Costume Designs

Today, the production team and I discussed the costume designs for the protagonist characters and what particular image would be suitable to help reflect their personality. We all studied the iconography of each individual character in depth and came up with a montage of images which helped to imply each characters individuality. Hopefully, by doing this, we are able to come up with a clear image of what is iconic for each character. Also, as we did not do this in the planning for last years AS production, our images of each character should come out more precise compared to last years outcome.

We analysed this characters costume through the study of semiotics. This characters personality is shown quite obviously through the fashion of her costume; the casual look helps to portray this characters personality as being quite ‘cool’. Additionally, it is clearly shown that the style of this characters clothing is like the majority of teenagers. Plus the costume design also gives the hint that this character has a general interest in fashion.

This character pursues the role of a punk. The use of black clothing helps to hold connotations of a sinister personality. However, this character is going to wear black make-up which could help to symbolise the lack of confidence that this character has.

In the first glance, this character may appear relatively similar to the main female character due to the sense of fashion. However, with a closer look, this character’s image holds connotations of an arrogant and ignorant nature.

This character’s image is stereotypically known as the ‘geek’. This characters costume appears old-fashioned which helps to portray his boring lifestyle and personality. On the other hand, this changes as the music will begin to progress. His confidence will develop and then he will turn out to be the ‘Superman’ – hence the Superman costume.

Characters and Cast

The production team and I thought that it was now a crucial time to begin organising and arranging who was going to be the characters. We realised that there were many factors involved in making the final decisions as to who was going to play what character. Factors which the group and I considered to be very important were the general image of each person, their availability and, of course, how good each character was at acting and staying in role for long periods of time. We all agreed as a group that the general image was one of the most important factors as each character had to look around the age they were actually playing plus the general image helps to portray the actor as who they are trying to represent as a character. This would therefore be for the audiences benefit as it would help them to understand the characters in more depth when viewing our final outcome.

Characters
(Protagonist characters)

- Female : Reena Chadee

- Boy Date (Punk) : Robyn Oliver

- Boy Date (Geek) : Krishna Mootoosamy

- Boy Date (Hunk) : Michael Chering


Characters

- Young Boy : Cameron

- Devil : April McKay

- Screaming Girl : Laura Fredericks

Starting the Final Storyboard

In today’s lesson, we had been given the valuable opportunity to begin our final storyboard, meaning that our written storyboard would be converted into a storyboard of drawings. We did not get the chance to complete this, but here are a few sheets of what progress we have made as a group of the storyboard. We decided to fill in the details of the camerawork, transitions and timing last due to the fact that we wanted to make sure that everything we changed at last minute would be precisely written down next to the correct pictures.

Beginning Our Storyboarding (2)

Today, the production team and I met up to complete our storyboard. We made only light changes to what we had done the day before.

Beginning Our Storyboarding

In today’s lesson we had been given the chance to begin our storyboard. The production team and I had many ideas, but they were scattered which made our storyboarding slightly complicated. We had the specific ideas we wanted to use in our music video, however applying these ideas to the lyrics of our song was rather confusing. Therefore we used a technique in which we did not use in the process of our storyboarding during our AS. Our technique was to play our song many times, and then keep a record of how many seconds each section was from the beginning of the song. After a while of doing this, we realised that this was very time consuming. Nonetheless, it was a more productive way of becoming more organised of what specific scenes were going to fit in with what lyrics and how many seconds each scene was going to take up, especially because our music video has a time schedule to meet.

As a group, we organised to have our next meeting on 20/10/09.

Foundations - Kate Nash (Director - Kinga Burza)

Kate Nash
Kate Marie Nash (born 6 July 1987) is an English singer and songwriter based in London. She had a UK #2 hit "Foundations" in 2007, followed by the platinum selling UK number 1 album Made of Bricks. Nash started her career in 2006. After several gigs, Nash uploaded her music to MySpace. She found a manager for herself before seeking producers for her music. On November 14th 2007, Kate Nash celebrated her debut album 'Made of Bricks' going platinum. Whilst playing a sold out show at Shepherd's Bush Empire the news broke that her album had passed the 300,000 sales mark after Fiction records conducted a massive sales check. The album currently sits as 2007's second best selling album.

Kinga Burza
Kinga was born in Krakow, Poland and raised in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia before moving to London in 2005 and signing with respected film production company Partizan of Michel Gondry fame in 2006. She completed a BA at the University of New South Wales, before she went onto postgraduate studies in Theatre and Film at UTS in Sydney. Whilst studying at university, Kinga began teaching herself by making amateur videos for her then boyfriend Sydney musician Jack Ladder and many other friends she had in bands. Since being in the UK, Kinga has shot videos for M.Craft, The Thrills, The Rakes, The Teenagers, Calvin Harris, Kate Nash, Ladyhawke and recent Billboard No. 1 newcomer Katy Perry in LA. Promo Magazine has dubbed Kinga to be among 'the next wave of up-and-coming directors' while both I-D and Dazed and Confused Magazine have also run features on her. She was nominated Best New Director at the CAD Awards in 2007 and won a Young Gun award for Music Video Direction for Kate Nash's "Foundations" in 2007. Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" reached No.1 on the BillBoard charts. In 2008 Kinga won Best Pop Video at the UK Video Music Awards in London for Kate Nash's "Foundations".I thoroughly enjoy watching the video to Foundations at every available opportunity. Its light-heartedness and simplistic techniques (excluding the animation) is something I would like to incorporate into my own music video. The humour used with simple camera angles and editing techniques I feel would appeal to the audience I am trying to reach, i.e teenagers around 14-18 years old. I believe it would create light hearted and at times humourous connotations throughout the video.

Value of Sound

The value of sound in a music video is questionable when much of the research around music videos only makes brief references to the music itself; an example of this is Kaplan who applies film theories to music videos. The links between music videos and films continue to grow especially since chart hits have been used to promote movies rather than their own album such as Paramore promoting Twilight in 2008.

Superman - Barrie Gleden (Lyrics to our song)

Here are the lyrics to our song. We decided to keep a record of our lyrics so that we can analyse them to help us come up with ideas for the scenes in our promotional music video. Also, by writing down the lyrics, we are able to see if we are able to make up a narrative for the music video.


He struts his stuff like his the Mac daddy,

He's one of a kind, invincible and ready,

To take on the world, He's got sex appeal

The man is a dream, the devil did him a deal,

Unstoppable, incredible, irresistible and powerful,

The one and all number one,He's Superman [superman], he's Superman,

That man's got style, that man's got flare,

Try to compete, oh don't you dare,

He's got the moves, he makes me shiver inside,

And he knows it, yeh he knows it,

Unstoppable, Incredible, Irresistible and Powerful,

The one and all, number one,He's Superman [superman], he's superman,

He struts his stuff like his the Mac daddy,

He's one of a kind, invincible and ready,

To take on the world, He's got sex appeal

The man is a dream, the devil did him a deal,

That man's got style, that man's got flare,

Try to compete, oh don't you dare,

He's got the moves, he makes me shiver inside,

And he knows it, yeh he knows it,

Unstoppable, Incredible, Irresistible and Powerful,

The one and all, number one,

He's Superman [superman],

He's superman,Superman[superman]

Ehhhhhhhhhhh

C'mon Superman [superman]

Yeh he knows it [superman]

He knows it [superman]

Inspiration for our storyboarding

The production team and I in today’s lesson explored various music videos from the pop and pop/rock genres to see if any of the editing, animation, camera angles and possibly mise-en-scene could influence us for our music video and inspire us to look outside the box in terms of particularly editing and the use of special effects.

Nelly Furtado - All Good Things

The video by Nelly Furtado, 'All Good Things', I thought had a few effects which might be relatively influencing for the production of our music video because this video has a dream-like feel towards it due to the editing techniques. Some scenes such as the above screen shots show blurryness. This contributes to the dreamy feel, however at times, some scenes fade into one another which is a useful effect which can add on to the illusion of a dream-like world.

Blink 182 - Always

This video from Blink 182 is a specific video that the production team and I found stood out from many others due to the individuality of how the video represents its narrative. This screen shot of a scene shows the storyline of a girl opening the door to her boyfriend. The screen is divided into three different sections which symbolise the different outcomes of what could possibly happen. This, we thought would be a good effect in our music video as we all thought that by dividing the scene into three different sections it would be a good way of comparing the various characters for our narrative, as well as the different situations concurrently.

Powder - Up Here

This music video by Powder, I thought had very high relevance to our music video due to the fact that this video is based on the Marvel comics, which relate to a very high degree to our ‘Superman’ song. The acting in this music video is much exaggerated, which is one of our initial ideas of how characters should act in our music video. Also, the costumes in Powders music video are an important asset to the music video as this portrays each character individually as well as their intentions. For example, the hero in this music video is dressed in white – this colour obviously holds pure and angelic connotations. Relating this to our initial ideas, we had the idea that our characters costumes would represent their personality which proves that costumes are very crucial. Another aspect of this particular music video which caught my eye is the cartoon like comic book scenes which make an appearance. This plays a relevant role when again, relating these ideas back to our initial ideas because ‘Superman’, is based on a comic book, therefore we could give the appearance of onomatopoeias such as ‘POW’ which shows the sounds being made.

Influencing the Audience/ Theories

The Hypodermic Syringe Theory
According to the Hypodermic Syringe Theory, the media is like a syringe which injects ideas, attitudes and beliefs into the audiences who as a powerless mass have little choice but to be influenced. This theory is based on people’s actions after watching films, specifically violent ones.
For example:
You watch something violent and then you may go and do something violent. Or you could possibly see a woman doing the cleaning in a house and then you want to go and do the same thing the woman is doing if you are a woman as well, and a man will expect women to do the cleaning for you.

A film called ‘A Clockwork Orange’ has been banned in the past, partly because of a belief that they might encourage people to copy the crimes within them.

Another example:
The serial killer Jeffery Dahmer, watched a clip from his favourite film before every murder he committed to excite him. This is the kind of fact that could possibly prove the Hypodermic Syringe Theory to be correct, however the film he was watching was ‘Star Wars’, and nobody has ever suggested banning this film for being too violent, therefore on the other hand, this could also be going against this theory.

The Cultivation/Culmination Theory
This theory takes the hypodermic syringe theory to the next level. This theory looks at how the audience of films become desensitized as time increases due to the fact that the more we view something in a film, for example violence, the more it is ‘normal’ for us to view this in everyday life, especially if this violence goes unpunished. The opposite to this is sensitization where one viewing of violence would leave a person so shocked, that they were unable to view this again.

Gratification Theory
According to this theory, we all have different uses for the media and we make choices over what we want to watch. In other words we only encounter a media text if we know that we are going to be satisfied by what we chose to entertain ourselves by – therefore we gain gratification because we have satisfied our needs.

Researchers such as Maslow (among the chief exponents of this model are McQuail and Katz) have identified the kinds of gratification we can be getting. Four have been found:

1) Information: we want to find out about society and the world – we want to satisfy our curiosity. We can also gain information from the news and documentaries because they also make us feel we are gaining knowledge from the world.
2) Personal Identity: we may watch the television to see if we can find people who are role models that we can admire and look up to for our behaviour. For example, we may identify with a character in a film and they might help us to decide how we feel about ourselves.
3) Integration and Social Interaction: we use the media in order to find our more about the circumstances of other people, this also helps up to sympathise and empathise with the lives of others. However, television also gives us a topic to talk about with our real friends.
4) Entertainment: sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxation or just to fill time.

However, this theory ignores the fact that we do not always have the complete choice as to what we receive from the media. For example, we may see a poster on a billboard that we may consider extremely sexist but we are unable to change that poster to what we find more pleasant – therefore we are having to choose the media that we consume from what is available.

Reception Analysis
Reception analysis is based on the idea that no text has one simple meaning. Instead, reception analysis suggests that the audience themselves help to create the meaning of the text. For example, we may watch soap and some people may find a certain scene quite offending and sexist but another person may find this perfectly acceptable to society. Factors such as gender, our place inside society, and the context of the time we are living in can be enormously important when we perceive the meaning of the text. David Morley identified three categories in which audiences fall into when conveying the meaning of a media text:

Preferred reading – The preferred reading is the reading media producers hope the audience take from the text.

Oppositional reading – Audience members from outside the target audience may reject the preferred reading, receiving their own alternative message.

Negotiated reading – Audiences acknowledge the preferred reading, but modify it to suit their own alternative message and opinion.

The Audience as "Mass"

The audience can be referred to as the “mass” because no matter where we are situated as audience, we will always receive the exact same information that the media is advertising. Nowadays, there is not a day that goes past without us encountering the media in some kind of form, whether it is in the form of the sound of the radio in the morning, passing billboards when walking down the street to watching a film in the evening.

The key ideas about media audiences that are very essential to take into consideration and remember are the facts that:

1) The media are often experienced by people alone. This can be looked upon in a way in which that people are cut off from other people like separate atoms.

2) Wherever the audience is in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.

When looking at the early history of the media, it is fairly easy to see where the ideas of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, film, radio and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have been restricted to the number of people who could fit into an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly the same form to enormous numbers of people in different parts of the world.

Herbert Blumer in 1950 (before Hitler in Germany attempted to use the media as propaganda) referred to the audience as being the mass in an anonymous group, and their membership may come from all walks of life and from all distinguishable social backgrounds from different cultures, vocation and wealth. Also, Blumer made it clear that the mass have very little interaction with one another as they are all physically separated.

Questionnaire Results

After I have collected the data from our dispersed questionnaires, I decided that it would be best to present the findings in an excel table to look at the comparisons and to illustrate the demographics.

Class

By analysing the chart it is clear to see that the majority of our target audience is mainly that of a middle class, hopefully this will not be effected by the class demographic.

Age of targetted audience

Due to the production teams decision making, our preferred genre is pop/rock, we wanted to show questionnaire results for our age range. We interviewed a range of people and came to the conclusion that the most popular age in which preferred pop/rock was people between the ages of 16-18. Therefore, it is clear to see that our target audience are going to be young, and of course teenagers.

Gender and Genre

I have come to the clear conclusion that females prefer the genre of pop/rock opposed to their counterparts. It is proved that 8 out of the 20 females preffered this genre whereas only 5 males preffered it.

Gender and preferred album cover

This was quite important as one of our ancillary tasks is to design a digipak.Our questionnaire highlighted that Mika's album proved most popular, but only with females. Whereas Groove Armada's was only popular with males.

Another music related theory...

Phillip Tagg suggests that the listeners are already able to create an image of what the music should look like through the semantic connections they hear created by the lyrics. As people react differently to music the image in each persons mind will vary. Therefore music videos could threaten the listener’s individuality and interpretive ability according to Will Straw. “the debate about whether or not the video images triumphs over the song itself needs to take account of where the emphasis lies in the visualisation, and whether or not it illustrates, amplifies or contradicts the meaning of the song” states Goodwin. Amplification adds layers of meaning, illustration tells the narrative of the story and contradiction uses images to contradict the songs narrative.

Our Initial Ideas and Chosen Song

The production team and I ended up choosing an uncopywrited song from the LGFL website called ‘Superman’ by Barrie Gleden. We thought that this song was suitable for our music video due to the captivating tune and the catchy lyrics. There was a hard decision between this song and another song, however we thought that this song would be much more appealing to our age range of audience, and it was an overall more upbeat tune. The song is about a girl trying to find her ‘Superman’; therefore she goes looking at different types of men. The group and I immediately came up with ideas of what to include in the music video which were very humorous and comical which made our narrative fun and exciting for all ages, therefore this was a good choice of song as our ideas were very open from all angles of the group.

Here is a rough outline of our initial ideas of what we could possibly include in the narrative of our music video. The acting of the characters is going to be much exaggerated to make it comical for our audience so it is more entertaining, which will result in it being more striking. This will also make the production of our music video more engaging for us as a production team.

- There is a girl who is looking for her ‘Superman’. So, she goes on various dates with a range of different guys whose style vary from gangster to punk to geek.
- The dates are all in the restaurant, however in each scene the guys change but the mise-en-scene stays the same so that it is easier for the audience to compare the differences in the guys.
- Obviously, the girl is going to choose the best looking guy, but as time goes on she begins to realise his egotistical attitude and his arrogance and eventually, she will come to realise that he does not even care about her!
- The geek is the boy that is hardly noticed, but as the music video will progress he will be noticed more and more and will slowly become better and better looking. He also really likes the girl, but as the girl does not give him a chance she does not realise this.
- After getting to know the good looking guy, the girl finally realises that she made the wrong decision. She notices the geeky guy and begins to really like him. She has recognised that he has gotten better looking over time which is what made her initially notice him.
- Lastly, she finally gets with her ‘Superman’.
- As a group, we thought that we could possibly have animation appearances in the music video to make the video appear slightly like a comic as the word ‘Superman’ is associated with comics generally. This will also reflective on the cartoon ‘Superman’ which is one of out initial ideas for this music video.

LGFL Audio Network Website

In today’s lesson, we accessed the LGFL Audio Network Website. We also discussed that making our own music on Garage Band would be too time consuming, as we could be using our time more wisely by trying to gain ideas for our music video. So we came to a final decision that we should choose a song from the LGFL Audio Network Website. We are only able to access this website from the school computers which was quite helpful because it helped us to choose a song as a group instead of my group members going off and doing their own thing as individuals. By doing this, it was easier to discuss as a group what songs would be most suitable for our genre by analysing the tempo, how fast the beat was, what the lyrics were and whether we were able to come up straight away with a set of ideas which could be used for our music video for this chosen song.
This website was relatively easy to use as everything was set out in a ‘user friendly’ layout and the genres of music were easily categorized into sub-genres making our chose song very specific. As a group, we all looked through the genre of Pop/Rock and chose a list of songs that we would possibly consider.

Investigating Our Specific Audience

From my research, I have realised that Pop music usually attracts the youthful audience because most Pop songs are catchy and from what my research says, consist of 'love lyrics' which helps this genre of music relate to the younger audience, especially as the majority of the time the Pop Star is around the same age for example, Taylor Swift, as she is a teenager herself. Pop music is very broad, which helps a range of different audiences to get involved in the liking of this particular music genre, this helps to converge with what my research explains about how Pop is a commercially friendly, marketable and memorable genre.

My group and I came to the conclusion that to make our music video suitable for our audience, we have to firstly find out who our specific target audience are. Therefore we made a questionnaire for 20 people to fill out on their own individually so we can get a rough idea as to what would be suitable to include in the production of our music video. The people who we will ask will be random, so that we can get a range of peoples opinions on what they prefer.

Pop - The Global Perspective

English is one of the most popular languages in the world, therefore Pop music can appeal across many areas of the world. This has given the UK and America a very strong presence in the Pop music industry. Also, as these two countries are quite rich, this helps music to be widely spread to other countries through different forms of technologies such as television, radio and internet.

The areas of the world which have quite a noticeable pop music genre domination is Western areas of the world such as the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, North America, South Africa possibly, and the majority of Europe.