Magazine Advert sketches

These are sketches for the magazine advert advertising Erica Shine's new album and video. The first is a cover of a magazine. These are often seen as adverts in magazines advertising another magazine with something interesting on the cover to persuade people to buy them. The magazines advertised within other magazines, like this, are usually produced by the same company. The idea for this was very simple the image of the artist looking over her shoulder, taken from the digipack, but on a white background. The artist will be wearing a colourful dress and the colour scheme will look clean and fresh, for example pink, orange, yellow and white. We are also aiming for a rather summery look. There is then the artists name and some other small article titles for the other parts of the magazine. Basically, it is a typical cover of a music magazine for pop music, but will look clean and polished.

The second idea is a full page advert within a magazine for Erica Shine's Album. The image will be similar to the one used in the previous idea, but will be a front view of the artist.

Album Cover Idea

Album Cover Idea

These are my ideas for the Album. The top two images in this design are the front and back cover for the album. I was inspired to do this design off the albums from famous artists such as Leona Lewis, Cheryl Cole and Taylor Swift. The fact that the focus on these images is the face shows that it is our attempt to introduce our new artist to the audience. And the guitar shows that the music is unique.

These are a couple of those covers:

Ideas for digipack cover

Rough Sketch of Digipack

This is a rough sketch of my ideas for the digipack cover, the top two images are the front and back and the bottom two images are the inside of the pack.

For the front cover I have used an extreme close up of the artists face, with text layed over: the artists name, Erica Shine, and the song

title, I will w

ait for you. This is a popular idea for the front of an album and is used by artists such as Leona Lewis and similar ideas are used by Pixie Lott, Black Eyed Peas, and La Roux.

This is Leona Lewis' album cover for her album Spirit. This is a very similar idea to my idea for the Erica Shine cover. It is a simple image and layout, but works well as the audience can straight away identify the audience. I think with our image, a brighter look would be more desirable. This can be achieved with makeup, image editing and the colour of background used. Although not a lot of the background is seen, I think that a white backg

round would brighten up the image, and would also fit with the brand image of innocence, created in the other products.

This is an album cover from La Roux. A more unique artist, and so the cover is more interesting. The principal idea is the same, a close up of her face, but interest is added by using a side view. Also this shows the artist's trademark hairstyle. The red background also looks much more striking than the leona lewis cover, and immediately grabs attention. I also like the use of lighting in this cover, her face has been made lighter than the rest of the image. This is probably difficult to achieve without professional lighting, but is a good idea. As with the leona lewis cover, the text is kept simple, meaning it stands out more. Because of the large images used, a lot of text in a fancy font would look too 'busy' and cluttered.

The black eyed peas also used a similar idea on the cover to their latest album, The END, they used a robot style face which was green. This fits with the electronic sounds of their music, and once again is eye catching and unique. This however, would not be appropriate for our album cover, and would be very difficult to re-create. (the image was unable to upload)

For the back cover of the digipack I originally thought of an image of the artist, the photos and a track list, which is what I have drawn above. However, I think that the image of the artist looking over her shoulder with the clock would be better, as it is more unique. I also think it will be easier to see the track list with one simpler image rather than my original idea.

for the inside, my ideas i have drawn I think would work well, but after thinking about it in more detail, I think that one large image stretching across both pages would be more stylish and appropriate. Perhaps an image of the artist led on grass with some photos would be appropriate, and would look more professional than two separate images.

As these are just rough sketches, there will most probably be changes to the original ideas to improve the product. Also some of the shots may not be possible such as shots in the grass as if the weather is bad, it will be very difficult. However, I think that these rough ideas, if possible, would work well on the digipack and would link well with the music video.

Album cover ideas-ancillary tasks

For our album cover design, we would think about designs such as these:

These are the album covers that have inspired us to think of some possible designs that we can have for our artist album cover. These album covers focus on the artist only to establish who they are and what their image is. As our artist is a female solo artist too, we will be planning on making a cover that is similar to these in order to show our artist as the protagonist.

Photoshots

Here are a couple of Photoshots for our music video:

Casting Shots

Grace Rewaj and Ben Clynes

primary research on an existing music video-Taylor Swift, White Horse

Taylor Swift is a female American country pop artist. The song, white horse has an on-going narrative throughout about Taylors character finding out that the person that she was in love with has been with somebody else. She even suggests that she used to believe that she was his 'princess' and he was her 'prince', which is where the name 'White Horse' comes from. This narrartive also fits in with our music video as the song that we are using also relates to a female who was in love with someone and has now lost them. It even has a reference to another woman when it says "do you think of me, whenever you lie next to her?"
Lots of different shots are used to introduce taylor as an artist, such as close ups, medium and long shots all used so that the viewer doesnt get bored whilst watching the video as they dont see one shot for to long. I am hoping that we will be able to incorporate this into our video too.
In Taylor's video we can see past scenes of her and her past love. we also want to include this in our video to establish what the song is about. Low key lighting is used during the shots of her on her own, which contrasts with the high key lighting used when we see scenes from the past. This is to show to the audience that when she was in this relayionship she felt happy, but now that has gone she is on her own and is very unhappy and feels lonely. The rain through the window helps to show the sadness too as it generally create a more unhappy surrounding. In our video we want to aim at creating a noticable difference with our 'past' and 'present' scenes too, maybe a difference with the lighting like in this video, or by putting an effect on such as black and white for example. Also, we are even aiming at showing a difference in emotions at these points through the artists facial expressions and movements as Taylor does in her video,.

below is a link the video 'White Horse' on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Xr-JFLxik

Institution

A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they came into their own in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. The term "music video" first came into popular usage in the early 1980s. In Chinese entertainment, music videos are simply known as MTVs because the network was responsible for bringing music videos to popularity in that country.
Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, including animation, live action filming, documentaries, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film. Some music videos blend different styles, such as animation and live action.
With the arrival of the sound films and talkies in 1926, many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (1926–30), which were produced by Warner Bros, featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. The series entitled Spooney Melodies was the first true musical video series. The shorts were typically about six minutes in duration, and featured art deco style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing the song. This series of shorts can arguably be considered to be the earliest music videos.
Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball". Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons.
The early animated films by Walt Disney, his Silly Symphonies, were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theatres.
Furthermore the first music videos of the modern era were produced by ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith who started making short musical films for 'Saturday Night Live' in 1979. In 1981, he released 'Elephant Parts', the first video album and first winner of a Grammy for music video. However now there are many videos that have evolved from this and have become more based on the recent technology. Entertainment is a big part of the music industry therefore thats what the videos are mainly based on rather than on the artists individual talent. There have been many music videos that have been animated which shows that the artist does not have to be in the video for it to be a success.

Brand image of artist

For the brand image of our artist we want to give off a 'clean' and 'fresh' image. We want the audience to feel as though she is a 'nice' girl. Because of the lyrics to the song and the overall feel of the music is quite sad, we want the audience to feel quite sorry for her so that they understand what she is feeling. We will not have our artist in lots of make-up as this would give the wrong impression of what we are trying to put across about her as a person. Also, for this reason we will have her wearing non revealing clothes as we want to portray the artist in the right way.

An example of this type of artist is Taylor Swift. She 

gives off a young and fresh image and is portrayed as a nice and genuine type of girl, which is exactly what we are aiming for.

Storyboard Page

Feedback 4/12/09

Very good group - lots of good research and planning - good case studies and analysis also - well done!

Planning
- Remember to put on your blog where you got your song from and the creative commons licence agreement also - to prove it is non copyrighted.
- Also sum up the brand image of your artists you are trying to 'push' in your products.

You can also add...
- shooting schedule
- health and safety form
- cast list
- location shots
- costume shots/ideas etc...

- keep blogging on your ideas and progress!

Miss McNulty

Camera Angles

The term camera angle means slightly different things to different people but it always refers to the way a shot is composed. Some people use it to include all camera shot types, others use it to specifically mean the angle between the camera and the subject. The camera angle marks the specific location at which a camera is placed to take a shot. A scene may be shot from several camera angles. This will give different experience and sometimes emotion.

Here are some of the angles that are used and will be used in our music video:

Eye Level - This is the most common view, being the real-world angle that we are all used to. It shows subjects as we would expect to see them in real life. It is a fairly neutral shot.

Low Angle - This shows the subject from below, giving them the impression of being more powerful or dominant.

High Angle - A high angle shows the subject from above, i.e. the camera is angled down towards the subject. This has the effect of diminishing the subject, making them appear less powerful, less significant or even submissive.

Bird's Eye - The scene is shown from directly above. This is a completely different and somewhat unnatural point of view which can be used for dramatic effect or for showing a different spatial perspective. In drama it can be used to show the positions and motions of different characters and objects, enabling the viewer to see things the characters can't.
The bird's-eye view is also very useful in sports, documentaries, etc.

Slanted Angle - Also known as a dutch tilt, this is where the camera is purposely tilted to one side so the horizon is on an angle. This creates an interesting and dramatic effect.

Which technologies we will use

During our production of our music video, we will use various technologies

These are:

Digital video camera

Digital stills camera

camera equipment-batteries, computer connecting wire, tape(for video) and tripod

Apple Imac

Final Cut Express software

The photo booth

And possibly:

Adobe photoshop to edit the stills

For our other tasks we will be using:

Digital stills camera

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe In Design

planning for music video-cinematography & lighting

Cinematography

When we go out filming we have lots of different plans for our camera shots. Firstly, we will begin to establish our main character  and the plot of our narrative. In the introduction of the song we have medium and close up shots of the girl looking at the photos of her and her ex-boyfriend. She will have an upset facial expression to show how she feels. This introduces our character and shows that she is upset. We use close ups throughout of photographs etc, and the pair holding hands in the past to establish that they was once happy and that is what she is clinging to. At one point we are planning on having a high angle shot of the girl lead on the floor with the pictures surrounding her to show what her life revolves around. Also we are going to have a point of view shot of the girl putting a ripped up photograph back together. This is our way of trying to really show how she feels and what she longs for to the audience.

Lighting

The lighting which we intend on using will be bright natural lighting when showing the scenes from the past, however, when we are showing the girl feeling down and emotional, the lighting will be duller to reflect her feelings at this time. We are hoping to make a sort of 'film effect' once we have filmed all of our product and are planning on using colour grading on final cut express to make it look more professional.

Music Video Planning- Media Language - Sound and Mise en scene

Sound

In our music video, we are not going to have any dialogue as it is a music video, and it is uncommon for dialouge to be used. Also it would detract from the song. We may try to include some camera sound effects for the shots with the photographs, but this will depend on how the song fits with the images, and if the sound effects work with the song. Our main sound in the video will be the song. Erica Shine's 'I will wait for you'.

Mise en Scene

For our video, we are going to have a relatively bright look with use of bright colours to reflect the artists innocent and harmless image. We will have the actors dressed like average teenagers, in fashionable clothing that is not from any particular stereotype. The girls bedroom will be girly colours such as pink or lilac and white, to show that she is a 'girly girl' and to add to the innocent look. The boys bedroom will be more boyish colours such as blue and green. The girls bedroom should be relatively tidy and clean to represent her innocent and girly character. The girl will wear bright colours and jewellery to create a pretty look and also to create her innocent image. The boy will wear a simple outfit such as jeans and a shirt, and will also dress to look clean and also relatively innocent. The mise en scene of the street and photo booth will be just whatever is there at the time including other people, cars and objects. This does not matter though, as we can edit the colours using Final Cut to create a bright look, and the other objects will just add to the 'normal' look of the street. Overall, we will try to keep our mise en scene bright, colourful and clean looking, however, for the outdoor shots we will use a slightly grittier look to create realism.

Narrative

We will be creating a music video to the song 'I will Wait For You' by a singer called Erica Shine. Our plot is going to be based around the lyrics of the song, in which a boy and gils relationship has come to an end, and, whilst the girl still loves him and wants to be with him, the boy has moved on and found somebody else. Like Levi-Strauss' theory of following the binary oppositions, it brings up the conflict of the future vs the past, because whilst we will be showing that she is clinging onto the past, we are also putting across that he is moving on with his life. This shows the binary opposites.

Primary Research on an existing music video

Pixie Lott- Cry Me Out
Pixie Lott is a female British singer songwriter from Essex in London. Her birthname is Victoria Louise Lott she was given the name 'Pixie' by her mother as a nickname. Pixie Lott is currently signed with Mercury Records in the UK and Interscope Records in the U.S. Her genre of music varies from pop soul and R&B to Wonky Pop and Electropop. She started out with the single 'Mama Do' which was released to Myspace and gained over 2 million views on Youtube. It was then entered both into itunes and the UK chart at number one after 50,000 sales. It spent one week as number one and eleven weeks within the top forty. She released another single called 'Boys and Girls' which topped the UK Singles Chart on 13 September 2009. During the week in which it reached number one, the single sold just under 50,000 copies. It has so far spent nine consecutive weeks within the top seventy-five and eight consecutive weeks within the top forty of the UK Singles Chart.
On 14 September 2009, Lott's debut album, "Turn It Up" was released. The album debuted at number six on the Album Chart. The album has so far sold over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom and was certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry in October 2009.
Lott has written a song for Alexandra Burke's debut album, Overcome, titled "You Broke My Heart" and a song for Girls Can't Catch titled "Alone". She also has written two tracks on Lisa Hordijk - the Dutch X Factor's winners album, they are titled "No Good For Me" (1st single off of album) and "Promises, Promises".
Pixie's third single from the album was confirmed as "Cry Me Out" upon the release of the previous single and the single was later confirmed for physical release on 23 November 2009. The music video was directed by Jake Nava (director of recent videos for Beyoncé, Leona Lewis and Shakira) and was shot in Cuba. Lott won two MTV EMA Awards MTV Europe Music Awards 2009, Best UK & Ireland Act and Best Push Artist (best break through artist.)
'Cry Me Out' is Lott's most recent single which i think relates to our music video the most from the others as they are both about relationships and not being with that one person anymore. However I also believe that it is a good inspiration as to what locations should be used for our music video and the style of the video is very similar. As it is black and white throughout the video it shows how she feels. There is alot of natural editing used which shows realism therefore the audience can relate to it.

Pixie Lott- Cry Me Out Music Video

Questionnaire Analysis

A sample questionnaire has been posted earlier. We gave out several questionnaires, approximately 10 to members of the target audience, and received the results which will help us with the rest of our planning.

Our first couple of questions were to make sure that the person completing the questionnaire was part of the target audience or secondary audience.

We asked people how often they watched music videos, the most common answers were Every few days and Every other day, with a 3 people answering Every Day. Nobody answered once/twice a week. This proves that music videos are popular with the target audience and that they are watched frequently.

We also asked which channels and/or websites people watched music videos on. The kost common were Viva, 4 music and youtube. But there were some other channels such as MTVdance and specialist rock channels. This shows that the most popular channels are the free ones, the ones available on freeview television and websites, which shows that people do not like paying to view these videos.

For question 5 we asked had a music video ever influenced the person to purchase a song or album, and surprisingly all answered No. This shows that there are other factors that have to be taken into account before someone purchases a song or album. The video will help make the song and/or artist known, but will not neccessarily promote sales.

We also asked, when people were watching music videos, how long that they spent watching them? There was a variety of answers, with someone answering each choice: 10 minutes or less. about 30 minutes, about an hour, and longer than an hour. However the most common answers were about 30 minutes and about an hour. This shows that music videos don't hold attention for as long as films and long television programs, but do hold the attention as long as soaps and hour long programs. This also proves that people spend a reasonable amount of time watching music videos, and so there is a good chance that people will watch an artist's video, especially if it is popular and on a lot.

For question 7 we asked if people had a favourite music video. Most people answered no, but one person gave an answer of Michael Jackson's Thriller, an extremely popular music video.

Question 8 asked What would you like to see in a music video? There was a variety of answers some of which were: the artist/band, a narrative, something interesting not just stood there singing, and other similar suggestions. We have included all of these suggestions in our music video, as we have the artist, a narrative and a unique idea revolving around photographs, and we are planning to include some interesting effects to show the photographs in the video.

The last question was do you have a favourite genre of music, and every questionnaire gave a different answer! Therefore this question did not really help with our planning. We included this question to help with the choice of song, so we decided to go with a song that sounded relatively mainstream and like other artists that are popular today like Taylor Swift.

Our Questionnaire was useful in planning our music video, as it gave us ideas for what to include, and whether or not music videos were important in the selling process of music, and other general facts that we wanted to know, such as how often people watched the videos. Therefore, it was useful to do the questionnaire, but if it was carried out again, we would include more questions on the content of music videos, rather than genre of music and favourite videos, as these questions did not really provide any useful results, but at the time we thought that it would be useful.

Shooting Schedules

Call Sheet (Day 1)

Date: 5th December 2009

TIme: 10am-1pm

Location: House, Bedroom, Street, Photo booth

Cast: Grace, Ben

Crew: Fatima, Elizabeth, Grace

Equipment: Camera,Tripod, Battery, Tape etc.

Props and Costume: Pictures, Clocks, Watches, Normal everyday clothes.

Representation

Research and Outline of the representations used in our music video, and an outline of Walter Lippmann's 4 functions of stereotypes.

Representation

The group represented in our video will be Teenagers, one boy and one girl. Our protagonist will be a teenage girl, who is in love with a teenage boy. The teenage girl will be represented as a relatively simple character who is experiencing love for the first time. She will be represented as a young, free spirited girl who is no trouble to anybody else. She will not be represented as violent or abusive, and so will reject the dominant stereotype of teenagers. The girl will also be represented as quite mature for her age, so as not to appear foolish, and to make the product appeal to the target audience, as this audience covers teenagers, but also slightly older people. The Boy will be represented as a nice, friendly boy, who like the girl is not troublesome, violent or abusive. He again, will reject the dominant stereotype of teenagers today. He will also be represented as quite mature for the same reasons as before. The two characters will take on some of the behavioral traits of teenage love, and so to some extent will follow the stereotypes for this on naïve, young and relatively foolish. We will not make our characters complex as there will be no dialect in our music video and it will be short( the length of the song) so there will not be time to explain the characters, and they will have to be portrayed by their costumes and actions.

Walter Lippmann’s Four Functions of stereotypes are:

1, A short cut – easily recognizable people / characters that the audience is already familiar with and so do not need exlaining.

2. An ordering process, an easy way to put people in order of class, socio economic status and other categories, To put people in groups, for example people will expect teenagers with hoods up and dressed like chavs to be part of the villain group.

3. A map of the world. Stereotypes can represent cultures and create one stereotype for a whole nation. For example, the Japanese will be represented by one oriental person eating sushi.

4. An expression of our values and beliefs (as a society) Stereotypes can represent a whole society’s views on different groups of people or countries. For example, an Arab represented as violent represents the dominant ideology of the violent Arab, which is a common media stereotype, even in children’s films like Aladdin.

Storyboard Page 1

These are the scanned images of our storyboard

Animatic story board

This is an animatic storyboard for our Music Video. it is a rough shot to shot outline of what will be in our video. When we are filming, we may add in or take out certain shots and possibly move things to fit in better with the song. However, we feel that this storyboard would be suitable for our music video.