video is amazing! It has a good beat but maybe the pace is too slow...also we'd love to use some of the video ideas.
This is another song that suits our genre but yet again we dont know if the beat is going to be fast enough.
Having gained some of our first rough footage we decided to experiment with some of the techniques we plan to use in our video.
An extremely rough and rushed composition of clips rather than a video we used this to try out some techniques we wanted to include in our actual video.
Techniques we have tried...
Flash screens
Firstly the idea of flashing to black screens on a beat somewhere throughout the song as we found it creates an effect of flashing back to memories or maybe that it even adds to the pace and beat of the song. We got this idea from this music video by the artist of the song we had chosen......
Jumping and rewinding
At about 36 seconds in to the montage we have rewound the clip of the girl dancing which gives it a kind of jump effect and then continued it. This almost creates the illusion of stopping time. We find this really effective as when put in sync with the right part of a song it can really highlight the beat and create tension before the main part of a song drops.
An example of where this has been used would be Nicola Roberts video at 45 seconds
We have started to look at some ways in which we can include voyeurism in our own media production. We looked at some music videos of our genre to see how they have used them and found this video by Nero called 'Crush On You'. The element of voyeurism in this video is where the characters are singing karaoke from the lyrics of the song of the music video which appear on a television scree. We liked this idea because
It creates the fun upbeat atmosphere we want to achieve
The style of karaoke has a certain retro and authentic feel which again we have included in our plans for our production
Voyeurism is the element of a video where the artist appears to themselves as a product or sound within their own music video. The idea is that some element of themselves is included in the video. Here are some examples of where it has been used in modern and much older media.
At the start of this video rizzle kicks have their song playing from a stereo as it then blends in to the overall song.
This is an example of Voyeurism at a much earlier stage. Nat King Cole appears on the television screen.
In this Madonna video there is a slightly different kind of voyeurism being that she watches herself dance in the mirrors of a studio.
Laura Mulvey an academic and theorists claimed the representation of women in media is mostly dominated by the male point of view. She believes women have a more passive role compared to a man's more active role and therefore this is reflected in the way the media represents women as men are to be the ones that look and women the ones to be looked at.
Traditionally men play the active roles that drive the story forward and the women are objects or obstacles on the way. Mulvey believes main roles for women are scares and they often just accompany the large main roles created for men. She believed there are certain stereotypes attached to females in film and television being that they are sexually and physically attractive, they are motherly and caring and though possibly intelligent want to settle down more than anything.
She believed their are two main types of the Male Gaze being Voyeuristic and fetishistic. Mulvey claims women are either sexually attractive or powerless females. In the 1970's studies found that men tend to be behind the decision making and production of film and TV.
Laura Mulverys theory is apparent in music videos such as these.
In this video by Metronomy the women's figures are used for decoration and their stances are suggestive of a sexual nature.
In 50 cents candy shop the womenare dressed in sexually provocative clothing and are made to appeal to men.
This is a recent film called Number one cheerleader camp which revolves around a story line of to young men trying to sleep with various cheerleaders. This film has clearly been produced by all men and made to appeal only to men. The cover of the DVD pack advertises this perfectly.
How has the Male Gaze been demolished in modern media?
Sket is a newly released film about a group of girls that decide to fight back against the violence of the men on their block. The violent nature of the film which has a dominantly female cast subvert stereotypes and challenges the Male Gaze being that none of them are made to be particularly attractive. Although they are the victims in the film the fact they fight back and the ending has some kind of resolution for the girls goes against the suggested rule that a male character must come in and save the day.
Our group have a strong idea of the type of genre we want to base our music video on. The most distinct aspect of our genre is the dance theme however we are focusing on the dance genre that is less commercial and more urban/indie dance.
Dance/Alternative-
Dance/Alternative is commonly known as a mix between electronic and indie/rock music. Its also referred to in amercia as Underground Dance.
As our genre is more of an up and coming genre there aren't many bands that fit in to it entirely as its often made up of artist from other genres. Our genre mainly began in the 1980s with the creation of the bands Prodigy and New Order which later developed in to what is now seen as Dance/Alternative.
The genre is also highly attached to the night club culture is therfore often attached to the audience of youth. With the development of computers and technology around the 21rst century the way music was produced and developed changed dramatically. The popular culture become more digital and as did the trend in music. Elements of the genre were pushed along by the sense of more online opinions and vocal preferences on sites such as myspace were music could become so criticised that music catered for smaller audiences became more accessable and creative.
Chase and status
Chase and status are an alternative electric duo from London. Recently breaking in to the dance scene in urban london their modern sound includes a variety of urban artists such as tinie tempa and katy b. Also playing a major part in the recent success of dubstep. This is the music video for a popular chase and status song 'End credits'. It has everything typical of our genre being a focus on the youth and an urban setting as well as being part of film advertising and so therefore made current.
Chase and status are a perfect example of a duo that has pushed the dance/alternative genre a long in terms of pushing it in to popular culture.
Sub focus
Another example of a of an artist that is successful in the generation of the dance/alternative genre is Sub Focus. He is a dj that has worked with artists such as chase&status, Dizee rascal, Empire of the sun and actually produced the number hit 'Kickstarts' by Example. His sound is again very electronic and aimed at a younger audience.
This is a popular music video by Sub Focus which uses footage from festivals which are a big part of the dance/indie/alternative culture. It is also very personal showing footage from his own view point as the artist which draws the veiwer in as well as having lot of performance.
For my research project I have decided to look at the french Electronic/ Dance duo Justice
Music career
Justice released their first album in 2007 signed to EdBanger records
Their debut album recieved a nomination for the Grammy award of best Dance/electronic album.
They have performed at festivals such as coachella, Sonar, Tomorrowland and Oxygen. These a festival attached to the dance genre.
Their sound has been known to incorporate Indie and Rock music in to a dance electronic theme which would make them primarily of the Alternative genre.
Representation in the media
Justice represent themselves in various ways that create their desired image as alternative and current.
One way in which they create their identity is the performances and festivals that they attend for example Oxygen festival . This festival is a platform for Dance and modern artists compared to more commerical and perhaps younger festival such as V festival.
Image
This is an image from a performace and the cross has been incorporated in to set design which is part of the Justice logo and has become a symbol of the duo.
This cross is also featured in this justice poster on the left which keeps a synergy between the performance and branding of the band.
The phsycial image of the duo members is also a part of the way in which they represent themselves. Often wearing black leather jackets this appeals to their younger target audience which would be highly judged by their listeners being teenagers and young adults.
This is a music video by justice from their newest album civilisation. The themes and concept of this video such as stars and space accompany the electronic more modern sound. It is fairly weird and unexpected in the way that the rocks turn in to animals which again highlights the creative streak indie videos tend to have. The large statue figures which seem to be religous idols crashing to the ground are suggestive of a deeper meaning that the band may be trying to express based on religion. The whole film seems to be in a kind of parallel world which could represent escapism.
This week we have confirmed our definite song choice. We also managed to gather some potential footage mostly as just an idea. We have planned to put that footage together and see how well it works which wil be coming soon.
One of the ideas we had was to make clothes out of green screen material and see how they worked with different images or films. We bought a few meters of the material and have started planning what kindo f clothes to make out of them.
Do the D.A.N.C.E. 1, 2, 3, 4, fight Stick to the B.E.A.T. Get ready to ignite You are such a P.Y.T. Catching all the lights Just easy as A.B.C. That's how you make it right
Do the D.A.N.C.E. 1, 2, 3, 4, fight Stick to the B.E.A.T. Get ready to ignite You are such a P.Y.T. Catching all the lights Just easy as A.B.C. That's how you make it right
Do the D.A.N.C.E. 1, 2, 3, 4, fight Stick to the B.E.A.T. Get ready to ignite You are such a P.Y.T. Catching all the lights Just easy as A.B.C. That's how you make it right
Do the D.A.N.C.E. Stick to the B.E.A.T. Just easy as A.B.C. Do the DANCE
Do the DANCE The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE You're always there for music and me Do the DANCE The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE You're always there for music and me
Take me through the radio Does it all around Except for one amp stereo And the speed of sound
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE (do the dance) You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE (do the dance) You're always there for music and me
Under the spotlights Neither black nor white It doesn't matter Do the DANCE (do the dance)
As strong as you might Working day and night Whatever happens Do the DANCE (do the dance)
The way you move is a mystery You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE (do the dance) You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE (do the dance) You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery Do the DANCE (do the dance) You're always there for music and me
Do the DANCE (do the dance) The way you move is a mystery
These are the lyrics to our chosen song, their context is fairly simple and fits the theme of a dance song.
What may be difficult about these lyrics is they don;t provide material for a story or situation as they aren't you based on the common theme of love or relationships.
