Research & Planning - Music Videos and Auteurs - Shane Drake

Shane Drake on Prezi

Research & Planning - Moodboard & Audience Profile

[Scarlet Pills Mood-board]

Here I have created a mood-board in response to what I think my target audience will be like. Headlights (the chosen song for my video) appeals to a rock/punk/light metal genre audience, although I feel they will not be too hardcore in their ways of life and have tried to demonstrate this balance through their typical ideologies in my mood-board. I have done this because I need my work to be eye-catching and appealing to the target audience, from this I can tell what sorts of brands and colours I should use, what brand styles to avoid and perhaps what locations would be useful in relation to the song. To aid me in the production I listened to the track and surfed the internet, thinking of as many aspects to include as I could.

Research & Planning - Synaesthesia

[Synaesthesia Diagram]

Synaesthesia is the stimulation of one sense in reaction to something, leading to the automatic and involuntary experience in one or more other senses. An example of this would be if someone were to see the colour red and perhaps automatically think of a raspberries taste, due to their minds subconscious association. Most people associate particular colours with particular days or the week, or even months of the year. This is a common example of synaesthesia.

[Synaesthesia of the Months]

A typical game formulated to test the minds conciousness as to what it sees, and what it thinks, has been adapted into the Nintendo DS's "brain training" game. In this game you are asked to read out the colour which has been written out, however the colour of the writing will be different to colour the word says, for example; "orange" will be written out in the colour blue. You want to say orange but find yourself saying blue. This is to see whether you will involuntarily mention the colour that is shown rather than the word.

Synaesthesia can be an important aspect to music videos as it can make the video ideal, or just weird. Redundancy and entropy, will eventually boil down to the directors synaesthesia towards the track.

When planning this track, me and my media partner sat and listened to the song several times airing ideas when they came to mind, this was extremely useful. Although these ideas didn't come in the correct order, they helped structure the basis of the story allowing us to fill in the gaps with relevant ideas. A useful element to this is how varied the song is with high energy parts, deep thoughtful parts, ambient parts and finally ending on in emotive mind set. This variation allows for an interesting and captivating video story line.

Research & Planning - Artists

Searching for an artist to feature our video on was a deceptively tricky task. Before searching for a band/song, we decided on some specification features which we wanted to include in order to set this to be successful from the start. These are some of the aspects we were keen to find;

[Paramore Band Photo]

• Preferably a female member to appeal to wider audiences. This member could be a guitarist or singer, and would add a different slant on the bands representation. Bands such as Paramore utilise this difference and base a certain amount of popularity to it.
• High recording quality is an important aspect to look out for when shooting a music video, although the visual quality may be high, it will be severely let down by poor audio quality. This specification may make our search more difficult but will definitely result in a more professional and satisfying finish.
• Catchy song, preferably not acoustic. Although acoustic songs can be a popular genre, indie acoustic songs are often slow, depressing and from viewing previous project outcomes, can lead to a boring video. The sort of song we will look for will contain driving guitar lines and drum beats, keeping it relatively high in tempo capturing the audience and maintaining their interest in both song and story. We will also look to use a song that contains deep, almost grungy parts to allow for a ranging story line and thus interesting video.
• Really we would like to use the original band members to uphold a realistic performance, although we understand that if this isn't possible, actors can be used. If we do have to use actors, we will cast people as closely to be band members appearances as possible, showing respect towards the band.

To begin with, we looked into a band my media partner knew called "Junk". They were relatively local and despite not containing a female member, they did have relatively high recording quality. Unfortunately we had to rule them out after a discussion over location. Although they were quite local, they were too far for easy filming, and yet too close to resort to actors.

Next we looked into the possibility of using my own band, previously called "1st Born" but currently referred to as "The Guys" for ease. We soon decided not to follow this up as our recording quality was not great, as well as the fact I would have had to be featured in all performance elements.

After I began searching the internet for unsigned bands, since we had little luck with our connections. From this I found a band called "Voletta", they again had no female members but did have extremely high recording quality and seemed near perfect for our project. The vocals were slightly generic but the guitars and drums were catchy and sounded very good. Sadly, we got no reply from our e-mail to them and so had to rule them out as a possibility as our featured band.

[Scarlet Pills Band Photo]

Finally I came across a band called Scarlet Pills (previously known as Geneva). This band had mediocre recording quality, but did have a female singer. Upon e-mailing them I received a reply informing me of their name change, and directing me to some of their more recent work. This recent work was extremely impressive as the recording quality had gone up hugely, and the singers voice had blossomed into something even better. After talking to them we decided they were perfect for our project as they ticked almost all boxes. Sadly they were based in St. Petersburg and so obviously using them in the video was out of the question, instead we must use actors, this major distance though made the actor use justifiable. Following is the e-mail conversation me and Nick (bassist from Scarlet Pills) had when talking about using them and their work in our project, as well as the link for the song we chose to use; "Headlights". As can be seen, they were eager to participate in this project, and learn more about it.

[E-mail between me and Nick]

[E-mail between Nick and Teacher]

Research & Planning - Research & Planning - Music Video History

The History of Music Videos on Prezi

Research & Planning - Audience Theories One (Cultural Studies)

The effects theory is the idea imposed by psychologists, that target audience behaviour is almost directly correlated with the portrayal of violence within media forms such as music, gaming, films and adverts for any of the prior. This can be simplified to saying media forms have direct behavioural effects upon the passive audience.

The cultural studies approach attempts to understand media texts intentions and sees the audiences as active rather than passive. This shows varying audience demographics to hold different standpoints in relation to those depicted within the media. The Gratification Theory shows audiences to be active by asking “what people do with media” rather than the passive approach  “what media does to people” (Katz, 1959) The cultural studies approach was developed within Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS) and shows how audiences perspectives can be split into three clearly defined sections; 
Oppositional reading, to which the viewer is totally opposed to the representations, values and messages and thus are not influenced.

Negotiated reading is the middle ground. These viewers will broadly accept the media's messages, representations and values although they will have reservations and slight disagreements with particular aspects.

Preferred readings are also known as the target audiences views. These people will not have any problems with aspects of representation and will see it as appealing overall. They may be swayed and influenced by the messages these media forms portray, but are likely to see it as "cool" rather than take it as a way of life.

For example, an oppositional reader would view this as negative, promoting reckless driving and destruction and in no way see it as appealing to the driving game it is advertising, especially through the catch line "inner peace through outer violence". A preferred reader through would understand that this violence and destruction is only meant in the harmless nature of it being a game. They would see it as cool and rebellious not only through the male dominated imagery of the burning tyre and trashed car, but also the contrasting catch line. A negotiated viewer though, would appreciate both arguments, they may disagree with aspects such as the suggested reckless driving but still view it as a good game because it is clearly meant in a masculine attracting fashion rather than promoting destruction.

In this advert for Hit man, a woman is lying on an expensive, lavish material dressed up in seemingly expensive clothes with a high riding skirt allowing a lot of suggestive leg to be shown. This shows her through a male gaze, attracting a male audience. It is also evident she has been shot with a single bullet wound to the head, backed with the contrasting/controversial line "Beautifully executed".

An oppositional reader would see this as a horrific sight with promotion murder being acceptable. They would also see this as exploitation of the female body, further expanding the stereotype of women as objects. Despite this, a preferred reader would see this as a somewhat appealing sight, combining two of the stereotypical male pleasures; guns and sex. Although these have been combined into a necrophiliac appealing scene, this view is not taken as it is clear the scene is hypothetical, but the game contains both gun violence, and the attraction of women. More so than this imagery, the catch line "Beautifully executed" is much more of a selling line, replacing the semantics of violence with those of beauty. Through all of this, a negotiated person would see this to be a perverse scene, but also meant as purely a marketing scheme, and that while the image is perhaps distasteful, it shows the product to be male dominated and "cool". 

Research & Planning - Effects & Popular Music

The researchers from the following articles are focused on the behavioural effects rap and heavy metal music have on adolescents mental and social states. Although their research is thorough, it is also likely to lead to bias answers as they do not have a wide variety of music genres to look at, therefore they do not know what effect other genres would have on adolescents. This slightly narrow set of variables inevitably leads to a slightly narrow minded set of answers which many would believe brings no conclusive answer.

http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/325.php

Here the researchers were interested proving a correlation between these musical genres and adolescents behavioural responses, rather than the suggested ones other researchers have put forward. To do this they played only rap and heavy metal to three groups while they played football. One set of the groups got the lyrics played, one the entire song and one none. Their aggression was thus measured. The flaw in this though is how it didn't play upon the groups musical preferences, and thus tainted the results in terms of their current musical/behavioural mindset. 

http://www.ehow.com/facts_4896441_effects-rap-music-behavior.html
The key concern raised in this article is how young rap, as a genre is. This is then elaborated to explain that due to this premature genre, its effects haven't had long enough to become enduring and serious enough. Also, as an effect of its young age, where have all these extreme statements of behaviour originated and question their validity. Another aspect raised by this piece is how the lyrics are not always literal, and can be implying things that are not as negative as most would believe due to the crossed meanings when taken into context from their target audience and a mainstream listener. 

http://www.funk-the-system.net/usualsuspect.html
In this piece, the author puts forward his view that rap music itself is not to blame and it is simply a form of entertainment appealing to certain audiences, instead the problems source from the community and corruption within it. As this evidently is focused around American life he pins this to aspects such as the easy availability of guns among other things, thus those blaming rap are simply using it as a form of scapegoat over the underlying problems.  


Overall I feel that these extremes in musical styles do have a great effect on their audience's behaviour (as stated in link/research note #1), but not because of their content but due to the vulnerability of the individual listening. As dominant ideology is focused within mainstream songs to grow popularity and reinforce these values, residual and redundant ideology is incorporated in either end of the musical spectrum (Heavy Metal and Rap) to differ them from these values. This leads their audiences further from what is considered the norm and thus "extreme". This differing from the norm will only result in extreme cases of suicide when neglected and seen to be further shunned. Otherwise it seems to only result in aggression and heightened emotional senses due to the often graphic and "deep" content mentioned within the lyrics. The instrumental aspects purely accompany these lyrics and create further scenes of atmosphere and emotion.

In my project I will try and make my digipak and video suitable for the punk/pop/rock genre. This means it has to be relatively mainstream with some rebellious aspects. These can be portrayed through the imagery, action in the video or colour schemes applied. The overall effect will be rebellious yet safe, allowing maximum appeal and a larger amount of potential TV airtime. As the song is already written we will use appropriate imagery and avoid socially violent and dangerous situations unless they are key to the songs storyline, in which case they will be carefully constructed and represented. This should result in a successful piece with a positive effect on the audience while maintaining the rock and roll punk style. If this effect is not achieved, then the video will become viewed as a more rebellious hardcore video, and will then appeal to a different target audience completely. 

Research & Planning - Music Videos and Auteurs - Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze on Prezi

Research & Planning - Photoshop Digipak Cover

[Bash Roland - Don't Blame Me]

Here I have briefly shown my photoshop skills through designing a quick digipak cover for a band I know; BASH: roland. Considering the amount of time I was given to complete this task, I feel the outcome displays an air of professionalism and suits their musical genre/style. Because of this genre suitability, this digipak design is likely to appeal to their target audience. I acquired the image from their myspace page;
http://www.myspace.com/bashroland

Here I also got the name for the hypothetical album from their media player, adding to authenticity.

Research & Planning - Analysis of Existing Products

Analysis of Existing Products on Prezi