Photoshop Lesson

 We were given the three pictures below and we got talked through a bunch of different effects that we could use to either enhance the photos or change them completely

 These were the creations that i managed to come out with when trailing photoshop.

This was a mixture between 2 filters these were fresco and mosaic tile.

This was a multiple of filters with the liquify effect.

 This was one of my failures when trying to lasso

 This was the earth with the sharpen effect and also the note paper effect.

 This was the earth but has been very misshapen with the liquify tool and lots of filters include Neon.

 This again is the earth with the transform tool.

It was very useful being shown all the different effect we could use as a lot of these we could use for our album photos and website. mainly the enhancing ones though not the reshaping tools.

Past Student Work Analysis

Rusted Root - Send Me On My Way

Division of labour

This is our division of labour - approximately...

Editing Process

We have now started to edit the clips that we got when filming. we have not quite got all the footage we need and have also found out that we need to add in the dance that we decided to take out because we don't quite have enough footage and we feel that it will help the music video build. One of the problems that we have encountered when editing was making sure that the continuity of the shots were correct as we weren't careful enough to make sure that we did pretty much exactly the same things in each shot. but we have managed to work around this with different editing techniques such as using transitions to make it a little less obvious.

Target Audience Survey Analysis For Costumes

Target Audience Survey Analysis For Costumes

Question 1
Our character in our video is quite innocent and naive, she is a weak character that doesn't stick up for herself, what kind of clothing would you expect her to wear?
-The majority of the results from the survey said that she would wear boring and bland clothes that don't attract her attention, floral design to represent her innocence or cute clothes that are light coloured. We tried to incorporate all of these into our video but using very bland dull pyjama clothes, cute floaty girly clothes that represent her innocence. We knew an image we wanted her to look like but needed to incorporate the audience's ideas too as they are the ones we are targeting and therefore watching it.

Question 2

Question 3

Throughout the stages of her growing confident and stronger and her then moving on from him, what should change with her costume?

a) at the very beginning - most people answered this part of the question as her having very basic, bland, dull clothing on to represent her mood and unhappiness with the relationship. 

b) when she starts to realise she is unhappy - this had a mixed range of answers, a few people said the clothing should get darker with heavier eye makeup to represent her rebellious side showing, some people said nothing should change at this stage and some people said that there should be gradual changes like little more makeup or neater hair or clothing.  

c) the growing stages of her strength - a lot of results were that her makeup should become more bold therefore representing that she is trying harder and some were just that she should just look like she is putting more effort in. 

d) once she has kicked him out - more bolder colours and more colour added to the wardrobe, also just need to make it neater.

e) at the very end - this was all similar results with everyone suggesting normal and bright clothing and how a regular teenage girl would dress and look like. 

Question 4

Question 5

Overall our survey results showed what kind of clothing and hairstyles, etc. that our characters should have in our video. With the female role, we basically covered exactly what our target audience wanted with a range of different outfits to represent the progression and also little makeup and neat hair. The male role was slightly different. We used a leather jacket and dark clothes to represent his evilness but decided against the slicked back hair. We decided it would make him look more sleazy than mean and so went with messy hair which was the next thing that the target audience would have wanted. 

Ideas for each scene

Guy walking in from work comes through to meal, he is drunk, gets mad, hits her, falls to floor.

0:11 - there is a bit of a pause in the music after the build up, thought that we could have the girl wake up in her bed alone with the bruise on her face. audience could be like oh shit, she got hit and he left her. then to realise at the end she got hit and kicked him out. she gets up and goes to bathroom, checks on bruise and puts make up on to cover it up.

0:45 - flashes back to memories with him, her trying her best with him, makes her angry, but stays calm to not anger him as well. ideas: girl crying and is upset, man notices but does not do anything, grabs drink, goes and to watch tv.  doing dishes, she is done, he brings plate through.

goes out with friends and neglects

general neglect

makes tea or beverage of some sort, he leaves note/text that he's gone out, she throws phone, smashes.

she goes to get drink of vodka but she is out and so goes out to buy alcohol to ease the pain.

on her travels, she sees the dude with another girl, they are close. she gets pissed off/sad and goes home.

she goes home and waits for him to get back then confronts him. he gets through the door, confrontation begins. she ends up getting hit. he walks out. she gets up, grabs empty vodka bottle, and chases him outside, confrontation outside, she throws bottle at him and smashes on the wall. she then goes inside gate and locks it on him. he gets mad and tries to break in, can't get in. she goes in shuts the door.

Mood Board

This is our mood board to show all the themes and ideas that we want to bring to our music video. 

A2 Media: Target Audience

A2 Media: Target Audience: This is our glogster we produced to show the features of what we need to include to aim our music video specifically at our target audienc...

Music Video Questionnaire

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

 Question 8

Our next two questions required the participant to give an opinionated answer so we cannot show it in a graph but will give a few of our favourite answers and the ones we found most useful to our research.

Question 9

What scenes would you like to see included? (eg. fighting/arguing, intimate)

- Some of our best answers were: "not just the cliche relationship, mix it up, don't stick to stereotypes", "something abstract", "intimate", "kindness/caring".

Question 10

What is your opinion on domestic abuse and how do you feel we could appropriately portray it? 

- Some of our best answers were: "don't show too much violence, just insinuate it", "it's an awful thing and so must be portrayed in a realistic way", "through lyrics and video symbolism", "do lots of research to understand it fully and look at both sides of the situation - from both points of view", "mimed drama or abstract contemporary dance would be the best way to show it", "try to do it in a tasteful artistic way and try not to portray it ever being okay for either a man or a woman", "as long as it is not romanticised."

Our results have concluded that we can do our narrative/performance music video with the storyline we want as from the results from our target audience, they would like to see it and wouldn't be put off by anything we want to include. A lot of the answers seem to show that they weren't that interested, eg.  by putting don't mind, but at least we know they wouldn't not want to see what we want to put into our video.

Target Audience

Photo Storyboard

This is the opening of the video. The abusive boyfriend is hitting the girlfriend in their home, they have just had an argument about something, the man loses his temper. This foreshadows the end of the music video as we are doing the rest of the video as a flashback of their relationship. 

Then it flashes back to the past and she is trying to make her boyfriend happy as that is her main priority. She is making him his favourite meal (beans on toast). She ends up waiting for ages as he is at "work" (having an affair) and everything gets cold - this annoys him a lot. Also, he comes home completely white boy wasted. 

Then he gets really mad at her for letting the tea go cold. He blames her and threatens her, and then throws everything off the table in a rage. He shouts abuse at her and leaves the room.

She then gets upset trying to clear up everything and she is saying to herself that she won't tell anyone about anything and will keep everything to herself.

Then she is out in town or somewhere and sees her boyfriend cheating on her with someone else. This frustrates her and makes her extremely upset. Especially as they look so incredibly happy.

We will then have a scene of dancing to support the feelings and emotions of the main characters. 

Then we end up back at the beginning shot of him hitting her and them having a major argument. In the beginning it appears she will just put up with it but then she changes her mind.

In the last chorus, she is going to kick him out the house as she is fed up with his behaviour and fights back. She stands up for herself and it ends up with her looking and feeling a lot more relieved and happy. 

Our final idea

This is our final idea for our music video. The features of it are described in more depth and we have thought about it more. 

Planning our video

These were our initial ideas for our music video - in the planning stages. This was what we discussed once we had decided on a song and chose to elaborate on a few ideas.

Music Video Ideas

This is our group Prezzi of our 3 top song choices. we have chosen to use the song Human by Christina Perri and use the idea we have written here, we may adapt it slightly but these are our main plans

Important Moments in Music Video History

These are some of the big milestones in Music Video History

50 Cent- Candy Shop. Music Video Representations

Preliminary task- Green Screen

This is part of our recording process for our preliminary task. Here we were learning and testing out the green screen. We learnt that we had to make sure that there were no creases in the screen or it came out a little bit crackly when trying to put different backgrounds on it. We also learnt a lot more about lip syncing from this process, you have to properly sing the part of the song that you want to sync to otherwise it looks very strange and fake if not.
Click here to have a look at our video of our Green screen filming Ours is the second from the top.

Music video analysis- Iggy Azalea- Fancy

Different Styles of Music Videos

Types of Music Videos

There are 3 types of Music Video, there is Performance, Narrative and Concept.

Performance 
A performance video focuses on showing footage of the artist or band either in a casual environment, i.e. socialising with friends, or performing, live performance or staged performance. an example of a performance music video is AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck'

In this music video we see the band AC/DC playing live to a small crowd on a stage. The video is full of close ups on all the performers but mainly the lead vocalist. There is also many close ups on each of the instruments. Both of these are very common in Performance videos as it promotes the band that is playing within their own product.

Concept

Concept videos are based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual and obscure, even surreal for the audience. This unusual content is an attraction to many consumers, which draws them in. a very well known concept music video was 'Land of Confusion' by Genesis. 




The song is widely remembered for its music video, which had heavy airplay on MTV. The video features caricature puppets by the British television show Spitting Image. After Phil Collins saw a caricatured version of himself on the show, he commissioned the show's creators, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, to create puppets of the entire band, as well as all the characters in the video.
The video opens with a caricatured Ronald Reagan (voiced by Chris Barrie), Nancy Reagan, and a chimpanzee (parodying Reagan's film Bedtime for Bonzo), going to bed at 16:30 (4:30 PM). Reagan, holding a teddy bear, goes to sleep and begins to have a nightmare, which sets the premise for the entire video. The video intermittently features a line of stomping feet, illustrating an army marching through a swamp, and they pick up heads of Cold War-era political figures in the swamp along the way (an allusion to Motel Hell).
Caricatured versions of the band members are shown playing instruments on stage during a concert: Tony Banks on an array of synthesizers (as well as a cash register), Mike Rutherford on a four-necked guitar (parodying Rutherford's dual role as the band's guitar and bass-player), and two Phil Collins puppets: one on the drums, and one singing.

Narrative
A song with a narrative based music video the song includes a narrative story of the lyrics/ words being acted out in some way. One of the most famous music videos and songs in general is A-ha's 'Take on me' 


The video's main theme is a romantic fantasy narrative.[18] It begins with a montage of pencil drawings in a comic book style representing motorcycle sidecar racing, in which the hero, played by Morten Harket, is pursued by two opponents, one of whom is played by English actor Philip Jackson. It then cuts to a scene in a cafe, in which a young woman, played by Bunty Bailey (Harket's girlfriend at the time),[13] is seen drinking coffee and reading the comic book in a coffee shop. As the girl reads, the waitress brings her the bill. The comic's hero, after winning the race, seemingly winks at the girl from the page. His pencil-drawn hand reaches out of the comic book, inviting the girl into it. Once inside, she too appears in the pencil-drawn form, as he sings to her and introduces her to his black-and-white world which features a sort of looking-glass portal where people and objects look real on one side and pencil-drawn on the other.
Meanwhile, back in the restaurant, the waitress returns to find that the girl is not there. Believing that the girl has left without paying the bill, she angrily crumples and throws the girl's comic book into a bin. This makes Harket's two opposing racers reappear, armed with a large pipe wrench and apparently aggressive. The racers smash the looking glass with the pipe wrench, evidently trapping the girl in the comic book. Harket punches one of the thugs and retreats with the girl into a maze of paper. Arriving at a dead end, he tears a hole in the paper wall so that the girl can escape as the menacing opposing racers close in on him. The girl, now back in the real world and found lying beside the bin to the surprise of restaurant guests and staff, grabs the comic from the bin and runs home, where she attempts to smooth out the creases to learn what happens next.
The next panel shows Harket lying seemingly lifeless, and the girl begins to cry. But he wakes up and tries to break out of his comic-book frames. At the same time, his image appears in the girl's hallway, seemingly torn between real and comic form, hurling himself repeatedly left-and-right against the walls as he attempts to shatter his two-dimensional barrier. (This scene is largely patterned after a climactic scene in the 1980 film Altered States[13]). He escapes from the comic book by becoming human and stands up. Smiling, the girl runs towards him and he embraces her.

My Preference 

I Personally prefer narrative music videos as i like watching the story develop and find it very interesting how the director and artist visualized their music ideas.

Major & Minor Record Labels

What is Domino Recording Company?

Domino Recording Company, generally known as Domino, is an Independent minor record label based in London. There is also a wing of the label based in Brooklyn, NY that handles releases in the United States, as well as a German division called Domino Deutschland and a French division called Domino France.

Fonded in 1993, by Laurence Bell and his partner Jacqui Rice, the label's first release was the Sebadoh EP Rocking the Forest, licensed from Sub Pop records for release in the UK. Many of the early releases were by American artists who in the USA were signed to Drag City (Smog, Will Oldham, Royal Trux), a relationship which continues to this day. Success was not immediate, as labels such as Domino, who were releasing more established American rock and unusual British music, were marginalised during the Britpop era, but a steady stream of new signings gave the label increasing credibility. Recent high profile releases from Anna Calvi, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and The Kills have only acted as a catalyst to this, and Domino is now one of the longest running and most successful independent record labels in the UK.

Domino celebrated their first UK #1 album in October 2005 with Franz Ferdinand's You Could Have It So Much Better, and their first UK #1 single with Arctic Monkeys'  I  later that same month.

Genre

The labels genre is Indie Rock and Indie Pop and this is very obvious from such artists they signed like Arctic Monkeys and Alex Turner.

What is Sony Music?Sony Music, fully named Sony Music Entertainment, is an American music corporation owned and operated by Sony Corporation of America. In 1929, the label was first founded as American Record Corporation and, in 1938, was renamed Columbia Recording Corporation,  In 1966, the company was reorganized to become CBS Records. In 1987, SCA bought the company and, in 1991, renamed it SME. It is now the world's second largest music company.
Other information about Sony Music:

• Sony Music holds many other labels such as: Columbia Nashville, Columbia Records, RCA Records, RCA Records Nashville, Epic Records, Arista Nashville,Legacy Recordings and a few others. 

• The Chief Executive Owner of Sony Music Entertainment is Doug Morris

• Sony Music have signed many big names, including the world wide superstar Michael Jackson. Other artist include Beyonce, Shakira, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake and Rita Ora

• Right now Sony Music is on a revenue of $4.89 billion and their operating income as $487 million.

The Genre of Sony Music
The Genre of is eclectic meaning 'deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources.' And with the artist that have been signed to the label you can see that the label is very diverse, for example Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson.

Spike Jones - Director

Goodwin's Seven Analysis

Andrew Goodwin's Theory

Andrew Goodwin
- Defines what a music video is.
- Describes the key conventions of music videos.
- First POST MODERNIST Theorist.

Goodwin's 7 key features of a music video:

1. Music videos demonstrate certain genre characteristics
2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals
3. There is a relationship between music and visuals
4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist
5. The artist may develop motifs or iconography that recur across their work (a visual style)
6. There is a frequent reference to the notion of 'looking' and particularly voyeuristic (pleasure through looking) treatment at the female body
7. There are often inter-textual references - mostly to film, television and popular culture

Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal

"Smooth Criminal" is the seventh single from Michael Jackson's 1987 Bad album.

It was released as a single on October 24, 1988, and peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100. It was re-released on April 10, 2006, as a part of the Visionary: The Video Singles box set. The re-released Visionary single charted at number 19 in the UK.

The song also serves as the theme song to Jackson's 1988 film Moonwalker. The single has sold over 7.5 million copies.

Jason Elias of Allmusic called this song one of Jackson's best: "Despite the content "Smooth Criminal" is a gorgeous and exhilarating record."


Jon Pareles wrote: "in Smooth Criminal, the singer finds a bloodstained carpet and an unconscious body, and asks, obsessively, Annie are you O.K.? when, clearly, she's not."


Rolling Stone's Davitt Sigerson wrote: "Smooth Criminal" may be the result of retiring too soon after aBrian de Palma picture."