Qualitative research

Here is the questionnaire I have asked some of my friends and I am currently in the process of analyzing results.

Did you like the track?
-yes, it is the sort of music I would usually listen to.
-its okay I wouldnt normally listen to it though.
-No i wouldnt listen to it again.

What type of person would like this track?
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Which age range do you think would listen to this track and why?
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What sort of music do you normally listen to?
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Do you watch music videos or do you listen to the song?
-Watch the video
-Listen to the song I dont pay much attention to the video
-Both

Do you think it is important for a star to be in the public eye and why/why not?
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Out of all the popstars out there today, who would you expect to be in this video other than ellie goulding?
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Are their videos similiar to this style?
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Target audience

The whole point of our video is for the audience to be entertained throughout the song, enjoy what they are seeing as well as what they are hearing, an active audience. This creates diversion for the audience, as a theme of the video is dreams this could help them escape from the pressures of every day and the light and fun mood of the video emphasises this. There is a strong relationship of music to visials as the visuals follow the lyrics. We havent always gone for the literal sense of the lyrics but for example we have taken the word 'fly' literally. This is included in our narrative, our character is also escaping the pressures of everyday life encouraging identification with the audience even if it is unrealitic. When she is flying, that is when she is happiest going with the flow with no worries, when life isnt passing her by which i think the song is about. I think this video encourages the audience to not take life so seriously, so would be suitable to all ages to people that would get the meaning, and to others just a really good video!

accomidating to two types of audiences

To accomidate to a focused audience, we have structured narrative with deeper meanings. The song to me meant that Ellie goulding felt like life we passing her by, she was there but wasnt enjoying it but the chrous sounded different to the verses so we made the chorus her escape. This is what the audience will get when watching the video something to think about. Not only this but we have included detail sketches to make the animation look more realistic, such as alternation bird sketches to make the bird look like it is flying instead of using the same one, of having the baloon pop instead of disappearing something we hope will make the audience interested and want to watch more. We want them to feel like they are interacting with the video and have a response to it rather than just watch it.
To accomidate to an ambient audience, we have the video cutting on the beat with a simple narrative to follow if you do not watch it closely. There is quick jerky editing as we have used i-stop-motion to follow how the music sounds so it would be what they expect.

Copyright

Copyright laws are in place so the artist/performer/writer/inventor has credit and royalties for their product and are not copied by other people to earn money. For example, phone companies like Apple will have a pattern on their technology so that other phone companies cannot copy their software design. Song writers have control over their creation and receive royalties if anyone covers or samples their song (with their permission). An example of a lawsuit would be the 1990’s song ‘Ice Ice baby’ which used the bass line of ‘Under Pressure’ originally performed by David Bowe and Freddie Mercury. After a dispute and denial of having sampled, Rob Van Winkle admitted to sampling and paid Bowe and Mercury the money and credited them as co-writers of the song.

In terms of copright law for our music video we are using Ellie Goulding’s song ‘Fly’ however we are not making any profit or money out of creating this video and we are not crediting our selves for the compostion of the song .

Lighting

Lighting

Because we are using istop we are limited to our use of lighting. In addition, streak lights or dramatic lighting is inappropriate for the mood of our music video.  Our main goal in terms of lighting is to make the background bright enough (by using lamps and reflector) to make it look livelier as opposed to the dull light the software istop give. Because most of our video will be cell animation we do not have to be as concerned with lighting the individual drawing, as they stand out a lot from the background and are not the main focus of attention. Our star however, is done through photographs so we had to use more conventional lighting for the close ups of the face as she is what the music video is advertising. Like Ellie Goulding, she is a more quirky singer song writer and is sold on talent, hence why we need to advertise her face.  In the walking photographs we have put more contrast in the light and shadow as to make her stand out despite being in black and white. As I referred in an earlier post, this is similar to the Juno opening credits, where the titular character has contrasted shading on the face. 

In todays lesson

In todays lesson we plan to continue filming and reach the end of the first chorus. Last lesson, due to technical difficulties getting the right camera and lighting similar, we were unable to reach the stage we wanted. Having wrote everything down e.g the exposure and changing the mode of the camera, to night. We have most of the first verse filmed, with only the clock left to film and then we will be on to filming the chorus so i think this is a realistic goal for todays lesson.

Copyright

There are always issues surrounding the copyright all around the media such as movies, video games, music etc. In our case we would need to to contact the song owner and explain that we only intend to use their song for educational purposes and we do not intend to use it to make money out of it. Usually the problem in the media industry is that people just take other artists videos and put them on somewhere else, for example on YouTube anyone can pretty much rip copyrighted video and then put it up as their own, there is not much that YouTube can do except deleting that video and issuing a warning, this is example of a common problem with copyrighted material. However we shouldn't have such problems because our video wont be making any money.

First Day of filming

Today we started filming and we managed to get the beginning filmed. Even though it started off slow we managed to pick up the pace and we expect to finish the filming next week same time. On the filming we encountered few problems like the camera going off but by turning it off and on again we managed to keep the focus without messing up all of the alignment. For each of the shots we took two screen shots and for the picture shots where we had pictures appearing on top of each other 5 shots per picture.

Filming so far

We started filming today as planned! I had taken the photographs i needed to in order to start filming so we started from the beginning! We filmed the actor sitting on a bench standing up ready to start walking. Although we only just started filming we encountered our first problem here, i took the photographs of her walking, but she is facing and therefore will be walking to the wrong way... so i need to either take more photographs or simply flip the photographs we already have. I will do this so we can then move on the storyline of the video.

As we couldnt film the walking, we filmed the flashing colour part. But again there was a change of plan. We still have all of the colours that will change to the beat, but instead of the screen flashing the colour was have seperate photographs overlapping each other and will edit it to the beat in final cut. Its the same idea but easier to film in our time constraints. As we had time to fill, we cut some of the photographs features e.g the eyes, the mouth and stuck them on some other photographs. This adds humour to the video and  i am excited to see how it looks during the editing stages.

We know by next lesson we want to get to at least the first chorus of the song and i think it is manageable if we have all of the photographs cut out. If the rest of filming goes as well as today did, we should be finished this time next week.

test footage

Here is our first piece of test footage.
Our first attempt was one picture everytime we moved the bird. That is the first second that i am talking about, and as you can see it moves too quickly to look at the minor details and to actually see that it is flying. To aviod this we made each movement but took two photographs of it so it still moves but there is more of a delay.

Progress so far

So far with the filming progress we got test footage done, we are planing on starting real filming on Monday. We were expecting to start filming one or two lessons earlier however we ran into some problems therefore it had to be postponed. One of the problems we had when we were doing the test footage the camera always goes to snooze when it isn't moved for a while since we are not actually recording with it but rather taking captures of shots through the computer and only way to avoid it is by pressing something on the camera which is also problematic because the camera tends to move and therefore lose the focus of the background making it look quite jerky. Therefore we either need to do it really gently or find out different approach to deal with the problem. Another problem we had is if one of the members of the group doesn't turn up the rest of the group is dragged back, as a group we agreed to do our best to turn up on time and try our best avoiding missing any lessons. The only problem I see occurring  in the future is the time management since we are doing stop motion it is going to take us longer to film on top of that we got editing to do as well. Therefore we might need to do quite a bit of work outside the lesson time because we are already a bit behind with the filming, but I think if we work hard enough we can overcome this problem.

Target audience

Our target audience for our music video would mostly be the teenagers- young adults because pop gender is mostly focused on them. Our music video is going to be about happiness and all around about life. Our music video is going to be a stop motion therefore I think that the jerkiness of the video is going to be appealing, since it seems quite fancy. Also the song is quite mood changing as well which usually pop genres have, in our song where the character goes into her "dream" the song from that point could be much more bright and happy.

Test footage 2

This is the test footage we did without the coloured background, in black and white. We animated the bird, we did several attempts with more screen shots of the bird on the second one which made it look more smooth. We used the light reflector with the light pointed at it, also we found out some of the lines need to be drawn thicker since the camera can't focus the lines properly causing the picture to look pixelated.

Test footage

This the test footage we did with the coloured background. We practiced zooming in and out also we tried tested head drawings and animated two birds flying at once with the screen moving upwards. 

Setting

Setting is the most important thing. It determines characters, timeliness, dialogue, conflicts (and resolutions). Plot is what sets the mood of the audience and how they perceive the characters. Just by having a room with certain furniture, items in it without anyone in the room could already have a meaning. For example in a music video it is usually shown how the character perceives the location and therefore reacts to it. In a music video there is often a change in the setting for example the chemical brothers the character is often changing to a different scene with a different setting and usually the clothes of the character are even changed. Through out the video when the scene is changing we get new questions whats going to happen next? well this is what keeps the video interesting because of the different set up of the background itself.




In a music video the main character usually is pointed out the most, however sometimes for example in pop videos we have a relationship between two people which could show two main characters but that's not always true. 

Inspiration for our video

We got influenced by quite a few music videos as well as our own ideas, that we are going to put into our music video. One of the music videos that influenced us was Beyonce - Countdown.

One of the ideas we took from this video was the background changing in the shot, we also thought about having the characters clothing change like Beyonce is in her video with the background, using the green screen.

 

This is the part where the color of her clothes change with the background in sync with the beat. However we decided not to go with the green screen and instead go with the stop motion. We thought that doing stop motion we could make it look much better and we are more comfortable with it since we had quite a few ideas for it. 

One of inspirational music videos was the "Milk Maid" by another group from previous year, we really liked how they done some parts of the song in sync with the beat and also the zoom in and out on the shot which we found really impressive. We decided to show some close up shots as well  however we are doing bigger print outs of the images rather than zooming in with the camera because that way we are not going to lose our camera alignment. We also got some of the ideas to our music video from brain storming for example: the birds which represent happiness are going to be included in the video.