Camera Angles and Shots

In our music video we utilised a variety of camera angles to achieve different effects such as the confusion and paranoia and create disturbances within our video. We used a high angle shot as the girl walks down the stairs to show the audience is following her, or 'spectating' her as the lyrics of the song suggest. We decided not to include high or low angle shots as the subject was moving round so much, therefore we used the zoom feature on the camera to create a variety of shots and show the emotions on peoples faces as, was used in the video for Radio Ladio - Metronomy, where they use a variety of close up shots to focus on the musicians, however we use these to focus on our character, her paranoia and the world around her. Zoom was also used to focus on the main feature of our video the busicuit. We used many tracting shots which produced the idea of movement and once again anchored the idea of spectating. They also helped build up our characters insecurity and achieved the effect of our audience feeling uncomfortable. Close ups were used with the character holding the camera to show the emotion on her face and connote her paranoia, we contrasted this with a long shot with her walking under a bridge to add a variety of shots and create a distance from the character but also the close ups make you feel a connection with the character. When the protagonist was holding the camera as in the scene when she is running down the street away from the two males, the camera movement is jolty and moves as she runs creating a sense of realism in this not so realistic world. When we filmed her from behind, walking down the stairs the camera is not on a tripod and is hand held which creates a purposeful unsteady movement, creating a sense of voyeurism, anchoring the feeling that you are following this character as she walks round a world of paranoia. When our character wa running away from the hooded boy in the alley way we deliberatly filmed this with a slight tilt to create a sense of vunrability as she is trying to run away from the immediate danger. Point of view shots were used as the character looked out of the window of the coffee shop to see two people sat at a table eating biscuits, which gives an insight into why the character is so unerved and allows the audience to view the things she is seeing from her point of view, changing the spectator status for that moment in time.

Mise-en-scene

Location;

The beginning of our film is based in Adam's house to create the idea of the girl waking up in the morning in a confused and paranoid world. The use of a home scene creates a false sense of normality in the scene, however the beginnings of whats to come is first seen within the house scene when Adam's mum picks up a biscuit and eats it.

We then moved to our outside scenes where the scenes turn more abstract and strange, such as when Indie bumps into someone holding a biscuit/telephone as well as sitting next to someone rolling a biscuit as a cigarette. These outside scenes take the viewer on a journey where they are not sure what is going on. We did the majority of filming in the town of Berkhamsted where we used the people of the town to eat biscuits as the 'spectators' and increase the paranoia of the girl. Shops were also used during our filming such as the inside and outside of Costa and Oxfam as well as Tesco alleyway where the girl is stopped by two men blocking her in the alley way this creates tension and the build up to the paranoia which is something we are trying to create the whole way through. At the end of the video our continuity has been lost slightly due to the snow but this could also be seen as the abstract nature of the video continuing, this fits in time with the song as the nature of the songs slows down the setting of the scenes becomes more relaxed as in the snow. All of our locations were used to add the the abstract nature of the video and create tension of the scenes.

Costumes;

We wanted the costumes of the people to remain as normal as possible as in most of the music videos we studied the costumes have been simple, normal clothes. The girl is seen as putting on a jacket in one of our first scenes and this can be seen as connoting that she is going to leave the house and go on a journey. The people we filmed had normal clothes on as to blend in with the public as well as us asking members of the public to eat biscuits and participate in our filming as to include everyday people of all ages. When she is confronted by the two men in the alley way one has a covered face and is all in black connoting a 'villain' in the scene however the other male is dressed in a uniform making the audience question what he is doing as he isn't your normal kind of villain.

Props;

Due to the title of the song we used biscuits as the props of our filming as well as coffee cups and tables and chairs, many of our props were thinks that were already around us. The change of biscuits was not a conscious choice but in fact the shop where we had got them from had run out of the custard creams we were using throughout the rest of the film, we thought about going to another shop but decided that using another biscuit brand when our protagonist accepts the biscuit would add to the ambiguity for the audience and so therefore this change worked well.

The Indie Genre

When beginning research on the genre we decided to look at which was indie, I looked at many websites and search engines to gather a better perspective on what this genre was and how i would create a music video that would fit inside the regulations of this genre.

Independent music is often generally abbreviated as 'indie', this is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels. Indie artists are know for placing on maintaining complete control of their music and careers, releasing albums on independent record labels (sometimes self owned and operated) and relying on touring, word of mouth, airplay on independence and the internet for promotion. Indie sound is music written for love, not the love of money or because you have to follow the record companies guidelines. Most indie sound is based on 'unplugged' or live sounds without the aid of auto- tune or filter, computers or programs. We have been studying this genre because of this is the type of genre the song we have chosen by 'The Proletariats'.

Indie bands give off a vibe of 'coolness' that they only care about their music. The have a certain look about them which can be seen in bands like Metronomy and The Maccabees. They have simple or abstract music videos usually containing the band as well as their album covers seeming to give the impression they are artistically done on a budget, which both of these ideas we used throughout the production of both our music video and our single cover. These bands also tend to be more artistic and aren't trying to appeal to a mass audience, rather its more the audiences choice if they want to listen / follow them or not.

Proletariats is a word used to describe a lower social class, which creates a sense of irony in the band name as the band is formed of privately educated school boys and this name doesn't reflect their background but does fit in with the indie genre of irony in their name, as well as the title of the band being clever rather than predictable, which was also something we wanted to create in our video.

Inspiration

We had a variety of ideas of things that we should have included in our music video and drew our inspiration from a variety of other music videos. One that was very influential was Metronomy - Radio Ladio. Here the bright colours and dead pan faces of the band members makes this a interesting video to watch, as the viewer is taken on a strange journey, as well as the band playing cardboard instruments. We decided that we would use band member too and film them in bright colours on a green screen and not in black and white, this would make them stand out and due to our questionnaire the majority of people prefer light, happy themed videos. The song we chose by the band was 'Sit Down have a Biscuit' and the ending of this song contains a loud screaming from the singer which takes away from the upbeat nature of the rest of the song and for this reason we decided that the calm dead pan faces of the musicians and the bright colours were not going to work for our video. The band's name is ironic due to the fact that they are privately educated - 'the proletariat' is the lowest social class - this lighthearted approach to the nature of the band is reflected in their song names and lyrics - the song 'sit down have a biscuit' is based around the band's time in the school common room where biscuits are supplied at break and the general rowdyness due to how crowded the room becomes. We favoured this song due to it's intriguing changes of pace and how literal and almost comical the lyrics are; we also liked how ambiguous the meaning of the song was and could already see how we could create an interesting video - the pace alone made us imagine how the song could become frantic at the fast paced parts of the track and neutral at the slower parts. From watching Indie videos, we realised that jump cutting was used quite often; near the end of 'sit down have a biscuit,' there is a fast paced, agressive section where Jamie's vocals and the playing of the guitars becomes chaotic; we thought the jump cutting technique would be effective here in amplifying the effect the footage would have on the audience, i.e. to cause more paranoia and confusion as well as allow them to decode the video in a greater number of ways.

Another song we looked at was Maths Class - Emporio Laser which was a video in washed out colours making it almost black and white this colour scheme worked with the abstract theme of the video focusing mainly on the band members. When we realised the band could no longer work with us we started to think of other locations which we could film. This video made us look at outside and also the inside of houses. We liked the fast cuts of the filming and the build up of tension, this fast cutting was used in our film as the paranoia built up in the biscuit eating scenes we had. We liked the fact they were outside because it was surreal yet realistic - surrealism is generated from how the video is edited; a considerable amount of jump cutting is used to quickly cut band members in and out of shot - this conflicts with the sense of realism gained from the fact that they are playing in someone's back garden.

It also meant that we had more to work with because we could film in more locations than just focusing in a few places within a house. However we started off in a house because we wanted a contrast from outside which complimented it with a sense of realism as we did not want to delve too far into the surreal - we wanted to retain the realism so that when strange things happened the audience could still draw comparisons between real life and the surreal events that occured - India was the best example of the realism we retained as she could appropriately react to the odd events that occured and reflect the audience's reaction that we intended to evoke.

Vampire Weekend were another band we gathered inspiration from due to the fast cuts and jolty movements of the band members as well as the actions being sped up to improve continuity which we wanted to improve on in our film. There video is entirely based upon the band and their music which is something we wanted to incorporate into our video. However on the other hand we wanted to create a story theme throughout due to the answers from our questionnaire as well as linking the video to the lyrics of the song hence most of our movie is about our protagonist's paranoia and insecurity seeing biscuits everywhere. However, our main focus we took from this video was the simplicity and the fast cuts which made it look like they were slightly delusional whilst playing their instruments.

Questionnaire

1) Have you heard of the following: The Maccabees - 19 Metronomy - 17 Foals - 11 Florence and the Machine - 23 2) What album covers have been memorable to you? - Florence and the Machine. Prodigy. Nirvana. The Beatles. Pendulum. Pink Floyd. Rolling Stones. Foals. Crystal Castles. Beyonce. Robbie Williams. Kanye West. Rihanna. B.O.B. Modest Mouse. The XX. Laura Marling. 3) Do you like abstract music videos or one that tell a story?

Abstract - 14 Tell a story - 9

4) Do you read music magazines? (if not) are you aware of the following magazines i.e have an opinion based around them If so which of these do you read?: NME - 13 RollingStone - 7 Q - 3 5) Do you view music videos as an art form?

Yes - 19 No - 4

6) Do you prefer to see the band on the front of an album cover or art work? Album cover with band on front - 8

Album cover with art work on the front - 15

7) Do you prefer happy, light themed videos or dark, deep themed videos?

Light, Happy themed - 10

Dark, Deep themed - 13 8) In music videos do you prefer the band: To be playing instruments/singing - 4

To be singing with no instruments played - 4 To be creating a story themed video with some singing - 15

Our questionnaire was used on 23 people of both sexes to make the results as fair as possible, however our target audience for this video were teenagers/ young adults as the band is formed of school boys and therefore would appeal to a younger audience. We asked people the questions ourself so that we could gather the information then and there and there was no problem in gathering people to ask the questions too, this idea we decided on was instead of emailing the questionnaire as we didn't have to wait for a response. We also linked our questions to both the indie genre we were looking at and the preliminary task asking questions about magazines and album covers. We wanted to know if people knew about various indie bands and if they were interested in the indie genre, if we found out the genre wasn't popular from our questionnaire then we may have changed the genre to appeal to a wider audience. The questionnaire was a good beginning spot to gather information on what our target audience expected to see in a music video.

Our Media Diary

Friday Sept 10th;
Chose band, research and study videos. In this session we chose the band we were going to work with who are 'The Proletariats' and looked at other bands and their videos who fit the same indie genre. The bands we looked at were:
Metronomy
Modest Mouse
The Maccabees
Foals
The XX

15th Sept;
We researched more bands and narrowed down our ideas and also studied the genre which our band fits into, to get a better feel of what we need to look at. Last week we decided on lights/flashing/party however after looking other bands such as Vampire Weekend, we decided on a simpler music video using fast cuts/colour. We looked at 'The Proletariats' Myspace and also further narrowed down our simple music video idea to looking at Alphabeat, and Metronomy-Radio Ladio.

22nd Sept;
We have talked to the band and have organised to go to their gig on 1st Oct in Camden to photograph them playing for the album cover or magazine advertisement. We decided not to film at this event as initially it would have been a good setting due to the party atmosphere however due to our new simpler idea I feel this wouldn't create the right atmosphere.

29th Sept;
One video that we have looked at this week was 'Maths Class - Emporio Laser' in this video there was many conventions of the indie genre as well as a variety of quick shots also many cuts featuring the band and parts of their body, which we liked the idea of to feature in our video. The focus in this video is on the band and the band move in and out of focus throughout the song. This idea also features shots of the whole band and individual members. However we still want to keep the idea of bright colour coming through in our video. The video is shot outside in a garden which adds some realism to the video which we haven't really looked at before

2nd Oct;

Yesterday we went to the gig in London and we listened to the bands lyrics and thought of how we could connect these with the music video. We also discussed our opinions with the band and tried to plan a shooting schedule.

15th - 1st Nov;

We did research on the history of the indie genre and what indie means. We also looked at the front covers of various NME and Rollingstone magazines to draw inspiration from for our magazine advert. We have decided that the band will be the main focus of our video and we also interviewed Jamie Makower the lead singer of the band to ask him questions about the band and the music which they have created. We asked them who inspired them and who are their idols are as well as trying to learn more about the band and ask their opinion on which song of theirs we should set our video to.

2nd Nov;

We created a questionnaire to help us with our development of our video ideas, this helped us to find out what people expect in a video of this genre.

5th Nov;

We decided not to use the band as they were not available at the times we needed them to shoot the video. We has to change our story board to something completely different which instead of involving the whole band would just involve one person, a girl. We also decided to for the main setting of the video to be filmed outside and therefore the bright lights and green screen ideas we had previously come up with had been changed. The song name 'Sit Down Have a Biscuit' was our main source of inspiration and we decided to have a girl walking through a town were various events happen involving biscuits. We kept the idea of dead pan faces from our previous inspiration videos as well as quick cuts from various scenes.

10th Nov;

Filming begins, the main focus of the film was on the girl (India) who was walking around town we did a number of point of view shots as well as medium angle shots to show people walking past her eating biscuits. So far today we filmed the scenes we needed of her walking into/around town as well as watching people who are eating biscuits walk past her.

14th Nov;

We filmed more scenes today to try and build up the paranoid atmosphere, as well as editing the beginning parts of the video with India leaving her house and walking into town.

17th Nov;

Today we filmed more scenes using passers by to eat biscuits. We got a lot of filming done today and believed we had finished filming, however when we returned to edit our film we discovered we had another minute of filming to put in. When we were editing our video we realised that we had to cut out a lot of the filming as it lack continuity, however we then wrote down exactly what we needed to film and where we needed to film it.

21st Nov;

We now only have twenty seconds more of filming to do after more editing and this filming will be completed at a later date.

1st Dec;

We have finished all the filming for our video and now the editing of the film is the main focus, using 'Final Cut Express'. Unfortunately there is snow in some of our shots which disrupts the continuity of the shots but adds to the strange nature of the video.

2nd Dec;

Some more filming needs to be done to improve the continuity of the video as well as a few gaps need filling.

This week our ideas became more finalised as we had a series of meetings with band member Jamie Makower where we discussed the song that would fit our music video would be their song 'Sit Down and have a biscuit' which can be found on their myspace page and is already recorded and avaliable to use. We worked on our story board bringing together all the elements that we have previously found from the music videos we gathered our inspiration from. We also looked at a new video which the band have recomended http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK9dmlVDINA I really like the quick cuts in this video and we decided we would incorporate these into our video. We have discarded some of the previous ideas we had come up with such as BOB- 'Nothing on You' as well as the various Florence and the Machine videos we looked at as we want a more simple music video as we I feel this will compliment the bands music and genre more.
The background to the music video is also a important thing to consider when studying and looking at the creation and production as well as distribution of the music video and I began to look at the history and ideas behind MTV. MTV is an American networked based in New York and its original purpose was to play music videos guided by an on-air host and would play music videos 24hours for 7 days a week. It was created by media executive Robert .W. Pittman who later became the President and Chief Executive officer of MTV Network. MTV has a profound impact on the music industry and has become a central location for news on music events and promotion. From the channel it produced a number of sister channels, as well as MTV offering a number of non music programs as well. When MTV began it was a channel mainly dedicated to rock music however in 1991 Nirvana was aired frequently on the channel leading to the rise of alternative rock videos from bands such as Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins and R.E.M all of whom are in some way linked to the bands which we gathered our inspiration from. Over time the amount of music video shown on MTV has reduced, in 2000 there was up to eight hours a day of music compared to 2008 when there was only three hours a day. Now MTV has a number of specialised channels dedicated to the various genres of music so that the audience can chose what style of music they like and watch a channel dedicated to this genre of music.

Brief and pre planning

Brief: A promotional package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options;

• A website homepage for the band
• A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)
• A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package)

My group consist of Adam Ridsdale and Olivia Mottershead together we began our research by looking at various bands that we could use as we decided against the idea of using a recognised band instead using the Proletariats. Using this band then decided the genre of the video we were going to base our music video around and we researched the bands and the songs which fell into the genre of indie. We met Jamie Makower of the Proletariats and discussed some initial thoughts and ideas of both bands that they are based on and also music videos of which they thought would be fitting to their song. The bands that we initially looked at were Metronomy, The Maccabees, Foals, Modest Mouse and The XX.

We began to look at the idea of the video being based around a party with lights, drinking and people having a good time. However we soon decided that this idea was not one we wanted to pursue as we decided after watching Metronomy’s video- Radio Ladio,we wanted our video to incorporate vibrant colours and quick cuts as the main themes. This video also incorporated close ups of the band members all holding dead pan faces throughout this was an idea I particularly liked.

Another video which played a particularly large part in our initial research was A-punk-Vampire Weekend here the band members actions are sped up which if colour was incorporated would give more of the idea which we are looking for within our video. We also visited the bands myspace to view their songs and we are currently deciding which one they would most like to use as well as which one would be most fitting to the ideas of which we have so far come up with.

Finally we have noticed through the watching of the various videos of the same genre as the Proletariats that the members of the bands remain almost emotionless throughout the videos and this is something we hope to incorporate within our video.