Plans to re-film

We decided as a group that we definitely need to re-shoot the performance element of our video, and will be doing this sometime in January. We are unsatisfied with this footage, and feel we could do much better. We also had issues when it came to getting access to a drum kit, which is something which we need to work on for our re-shoot, as we could not film any of the drum parts due to this problem. At current we are toying with the idea of an electric drum kit rather than a traditional drum kit. 

Final planning before filming

We had a few problems with decisions of when to start filming, but eventually came to a conclusion as a group. although we originally intended to start filming on wednesday but realised we had far too much we needed to do before we could do this. We needed to arrange locations and get props before we can get started. As me and Renee are not in tomorrow, we have arranged with Daniel and Andrew that they will go out to get the props (which they have a list for). The props they need to get are Silver body/face paint and a cheap suit which we can paint silver. We also need to decide on the guitar we will use, and get the band to bring in costumes. 

In addition, we will give the cast members the lyrics/cords to learn, and must decide on a finalised location for the narrative, as we have decided central london is too risky to use as a location as we need permission.

We have decided that we will paint any props that need to be painted silver on thursday period 3 and 4, and get things set up to start filming straight away on thursday after sixth form. We also plan to film on friday period 5 and after sixth form. We aim to film all of the narrative on sunday. 

Group meeting- final narrative planning

We have looked at funny ways that we could incorporate the stalking element into our narrative. We've organised our times and locations for filming, and discussed props.

For the stalking element, we decided to have the lead singer of the band as a living statue, and have him painted gold or silver. The two other members of the band will be dressed as members of the public, and at the beginning of the video put money into the hat in front of the statue. The woman will walk past him, and in the next shot we will see he has turned his head to look at her. His movement is never seen in shot, which is an idea we got from the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. As the narrative progresses, she is continually following him, but she never see's him move, and she gets more and more frighened. The last shot within the narrative is of him in freeze frame, looking at her, with her purse which she actually dropped in his hand. 

We have decided on the cast for our video, with three males to play the band, and a female to play the woman in the narrative.

The locations we have chosen are the recording studio's within our school, and central London. We chose the recording studio's as footage shot by others on the schools stage has never worked well, and we thought the sheer amount of space would not work well. With the recording studio we have limited space which we think will work better. 

We have decided when we will be filming, and what we will be filming in each session. We have decided that filming done tomorrow afternoon and  on Wednesday will be focused on the performance element, so that we have all of that finished. We would then use free time on the Thursday, Sunday and Monday which are coming up to go to London and film for the narrative. The days following this will be used for footage review and re-shoot if we need to.

A little research into Rock and the Folk- sub genre

Today I thought about the fact that we have placed Vagabond under the catagory of 'folk rock' because it sounded most like this, and was so different to the music that Wolfmother usually play that we couldn't put it as Hard Rock. We went for this based on what we have heard before, but not what it actually is, or the true conventions of it. This post is just a small amount of research into the genre, and to look at how much we would cross sub-genre's. 

Rock music is a genre which emerged as 'rock and roll' in 1950's America, under the influence of rhythm and blues music. It is centered around the electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, though different sub-genre's make use of different instruments. The lyrics often stress romantic love, and touch on themes such as political and social. It has a large amount of emphasis upon musicianship and performance. 

Folk music is a genre with roots in the ancient oral traditions, and the music was usually related to national or local issues, folklore and historical and religious festivals. The genre was revived in the 1800's, arising to revive disappearing traditions.

Folk rock is a combination of the rock and folk genre's. It arose in the 1960's, and is defined by its clean vocals and instruments. It can lean more towards either of the genre's which make it. Folk rock focuses mainly on the lyrics, rather than the sound itself, as the lyrics and oral tradition are most important to it. The video's also focus on the singer/performer, with little or no narrative. 

This is all important to know as it means we do have free reign within the entirety of the rock genre, as it blurs to create sub genres, which in themselves share influences and conventions.

Planning our Narrative

We looked over the idea again to reassess how to do our narrative as their was some question as to whether or not it will work. As well as this, we have realised that folk rock music doesn't tend to have a narrative, as the ones we looked at are all heavily performance based. As a result, we're using the fact that it is a sub-genre so we can incorporate elements of other types of rock into the video, particularly pop rock, as they tend to aim more towards humor.

When talking about this idea, we realised that how well the narrative fits in will be what makes or breaks the video. We will have to tweak the idea, and be prepared to keep tweaking it, until it is right, and that the stalking element is low key and subtle, as well as not being outwardly hilarious, and perhaps alternating between funny and creepy.

Practice digipacks

We started practicing making digipacks which had the same feel as the ones we are making for our band. We got the template from Digi wizard. 

I chose to use this image. I began by cropping the image down, then heightening sharpness and clarity. before fading the saturation. I then went on to the effects section, and did some experimenting with different effects. I used cross process to make the image deep blue. I then added a light Sepia tone to half of the image, and left the other half white and blue. I then used HDR and made the image colours less strong. I then added a dark film grain to make the image look a little dustier. The then overlaid a weave effect and a paint effect to give the image some texture. I also added 'lift off' to the image, as that is the bands name.

I then went on to create the back cover of the digipack using this image as a base. I enhanced the clarity and sharpness. I then added a dusk effect which tinted the image a slightly yellowy brown colour, and topped this up using the sepia tone effect. I then added the names of the songs on to it. After being placed on the digipack, I will need to add a barcode and change the dimensions a bit.

This is the mock digipack with the first two images on. So far, there appears to be little synergy, but I plan to change that once I do the inside covers so the two link better. So far, the only real similarity is the air of old around them both. the colours could do with being more similar, and maybe the patterns could be, however for my actual digipack I plan to draw the images, so I can make them into whatever I want and create more synergy.

I used this image for the inside front cover. I cropped it to the rough size of a CD cover and so it was the right shape, then added sepia tone. I then used a weave effect underneath. 

Analysis of Digipacks

Digipack Research

Planning for Filming

We have been planning how we will meet our filming deadline of the 19th of December, roughly 14 days from now. In our plan, we have included times we could use for filming, based around our timetables, though of course this will change based upon when our cast are available. In our plan, we divided it up by dates and days, as follows:

Day 1: Thursday 6th 

Individual Analysis

Location Idea

Day 2: Friday 7th

Regroup at lunch

Create a solid narrative

Individual analysis on progress

Idea's for storyboard

Day 3: Saturday 8th 

Individual research and analysis

Storyboard 1

Day 4: Sunday 9th

Storyboard 2

Final Storyboard

These are the first four days, where our plan is merely to prepare for filming by consolidating ideas and getting things ready. The idea of this is that once the immediate things are done, filming should go much more smoothly and be much better organised. By ensuring we work to this we will be better prepared and hopefully make a better video, in less time.
In this time we must also get together a small cast for the video. 

We made a short video blog post as a group focusing on organisation, time management and our aims:

From this we plan to use our time for filming, and have so far only worked out when each of us is free, which means we have a better and flexible idea of when we could film. Our times will have to be flexible as we may have things come up, or cast may not be able to make certain times.
The plans for the following 8 days go as follows:

Day 5: Monday 10th
Me, Andrew and Daniel- Period 1, 2, 3, 4
Renee- Period- 3, 4, 5

Day 6: Tuesday 11th
All have media period 5

Day 7: Wednesday 12th
Me and Renee are on an art trip
Daniel and Andrew have media period 1 and 2 and are free for rest of day

Day 8: Thursday 13th
Me, Andrew and Daniel- Periods 3 and 4
Renee- Periods 1 and 2

Day 9: Friday 14th
Daniel and Andrew- prepare period 5 and film after sixth form

Day 10: Saturday 15th
Should be free to film

Day 11: Sunday 16th
Should be free to film

Day 12th: Monday 17th

Me, Andrew and Daniel- Period 1, 2, 3, 4

Renee- Period- 3, 4, 5

Day 13: Tuesday 18th

aim to be finished

Planning a Narrative

We decided that we would definitely go with the stalking idea, and considered how the narrative could be put into the video, as normally songs and their video's run in a way which means that the narrative will build up at the same rate as the song, and reach a 'conflict', before resolving at the same rate as the song. We found that our song had barely any change, and so could reach this at virtually any point, though between 1: 50 and 2 minutes is likely best, we still had a lot more control over our narrative and it's structure than most video's.

We thought a bit more about how we could use the stalking idea. We realised that we'd have to make it much less serious to get it to work, because if we make it serious it will be cliched and look generally bad. Two video's came to mind when we thought of this, these being 'I'm afraid of Americans' by David Bowie, and 'Monster' by The Automatic. 

'I'm Afraid of Americans' was based on the invasion of homogenised culture, and how it narrows expression of life and strangles indigenous cultures. The video was  inspired by the film Taxi- Driver, and stars David Bowie and the Nine Inch Nails frontman, Trent Reznor, and features Bowie being stalked through New York by Johnny, a hostile American, who is played by Reznor. Bowie gets more and more paranoid as he is being stalked, and imagines he witnesses acts of violence being acted onto citizens by one another. Bowie ducks behind a taxi as Reznor fires at him with an imaginary gun, and awakes to witness Reznor carrying a cross in procession. Even though the idea is cool, its possible that something like this could be way too serious, and not work well for us. 

This video takes a much lighter approach to the idea, and although it is not about stalking it has a hunter and hunted theme to it, which is something we're considering playing on within our own video. The video features the band playing monster hunters, wearing false beards and hiking gear, and travelling in an old van which is draped in camouflage and newspaper articles about monsters, UFO's and Nessie. They encounter Nessie and Big Foot repeatedly, but are oblivious each time, and when they return to their van they are surrounded by the monsters, who are destroyed by a UFO, which then zaps up the band.

We thought that this would make the video much more satirical. From this we also thought about having the whole band stalking the woman, but rather than having them grouped together like in this video, have them appear separately along the same road or something like that. We also thought about maybe basing their costume around hunters, having them in deer-hunter caps and maybe with binoculars and things like that. 

Official Logo Design

I decided on my final logo design which I am going to develop in Photoshop . The reason I chose this design is that that it depicts an eagle, which symbolises illumination of the spirit and the divine, both of which the band will see as being important when it comes to music, as they take their music very seriously and feel it should be emotion provoking and a higher power than anything else. This also links with how the band want to be very in touch with their fans, and want to help their fans via their music. They are also symbolic of courage and power, as they are large strong animals and are often regarded as the 'King of the Birds'. Likewise, the band want to show themselves as being strong, by giving out strong messages to fans, and not being afraid to speak out too much. 

I decided the bird would be black, even though it in an eagle, because the colour would stand out much more, meaning the logo would be much more noticeable. I also changed the font, as I wanted something a little smaller which had a slightly more unique font, as unlike the previous one it is not as unique or easily definable. 

Folk Rock Music Video Analysis

The video starts with the lead singer of the band asleep/passed out on a bed, with an awake women sat next to him. There are a variety of quick shots at different angles of the woman stroking his face. The woman looks out of the window, and a man dressed similarly to a typical 'ninja' enters from the window, and grabs the lead singer, putting a bag/sack over his head, and dragging him back out. We see the dragging happen several times in several different angles. It then goes onto a long-shot of a car on a suburban horizon, with very quick shots of the man walking him to the car and they use quick close-up shots of different parts of their bodies. They go on with this until the man throws him into the car and the shot lingers as he closes the door. After this, the video follows this again with really quick short shots of the car moving, and the objects and lead singer in the car. The shots in the car move about as though the camera is being moved as though it is in the car. The action is very fast paced and moves on quickly, which is aided by the shots. The singer is then tied to a stool in what appears to be some sort of bar, and the action slows a little bit, but not by a huge amount, and he breaks out. The action  then speeds up again as the singer escapes and runs off, with the camera moving about in a surreal as he does so. The camera then jerks as he is jumped out at by another man, and goes through several flashbacks of things which have already happened in the video, before much slower and lingering shots of him being carried away again. There are a few long shots of the environment, before a close up of the lead singer in a crate, and a long shot of the crate having a lid put on it. There are quick but slow moving shots of the singer with a match, while the woman from the beginning circles around it.   The shots slow down as the crate is lifted up on a forklift and as it moves the camera's begin to move and shake with it. The crate is loaded, before being crushed, and the shots are slow and suspenseful. The singer wakes up on the bed he started with, and the shot is long and basic, before fading out to black. Interestingly, the entire video is narrative, and there is no performance element at all.

The video is made up of a strange combination of narrative and performance, with them put together. It alternates between Dylan singing in a dark room with a cigar, and him singing in a car. It has no real narrative, and focuses on the singer for the whole thing, which is typical for folk rock.




The entire video is made up of performance, and Buckley is the entire focus. There is also a purple tone to the whole video, and this effect makes it look older.

Analysis of Questionnaire and Focus Group Findings

Analysis of Questionnaire and Focus Group Analysis

Focus Group

We have just finished conducting our focus group, and we have gained a lot of new information regarding our music video and the preferences of our target audience (which seems to be 15- 25 year olds).



We conducted the focus group keeping in mind the following:
The track
Possible music video pitches (for both narrative and performance)
The genre
Music channels which they watch, if at all
What they look for in a music video
How they like narratives to end
If they are reminded by any other bands by the song

We interveiwed people who were the ages of 17-18, which could be a fault, as it is a very limited age catagory, and the opinions of a 17/18 year old could be incredibly different to that of a 25 year old. We also noticed afterwards that we had a much larger male to female ratio than we would have liked, however, after looking at the questionnaire results, we felt this was justified, as there was a much higher ratio than this.

Creating the Webpage

This is the first part of the webpage of 'Lift Off'. So far, I have only created every page, and done a very brief part of the Homepage. The homepage so far consists of a title, a small bit of text, and an image. The empty part of the homepage will have a decorated side panel which I will have to draw myself and add as an image at a later date. The fonts still need to be decided and changed, as do their colours and sizes. The image which is there will be replaced with an embedment of our music video after it is produced and uploaded. The pages along the side have all the different pages which will feature on the site, via a link at the top of each page. Homepage is clear. 'Latest News' will feature a link to the bands blog, and maybe their separate blogs, and the page will consist of latest news from the band, where they may have featured recently (magazines, TV, publicity, etc). 'Shop' will obviously be there online shop, where fans can buy CD's and other merchandise of the bands. 'Music' will have all of the bands music, including video's, lyrics and sheet music. 'Tour Dates' will have the dates and places of each tour and allow for fans to purchase tickets. 'Community' has the option to sign up to the site for message boards to connect with other fans and sign up for the bands weekly newsletter. 'Contact us' provides all the information for fans to interact with the band, including an address to write letters to, and an email address to send emails to. 

Practicing with iWeb software

Today is lesson we began to practice with iWeb creating a webpage. The purpose of the activity was that we got used to how iWeb functions, and how it works, especially with things such as inserting a youtube video, as these sort of things are really important when it comes to this project. I needed to be able to develop my skills before I created my ancillary webpage

This is a screenshot of my homepage. As it was just to practice the program, I didn't make this serious, and just did a slightly comedic one on Batman. I added several different pages to the sidebar so that I had the option to go on to these pages, and if clicked on, it takes you to these pages, though they are currently uncreated pages. I practiced using the 'Youtube' widget in order to insert a video, which was actually incredibly easy. I also added an image of Batman and Robin and the Batman logo in order to practice inserting an image onto a webpage. 

Overall, I found that iWeb was very easy to use, however, there is not enough freedoms for the page, as  some things did not move where I wanted and would not change colour how I wanted them too, which could prove to be a large problem with my actual site, and may lead to me drawing most parts of the site myself, and adding them in as images. 

Band Name and Logo

Our group has decided on the name 'Lift Off' for our band, as we all had idea's relating to birds. After deciding on the name, we went on to design separate logos of the band each.

As I was linking the logo to birds, I made a brainstorm of different types of birds and the things they symbolised, and made several rough sketches of example logos from each.

This is the brainstorm I made of different birds and their symbolic properties. Most of these have a relevance to the ethos I am giving the band.

As I'm aware my handwriting is hard to read, this is a list of all the things appearing on the brainstorm:

Owl- Mystery of magic, silent wisdom, (night) vision, deception

Condor- Mysteries of life and death, Spiritual communications, overcoming limitations

Eagles- Illumination of spirit, Healing, The divine
Peacock- Resurrection, Watchfulness, Pride
Phoenix- Rebirth, Immortality, Renewal
Swallow- Protection, Warmth, Home
Raven- Magic, Shape-shifting, Creation
Magpie- Intelligence, the occult
Canary- Power of Voice
Blackbird- Understanding energies of nature
Hummingbird- Joy, Nectar of life

The one's which seem the most relevant to the ethos of the band are Eagles, Phoenix, Ravens, Magpies, Canaries and Hummingbirds.

The Eagles are relevant as I wanted the band to be in touch with their fans, with the hope their songs could help their fans and evoke strong emotions within them.

The Phoenix is relevant as the idea of rebirth is something which making a band successful draws links with (as they are both new starts) and the hope of music is that it will become immortal, which is what I'd imagine the band to want.

Ravens are relevant as the idea of shape-shifting is relevant to the creation of a band, as creating a successful band includes a lot of things being altered, and although the band would not change themselves, it is more in the figurative sense, such as growing up.

Magpies are relevant as the band aim to present intelligence, and it also links to the origins of folk music, which was formed from old folk tales and traditions, and gradually evolved, much like the birds, and presumably the band.

The relevance of Canaries is obvious, as they are the power of the voice, and the band aim to have power through their music.

Hummingbirds are relevant as the band would hope to spread joy and life through their music.

Questions for Questionnaire

We devised ten questions for our questionnaire which we plan to give to five people each, which will give us 20 sets of results to go from. Below is a link to out questionnaire on SurveyMonkey and print screens of it. The point of this questionnaire is to find out who our target audience are and what they would expect from us. Questions include age, gender and what magazines are read and music channels are watched.

 

We ended up with two seperate but similar questionnaire's on survey monkey, and had 17 results on one, and five on the other, giving us 22 sets of data to work from, the results of which will follow on a different post. Having two seperate questionnaires should not cause a problem as the questions which were important where the same and so should give us the same key useful information.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZX336C

We also plan on holding a focus group made up of both teachers and students in order to see differences in opinion among potential target audience members of different ages. We aim to have about six people in all. Despite our mix of people, we aim to pull these from the results of the questionnaires, and use our findings here in order to get a better idea of who we are aiming our music video at, and how best to appeal to them.

 

We have planned the things we aim to get from our focus group:

Names and Ages- This enables us to have a higher level of friendliness with everyone involved so the focus group goes more comfortably. Being aware of ages will also mean we can better seperate data within each age group, so we understand interests which are specific to each age group.
Music Channels- We need to find out which music channels are popular with our target audience as this information benifits us when we come to advertising and distributing our music video.

Show them Vegabond and the song lyrics- This is so we can see first hand how a potential audience reacts to the song and their opinions of our track. We also intend to get any possible idea's for video pitches which they would like to see which we could incoprperate, and see what they think of the pitches we came up with.

Video pitches- This is actually when we would pitch our idea's to them. Here we hope to get a mixed response to our pitches, and be given as much constructive feedback as we can get. This will enable us to see if we are thinking along the same line as the audience, and find out exactly what they want or expect from us.
Where they go to gain information on bands/artists- We need to know where our audience goes to get information regarding a band or artist so we can gain specifics on where we should promote our band, such as using fan bases, magazines and social networking sites.
Examples of music video's within the rock genre which interested them due to narrative- This is so we can draw out specific interests of the audience and let them be free to talk about these things. This will also help us with the setting for our video, and see what sort of bands we will be linked to so we can look further into these both for inspiration and to know what is expected of us.

What is effective in a music video and why- This is so we can decide what needs to be in our video and link this to the appeal it has for our target audience so we an create an impressionate video which is well recieved.

Video Pitches

I only managed to come up with one idea for the music video, which goes as follows:

The band are performing in a small room, such as a studio for the most of the video, being very vague about their performance, but clearly still caring about what they're playing. The band will be messing around a little bit, and the lead singer will be playing with a bouncy ball at some points.

Together as a group, we looked over our ideas and came up with two.

In this, a boy is stalking a girl. She is going around and minding her own business, completely unaware of him being around or even that he exists. In a typical music video with this sort of theme, it would only really include a typical follow and hide theme, but we plan to make ours a little more complex then this. We'd plan to represent this in a way of a more typical love story, with him helping her in a friendly way at times and being friendly, with her either responding as a friend or not at all. The stalking element would only really become obvious when at the end he goes into his room and has pictures of her everywhere.We wanted to avoid the really obvious and cliche stalking idea, such as where the woman thinks she's being followed and looks around, but no one is there. 

Another idea was of someone going around London, and we don't see their face, and putting up missing posters. At the very end of the video we see that the person putting up the posters is the person in the video, demonstrating a more mental or metaphorical missing, rather than actually being missing. 

Band member Idea's

I designed an exaple of what I imagined a member of our band to look like and how things linked to the etho's I thought they should have. Of course, all things featured will be discussed and changed within our group at a later date.

In case my handwriting is difficult to understand, the below is my annotations:
Slightly Messy Hair- To show they are laid back and that there are more importnant things to them (such as their music) which they care about.
Shirt (below the jacket)- This shows a more serious and professional side to the band.
Jacket- This particular one is checked due to it's folk influences which I felt the band will have. It is also more casual than the rest of their clothes, and presumably more comfortable, showing the bands practicality.

Microphone- This is a representation of the band members taking their music seriously, and also of how they belive in free speech and speaking out.

Smiley flag (or other child-like/ happy motif)- This shows that as much as they are serious about their music, they have a fun-loving side too.

Smart Trousers or dark jeans- They could wear either, as both are fairly smart. The difference, however, would be that smart trousers would denote they were even more serious/ professional, and dark jeans would maintain the casual look which I'd mainly imagine.

Shoes- Most likely to be some sort of trainer or boot, as both can be casual but somewhat smart, which is how they should look. They are most commonly worn by members of rock bands.

Webpage Design and Webpage Research

Webpage Analysis by

div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

This is the website design I came up with from the moodboard I created. The left hand corner is where the band logo goes, and below this is the navigation bar for the website. The circle next to the 'HOME' button is actually a bouncy ball, and moves to different parts of the bar based on what page the veiwer is on. Clicking the larger words which have arrowed words under them leads to a page with the same design, but in the space has boxes with the links to the options within it.