Music Video Timeline

Hello!

As we are beginning to plan our own music video I have decided to make a time line of a music video in our genre. I took Taylor Swift's song '22' and wrote down all the different shots and settings on a timeline for the first half of the song. (Two versus, One chorus) 

You can see my work attached below:

From this I learnt:

• The video is focused on three or four main settings/ideas which are spread over the whole video
• The artist is always in the focus (middle)
• There are a lot of close up/mid shots of the artist
• The artist changes clothes a few times
• The video has both day and night in it (as though the video was filmed over a day)

This has definitely given me some ideas for when we make our own music videos.

See you soon.

Miley Cyrus - We Can't Stop (Codes and Conventions)

We recently got some feedback on our documentary and found that our weak spot was the content of our codes and conventions for editing. Therefore we decided to choose three music videos and analyse the codes and conventions in more depth!

3. Miley Cyrus - We Can't Stop

Miley Cyrus caused huge controversy with her music videos. ‘We
can’t stop’ was the first of her videos that caused a massive up raw within the
female pop artist industry. The actual editing and putting together of the
video is very similar to ones previously analysed. For example, the proxemics
are the same with the artist being in the centre of every shot as she is our
main focus. The high speed shots create a fast pace to the song, using match on
action shots (several different angled shots but from the same location) of
Miley herself, in this particular instance she is laid in a bath. The change of
outfit is similar, although Miley wears less clothing than Madonna and Ellie
Goulding, simply wearing a leotard and a crop top. Another similarity is the the
close up shots of her having longer camera time and longer shots for other, ‘less
important’ people we only get a small glimpse of. All of these techniques are
used in almost every female pop artist video. So why did Miley get so much
hate? Well, this could be for many reasons that have nothing to do with the
making of the video. The topic of the song is based around a party, similar to
Kesha’s Tik Tok. However, Miley touches on very controversial subjects within
her song/video. Exploiting homosexual actions, swearing and posing with several
different stuffed animals. All of these subjects could be hugely offensive to
the audience but by being so unique and controversial, she has gained a huge
fan base.

Ellie Goulding - Lights (Codes and Conventions)

We recently got some feedback on our documentary and found that our weak spot was the content of our codes and conventions for editing. Therefore we decided to choose three music videos and analyse the codes and conventions in more depth!

2. Ellie Goulding - Lights

In contrast to Madonna’s vogue video, Ellie Goulding’s
lights is filmed using extreme bright colours. This is something that is very
popular in the female pop artist industry as bright colours are memorable and
eye catching. Another technique used within this video is the 360 panning shot,
where we as an audience see every possible angle of our artist, which is
another way of showing the star theory. The entire video is orientated around
Ellie herself, watching her perform with drums and a microphone. Unlike
Madonna, there is no narrative to this video which emphasises how desperate the
artist wants to make her identity known, like most female artists. Although 30
years later, there are actually many similarities between the two videos, the
proxemics are very similar, in terms of the artist being in the centre of the
shot at all times, showing her importance. Both females wear revealing clothes,
and change outfits a lot, showing they can essentially pull off anything. Also,
the pace of shots is very similar, quick yet in time to the music so the music
and video link. The editing on Goulding’s video is extremely technical. As the
song is about ‘Lights’ there are many freeze frames of Ellie posed in different
positions with the camera still rotating around her 360. Along with this, the
editor has put several effects onto the shot with different lighting patterns
in different colours. This shows how technology has changed since Madonna’s
era, but the fundamental video has very similar techniques and overall feel to
it.

Madonna - Vogue (Codes and Conventions)

We recently got some feedback on our documentary and found that our weak spot was the content of our codes and conventions for editing. Therefore we decided to choose three music videos and analyse the codes and conventions in more depth!

1. Madonna - Vogue

Madonna uses many different types of editing techniques throughout her video Vogue.
Firstly, she uses cross cut editing as she switches from her performance part
of the video to the narrative. The pace of the shots is linked with the music
itself, keeping to the beat and creating a staccato feel. Within this, we notice
that shots are longer when she is in the shot alone. However, the shots soon
become shorter when anyone else is in shot. We also notice that most of the
shots of Madonna alone are very close up, showing her beauty, body and
extremely minimalistic clothing. This creates the idea of the star theory, that
Madonna is who we, as an audience, should all be looking at. This idea is also
reinforced with the lighting editing. Although the video is filmed in entirely
black and white, the other dancers are made to essentially merge into the
background, whereas Madonna is very bright, with white hair and her face seems
to glow more than the others. This type of editing is essential to make the
artist look their best and look the most important thing there, selling
themselves in order to look good. The proxemics of this video also create the
star theory as Madonna is always in centre shot and slightly more towards the
camera to make her look bigger than everything else in shot. This is an
important part of camera work when making the audience focus predominately on
the artist. Another technique used in this video is the use of fades. Not only
were fades a very popular transition in the 80’s but Madonna does this for
specific reasons. It allows each shot to run smoothly into each other and like
the song itself, creates a very slick feeling. However, in some cases Madonna
actually uses a fade because it’s relevant to the lyrics. For example, “It makes no difference if you’re black or
white, if you’re a boy or a girl”. At this point, a shot of a boy fades into a
shot of a girl, emphasising the point she is making when singing the lyrics.

Survey Results

Hello!

Here are the results of our survey questions! Here you can see what we learnt and how it could help us:

See you soon!

Online Survey

Hello!

We recently used the website 'SurveyMonkey' to design and publish a Pop Music questionnaire where we asked questions to get to know our target audience's lifestyles, interests and music habits.

Here you can see screenshots of our survey:

Soon to follow will be the results of these questions and what we have learnt from them!

See you soon!

Focus Group Evaluation

Hello!

Here is the evaluation of our Focus Group. Here you can see what we learnt from our interview!

What we have learnt from our focus group task:

We asked a group of girls aged 16, 17 and 18 what they thought of three specific music videos that we are focusing our documentary and main task on. We asked this group of females in that age category as they are our main target audience for our music video, therefore their views would match those closely of the people we are aiming to attract. They watched the video ‘Rude boi’ by Rihanna, ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ by Whitney Houston, and ‘Single ladies’ by Beyoncé.

We picked these three videos out of all of the possible female pop artist’s music videos as they all have a lot of differences that we wanted the focus group to pick out on. Rihanna’s music video is a recent song that is quite explicit and features a lot of bold colours, Beyoncé’s music video is also recent but is in black and white and focuses on different aspects such as dancing. Whitney Houston’s music video is a lot older than the other two videos therefore focus on different things and shows them in a different way.

After watching Rihanna’s music video, the feedback from the focus group consisted of comments about how she wasn’t wearing a lot, but how this worked as the lyrics linked into the images displayed. They also said that the colours drew attention from the audience as it became eye catching and interesting. They said that Rihanna’s music video would attract females as it’s a catchy pop song, but also that males would be interested because of the setting and costume choice.

After watching Whitney Houston’s music video the group talked about how there was a difference in the two videos they had watched so far. Whitney’s focused more on her face and the lyrics that were being presented, as well as having other dancers. The song was shown to mean more to them than just the catchiness of Rihanna’s video. They said that even though it was an older video, it was still catchy and they would enjoy both of those videos.

They were then shown Beyoncé’s music video. This was in black and white the whole way through, so differed from the other videos in that aspect, but the focus group said that it worked with the lyrics and performance. They said that a video without colours wouldn’t have worked for Rihanna’s video, but Beyoncé had made it work as she had focused on other things like the skill of dancing. Beyoncé’s video was very minimalistic, with a plain background and just the dancers in the centre. The focus group talked about how although this was different, it didn’t seem like anything was missing as the dancing and lyrics were enough.

From this task, we have learnt that in order to attract our target audience, we should alter our ideas of the video to fit the lyrics given across and the general feel of the song. The majority opinion from our focus group was that they found Rihanna’s video more entertaining- therefore using bright colours may attract the attention of our target audience easier.

More audience research is to come including an online survey!

See you soon!

Focus Group

Hello,

For some more audience research we did a focus group with 3 idividuals from our target audience, here's how it turned out:

There will be an evaluation of this interview shortly!

See you soon

Pop Music Documentary Evaluation

Hello!

We hope you enjoyed our documentary, here is our evaluation:

One of our main strengths when completing the documentary is the information we gathered. In the early stages of our planning we ‘mindmapped’ topics that we wanted to put in to our documentary, for example the history of pop music. We then each took one or more topics and went off individually to research and gather information on this topic. We believe that this was done to a high standard and each of us put in the effort to collect the research that we needed. We believe that we were then able to put this in to our documentary and produce a very informative piece of work, which not only helped us learn about the genre of pop but would also help others watching to learn about it. One of the main things we learnt when researching for our documentary was the history of pop. We used 4 big changes for pop music that we believe has helped shape it today. The first was improved microphones in the 1940s, which allowed artists improved sound quality both in performance, and in music videos. The second was in the 1950s, where rock and roll saw the push of actually creating the pop genre for the female voices, which were popular however not husky enough to fit in to the rock and roll genre. 1952 saw the introduction of pop charts, which gave the audience some more involvement with their favourite artist’s music and was a quick and easy way to find newly released songs. The last was 1981 which saw the first music channel aired on TV; this was MTV which opened with ‘Video Killed The Radio Star – The Buggles. Another one of the main things we learnt about by doing this documentary was the codes and conventions. By watching different music videos we identified the repeating factors and then paired them to a music video. The first music video we used was ‘Beyoncè – Single Ladies’ which shows the tight, revealing outfits that are regularly worn in female pop music videos. The second music video we used was ‘Rihanna – Rude Boy’ which shows the bright, colourful feel and look that female pop music videos usually have. The final music video we used was ‘Kesha – Tik Tok’ which showed the content of the songs, which are usually teenage issues such as drinking, sex and parties.

Another one of our main strengths was the editing added to the filmed clips. We believe that we were able to really show off our media skills through making this documentary. We were able to plan out the editing whilst planning the content because we knew what we would be able to achieve through editing. The subheadings, transitions, voice-overs and greenscreening were all part of our original plan and we believe that this helps to pull the documentary together and ‘show us off’ as media students. We also were able to get rid of a few problems in the editing stage, which helped to perfect the documentary. One of the mistakes was that when speaking to the audience, we mentioned that Video Killed The Radio Star was by Radiohead, however when we came to download the music video we realised that it was actually by The Buggles. To correct this we faded the sound out so that you could not hear this incorrect name and saw the correct name in the subheading that we added to the right hand side of the screen throughout the playing of the music video. Another problem that we were able to erase was the amount of time we left for the music videos to show. Our original idea was to have the videos played on the green screen throughout the whole of the talking and therefore when filming, the host paused for gaps to show the music videos. When it came to editing the documentary however, we realised that these gaps actually were not long enough to show the music video. To fix this we used a ‘cutaway’ tool which allows one clip to cutaway from another clip, this resulted in the music videos being played silently no the greenscreen whilst the host was speaking and then the music video is played with music in a separate clip straight after, which we believe actually looks better and more professional.

One weakness of our documentary is the sound. We filmed both inside and outside which meant that background noise and other factors managed to distort the sound in some of the clips. For example we held 3 quick interviews in front of a brick wall, however this brick wall was actually the wall leading to doors of a building, which had a shelter over. This meant that the sound of the voices echo and sound distorted and different to the other clips where we were stood outside in the open or inside. Although this does not affect the documentary and its contents a great deal, it is still something that should be worked on for the next piece of work we do.

To improve this we are going to ensure that we work on our sound editing. We feel like the editing stage is the best stage to correct any sound faults, as it is much easier and quicker to be able to manage it this way instead of having to bring in equipment such as multi-setting microphones. We are going to do this through research such as watching tutorials on YouTube, reading essays, following instructions and exploring the sound effects of the editing software that we use.

Another weakness of our documentary is the topic of the audience. We focused mainly on the history and codes for the genre pop and although we did a few interviews with the public ages 14-18, we still do not feel that we know our audience enough. We had previously written an ‘audience profile’ and now feel like this should have been added in to our documentary to give ourselves and the people who watch the documentary an idea of who it is that watches and listens to pop music and therefore who the music is aimed at.

We actually decided to take action on this straight away and after our documentary was finished we arranged and filmed a focus group. The focus group was made up of 3 teenage females, as age and gender were the only things we knew about our audience. In the interview we showed them 3 clips, 2 current artists whose music videos are quite different and an older pop music video. We then asked them questions such as what they think about the videos, what they prefer, what they think are the important aspects and more. We also crated an online survey about pop music to find out more about our audience. In the survey we asked things such as their hobbies, what they do as a living, their favourite books and films and also asked them about current female pop artists. Our next steps are to evaluate the focus group and draw together what we found out and also to assess the results of the online survey.

Overall we believe that the content and planning of our documentary helped it to be informative, effective and show our potential as media students. To improve we will be taking action by learning more about sound editing and analysing information gathered about our audience!

See you soon!

Pop Music Documentary

Hello!


We have finished and edited our pop music documentary! You can find it attached to the top of this blog post. We are happy with how it turned out and following this post will be an evaluation. 


See you soon!

Documentary Notes

Hello!

As I previously mentioned, we are planning a 'Female Pop Artists Documentary' and have been gathering some research that can be put in to this documentary.

Ideas mindmap:

 Notes on codes and conventions:

Notes on history:

Notes on target audience:

See you soon with our documentary!

Initial Genre Ideas

Hello!

So, we have decided what genre we would like to focus! First we noted the different genres and the artists within them genres. We then looked at music videos within each genre and the one that stood out for us was female pop! This is because the music videos are very loud, colourful and vibrant and often use very bright and clever special effects, such as Rihanna's song 'Rude Boy'. This gave us inspiration as we would love to be able to recreate special effects like this. We feel (so far) that we will be able to achieve the best music video with female pop.

Attached below is our 'initial ideas' notes:

To get to know our initial genre further and explore whether this is the right decision further we are going to be creating a documentary about the genre including the history, codes and conventions, current artists, interviews and more! The notes for this will follow shortly.

See you soon!

Evaluation of Mime Video

Hello!

The last blog post that I published was our Mime Video that we completed in order to understand one of the difficulties of making music videos and also to prepare us further. I worked in a group with three other Media students and together we wrote this evaluation. (see photo below)

As things get closer to the real task, we are now looking more in to what genre we would like to do. Be expecting our original ideas soon!

See you soon!

Mime Video

Hello!

As we are getting closer to having to make our mime video, we got set the task of creating a short video of someone miming to a song. In turns out this is much harder than it looks and can cause a lot of problems when it comes to editing the song other the mouthed words!

My group decided to use the song 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' by Cyndi Lauper as our first ideas for a genre is female pop artists.

Attatched is our final product:

Soon to follow this will be an evaluation!

See you soon.

Analysing Music Videos

Hello!

Recently I have been watching a lot of music videos and therefore though I would have a go at analysing them. I chose two, one was 'Ed Sheeran - Lego House' and one was 'Goyte - Somebody That I Used To Know'. 

To analyse these I used the six key aspects from Andrew Goodwin's theory and I believe that this is a very simple and effective way of looking at music videos and I had been looking out for the aspects in all of the ones I watched. 

Attached here is my analysis

See you soon!

Music Video Theories

Hello!

Attatched is some research I have done of music video theories from Sven E Carlsson and Andrew Goodwin.

This has helped me to gain a wider knowledge of the different types of music videos out there and the different ways music videos can be put together.

See you soon!