Animatic

Final Song Choice.

Are final song choice was Marina And the Diamonds The Outsider From her album "The Family Jewels" this song was not release as a single and so did not have a music video to accompany it. the song was the best for the project because looking at some of the previous work people haven't done it before but also because the lyrics show a girl who  doesn't fit in and is a loner and the music video can get a lot of great ideas for a narrative.

short list of potential songs.

this was a list of potential songs to use for the music video:

• Going Missing Maximo Park
• Number one enemy- Daisy Dares You
• in these towns-The Enemy
• Mr Medicine, Rollerblades, Nobody-Eliza Doolittle
• Girls, The Outsider-Marina and the diamonds

this is the final short list of potential songs we had for are music video:
Nobody- by Eliza Dollittle

Or

The Outsider- by Marina and the Diamonds

we came down to these two because they were the two that we thought would be the most easiest to portray and what gave us the most inspiration.

Shortlist of Potential Songs

Here are four songs that we thought about using for our music video;

Marina and the Diamonds

• Girls
• The Outsider

Eliza Doolittle

• Mr Medicine
• Nobody

These songs would all be good to use int the making of a music video because they are all sung by women, making them easier for us to make without having to bring someone else in to college for every lesson. Also, the connotations of the lyrics show the singer being alone, lonely or somethign similar. This would be easy to show in a music video with slow cuts and close ups of facial expressions. They also all tie in with the teenage girl image, because they are both young and know about the 'struggles of teenage life'.

Who was Vladimir Propp? (add music video and analysis)

Vladimir Propp was a Russian scholar who analysed the basic plots an narrative structures of Russian folk tales. He applied the formalist approach to his work, meaning he broke down sentence structures into smaller, analysable elements. Propp was then able to use this method to analyse fairy tales and break them down into their smallest narrative units. By doing this, he invented a specific type of narrative structures still around today.

There were 31 components to this approach, including TRICKERY, DEPARTURE, GUIDANCE, STRUGGLE, and eventually, VICTORY.
An example of this style of video is Sic Transit Gloria by Brand New. This is because it follows along with the song's lyrics as well as keeping in beat with the music. This becomes apparent when the main character says 'This is so messed up' at the same time as the singer, connecting him to the music and establishing his status as the main person. The music is non-diagetic, so he shouldn't be able to tap his foot in time with the beat, or sing along to the song in other parts, including 'Die young and save yourself'. The video is filmed with a sort of blue filter to convey sadness when the main character feels alone in the club, though it changes when he begins to start breaking things, as now he has the power of control over everyone. There is a lamb on the door at the start of the video, and the same lamb is on the shirt of the girl at the end, this shows the audience that there is a connection between the two of them, and also fits in with the line, 'He is the lamb, she is the slaughter'. The end of the video seems to be the victory part, as it looks like he has picked up a girl, but then there is an element of trickery, when he himself is controlled by an unidentified man.

Applying For Permission To Shoot on London's Southbank

To shoot on London's Southbank you need to have permission from the private property owner. To do this I had fill in a form and send it to Film London. Luckily, we are a group of less than five people and will be using a predominately handheld camera, as otherwise we would need to give up to eight weeks notice and may be turned down. This is just a precaution, because the terms and conditions say that we would normally not need permission, but without persmission, if we are asked to stop filming then we must leave the premesies. I am waiting on a reply from Film London, although it says that they endeavor to give feedback within three working days, hopefully giving me an answer before the weekend.

Review one of the previous students videos that you analysed in class (finish)

The previous student work I choose to analyse is the music video made to the song naive by the kooks. The narrative of the story is linear and tells the story of a girl cheating on her boy friend which seems to be a bit clique. 

Audience task

Mollie is a 18 year old female who lived in Kent. she is a Caucasian student and her parents shop at Waitrose. in  her spare time she likes to go horse riding ,going to gigs and shopping.

she reads the guardian when there's one around the house but she's more into reading magazines like glamour and ok because she likes to be up with the gossip.she gets around in a car and carries around her iphone so she can listen to her music and check up on facebook and twttier.

 when she is out shopping she likes going to Topshop, H&M, New Look and River Island. her favourite thing to drink are smoothies. and she wants to go on holiday this year to either Ibiza or Thailand. the reason why she likes pop indie is because she likes to express herself.

Audience Task (Planning)

MOLLIE

Mollie is a typical 18 year old Caucasian female who enjoys going to gigs, shopping and horse-riding in her free time. She lives in the rural part of Kent where her parents would be B when classed in occupation groups. For her groceries, she would shop at Waitrose who are known for their high prices but is of high quality. She reads the Guardian as part of being a student, it would be necessary for her to expand her vocabulary however she does read Glamour- for fashion aspects and OK!- for the latest celebrity gossip. She would normally travel by car because buses do not occur as frequently as they do in London and the train would be a far distance from her house. A gadget she would have is an iPhone- for music and entertainment purposes. Accessories she would have in her handbag would be: LipGloss, Mirror, bottle-opener, wallet and emergency cash. She likes to shop at high-street shops like: Topshop, H&M, New Look and River Island. Her favourite drink is smoothies or anything with lots of fruit: 'Fruity stuff'. 

As being an adventurer, she would like to go on holidays in exotic places with plenty of things to explore. Ibiza, Thailand, Ayia Napa would be examples. 

Mollie likes Marina and the Diamonds because as it is within the Indie Pop genre, she feels they express emotions quite openly and has the opportunity to have lots of quirkiness without people feeling it is over the top. 

Audience task

Final Song Choice.. Marina and the Diamonds (planning)

MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS
We have chosen to use Marina and the Diamonds- 'The Outsider'. I think this choice is very well-suited because the lyrics describe someone who feels that they don't fit in the society. Being practical as well, it would be easier to portray the lyrics as Marina because there are only girls in our group. The lyrics were easy to portray and allowed to use our representation to the song. As the song hasn't released a video, this would be important for us to link the lyrics to what we connoted of them. 

Shortlist of potential songs (Planning)

The following shortlist show potential songs which we could use for our music video.
Marina and the Diamonds

• Girls
• The Outsider

Eliza Doolittle

• Mr Medicine
• Nobody

For the group these choices would be most relevant because it would be easier to organise and de-construct. The feelings discussed in these songs were related to the teenage girls in society today making it easier for the audience to feel sympathy and engage with the video.

Review of previous student videos (Research)

During this exercise, I was able to look over past student videos to see how the videos were marked. It was an eye-opener for me to see what to use and what not to use. It also enabled to develop my knowledge of the conventions in a music video and to correctly use these features. 

 
Adam, Lisa, Nasima & Sayvita
This is an example of a good music video because it corporates a lot of shots and angles to captivate the audience. For example, there is a range of close-up shots which show the emotion of the artist. The colour red is very widely used in the video and this is noticed during the close-up shots connoting love references. The idea of using other people in the video with a script of the lyrics on them adds interest into the video engaging the audience to sing along. Since the video is black and white, the video has been filtered to only show the objects that are in red. The low angel shots were used to make the artist seem taller and relates to the idea of love being big. 'everybody needs love' 
In one shot, she is denoted singing the chorus in darkness where her earrings and red lipstick is brightly shown. All in all, this music video allows the audience to easily be visually interested. 



Adam, Lisa, Nasima & Sayvita from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Analysis of a previous student video

Here is a video a student group made last year for their coursework, watching a few of them helped me understand what it was that I wanted to do in my group's music video and allowed me a chance to look at what shots work well and can be filmed easily.

Sabien Flint, Jayden Murphy, Tenica Achord-Green, Michael Sintim
I thought this video worked very well, because there were a few different locations, like my group plans to do, but it didn't become confusing and I always knew what was going on. The lead singer wasn't part of the narrative, and I think this worked well because he was the story teller for the man getting frustrated at his boss while he worked in the office, and it went very well with the music. An example of this is when the video cuts back and forth from the singer to the character very quickly in time with the beat as the song reached it's peak. The motif of the graffiti background for the singer is very good, because it fits in with the image of the genre of music, along with the costume he wears. The BMX rider is a good addition, because it allows light relief from the story line, as well as being well shot. The worm eye view shots during the chorus are reminiscent of the rap genre too, and can be seen in many videos.

Thrasher from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Vladimir Propp (research)

Vladimir Propp was a Russian scholar who analysed plot components of Russian folk tales  to identify the narrative elements. His book 'Morphology of the Folk Tale' was published in Russian in 1928 depicted of 31 functions which were common in narrative structures. He used the breakdown of sentence structures to small elements which were easy to analyse and assess in Russian fairy tales. Examples of this were: VICTORY, STRUGGLE and GUIDANCE. 


GREEN DAY- 'BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
This depicts of the band walking along the road of a stranded neighbourhood that seems to have lost its happiness through times of war or global warming. The video is shown with a vintage effect to show how old the 'struggle' is. It denotes of people standing in the land is close up only showing the torso. They are seen to be wearing old, nasty-looking clothes which can connote that money is running in short supply. This video shows a narrative structure of 'struggle' as the lyrics describe of being alone in the world. For example, 'I walk this empty street on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. This is depicted in the video of the band walking across the empty land. Close-up images of the environment are shown persuading the audience to sympathise with the situation.  Since the Iraq war had started the year before, the war-stricken images could connote consequences of the war to a community and could represent other wars which have evolved in countries over disputes of land for example. 

Music Video Choice (add video of song and poster)

We have chosen Marina And The Diamonds - The Outsider for our music video. This is because you can hear the passion in the song, and this will be easy to reflect in a video, rather than a boring song with a girl singing about boys. Also, we needed a female artist because the group is all girls, and there would be too much hassle to organise bringing a boy in for all the filming sessions.

This is a poster the group made to show our influences. It includes locations and eccentric people, which we hope to envisage in our music video. They are all eccentric dressers, including Lady Gaga, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Noel Fielding. We chose people that stand out because we want our artist to fit in with the connotations of 'The Outsider', someone who isn't the same as everyone else and is very memorable. If we can manage this then I think our music video will be very memorable too, because of the costumes and style of the video.

There is no original video to compare this song to, so we will either have to stick to what the lyrics say or try and fit in other references to the song, otherwise it will become just another generic pop video that nobody will remember after five minutes. We plan to have our artist walk down London's Southbank, from Waterloo to London Bridge, and maybe cut in other locations and scenes to get a storyline going.

Lip Sync Tutorial

In the lip synching tutorial I learnt a load of new skills, including how to hold the camera steady without a tripod and how to do a moving shot while sitting on a chair with wheels. I learnt new skills on final Cut Pro also, such as how to pinpoint one point in the song, for example 'dance' by looking at the wavy lines on the equaliser tab of the video. The filming for a music video differs from the filming for a thriller film because you need to have your artists looking directly into the camera, which doesn't happen often in films, and you also needed a wider variety of shots to keep the viewer interested.

Summarise the main points of the handout on Andrew Goodwin's theory on music videos

Andrew Goodwin  believes traditional narrative analyses do not apply to pop videos because they approach it from a different angle to novels and films. The reasons for this are as follows:

• Pop videos are built around songs; usually these do not pose traditional narrative structures
• Pop videos use the singer as a narrator and a character
• The singer usually looks into the camera, as it helps the viewer at home feels involved in the song

Pop videos rely on repetition, such as images in the way the song repeats choruses or lines, or rhythms of other songs (intertextuality), allowing us to become familiar with the genre and have certain expectations. The video would be played on the radio, or an advertising film or TV tie-in, making the song familiar to the masses. Pop songs have a form of closure and ending because the three minutes that a video is based on must end. This is reflected in the structure of the music, building to a climax or constant repetition before fading out.

Some videos are autonomous from the music the spring from, e.g the visualisation of a song may go beyond the original meaning. Sometimes the video provides a visual pleasure that encourages numerous views, which promotes the music. The videos may promote films as well, showing that there are three types of relations between songs and videos: illustration, amplification and disjuncture.

• Illustration - The video tells the story of the lyrics, using dance and other things to express the feelings/moods of the song
• Amplification - The video introduces new meanings that do not contradict with the lyrics but add layers of meaning
• Disjuncture - The video has little connection to the lyrics or where the video contradicts the lyrics

Pop videos usually have easily recognisable features, e.g. Michael Jackson used to give a yelp and/or twirl in his videos. Also, women are presented as objects of male desire, especially in heavy metal and hip hop videos. Madonna and Beyonce present themselves for males to look at, but they look directly into the camera  and cease to be passive.

In some videos the instruments are portrayed by different objects, e.g. Rock The Casbah by The Clash, where an armadillo trundles along every time the piano plays. Videos also try and appeal to as wide an audience as possible without alienating anyone. Videos that feature older bands often show them in their younger days - but this would be 60s and 70s, so an older audience can still identify with them.

Lastly, videos that are from songs written for films usually incoporate images from the film in the video, for example Celine Dion in My Heart Will Go On uses clips from the film Titanic.

Illustration

This video is illustrative because it shows Eminem standing on rooftops and giving examples of confident body language, showing that he is 'not afraid' of anything or anyone anymore. Also he flies, something that nobody can do, and this shows that he's a changed man, as he says in the lyrics.

Amplification


This video amplifies the lyrics of the song because it isn't literally about what the lyrics say all the way through, but it shows the mundaneness of common life, which is the underlying meaning to the song.

Disjuncture


This video is an example of disjuncture because the video has nothing to do with the lyrics, most obviously because they are singing about being a spy, and girls, but neither of these are represented in the video.

who was Vladimir Propp? find out who he was and apply his theory to a music video you have seen. FINISH

Vladimir Propp was a Russian scholar who analysed the basic plot of Russian fairy tales.Vladimir broke down sentence structures where it was then used to analysize them into narratives. there are 31 of these narratives and they include words such as: VICTORY, PURSUIT and DELIVERY.
an example of his work onto a music video is....FINISH