Mood Board of Initial Ideas

This is the mood board of our initial ideas for the music video.  The song is about being a girl, the good and the bad things about it.  Its about having fun and being happy.

The pictures I have involved show themes of individuality, fun, dancing, couples and also some random things that reflects the random name of the song "Mouthwash".

Codes and conventions of the Pop Genre

POP GENRE

The chosen Genre of our music video is pop. The reason we have chosen this genre is because the music is upbeat, catchy, fast past and enjoyable music. We also chose then genre because most song have an emphasis on vocals, rhythm and catchiness that can be played regularly. This will benefit us as we have to film lip singing which is a reliable pace to record

The viewer will have the idea of the codes and conventions of our chosen genre which is Pop as the people playing our characters will be dressed in colourful clothes, dancing and general happy faces. Overall most pop songs are very positive and don’t influence any bad behaviour, language, sex or drugs to young people.

Lyrics tend to help establish a general feeling, mood and the subject matter rather than giving a straight forward coherent meaning. The most important lines will play out visually through the video. A music video will rarely simply show the lyrics as they’re written.

The music of the song is most likely to be upbeat and have a rhyme in the song. Most pop songs have a beat to the song then within the song there the beat will drop for the last verse then for the last chorus the beat comes back. This is most know for pop songs and also played on the radio. 

Codes and conventions of a music video

Codes and conventions of a Music Video

Lyrics – it goes without saying that the main convention of a music video is the lyrics. The lyrics are the reason behind the music video, and they establish the whole theme for the video.  Key lines in the lyrics will affect what is visually involved in the video.  But it is very rare that the video will just simply portray the lyrics, there will be a twist on the lyrics.

Music – a music video tends to make use of the tempo (speed) of the track, this will influence the editing of the song, and the video will emphasise particular parts of the song where the speed is faster or slower. For example, when there is a drop in the music, there will be a dramatic change in scene or shot.

Genre – some music videos show a clear genre through the images.  For example in the Katy Perry – California Girls video you can clearly see it’s a pop video.

The mise en scene in the picture below shows that this clearly is a pop video, due to the bright colours and high key lighting. The fancy costume that Katy is wearing also works on the pop genre, the multi colours and ‘Barbie’ like look develops more on the pop style video.

Editing – the most common type of editing in a music video is rapid editing and the use of a fast cut montage of images, the shots must be cut to the beat of the music. Although in certain genre's a different approach the editing may be taken

Narrative/Performance – Narrative in songs is rarely complete and often in fragments.  Often some videos will be in a nonlinear order to be more interesting.

Intertexuality – intertexuality refers to how music videos draw on other music videos (or media texts) to spark recognition from their audience. For example Madonna's video for 'Material Girl' took inspiration from a film released in the 1950's, 'Men Prefer Blondes' which stars Maralynn Monroe.  Both the video and the movie are trying to portay the 'Hollywood Sexy Blonde' stereotypical image.  Aspects of the mise-en-scene, choreography and colour scheme, all follow the same conventions. 

Voyeurism – in music video's voyeurism is used to attract audiences, it works off the idea that a person will be sexual attracted to an errotic image without being aware.  The music industry uses voyeurism throughout videos to attract an audience and make sales.

 

Letter to the music company

Here is a clear vision of the lesson.

F.A.O; Fiction Records

We are a pair of Sixth form students that are studying A Level media. Our A2 project is to make a music video in which we would film and edit ourselves

I am writing to you to request your permission to use one of your songs 'Mouthwash' by Kate Nash. I'd be grateful if we are able to use this song.

The music video that we would create would be published on Youtube and maybe social networking sites such as facebook and twitter from promotion within the coursework guidelines. However it would only be for examination purposes only.

I appreciate your co-operation with this matter

Kind Regards

Anisha Bains and Rachael Tonkinson.

Research of kate nash video's

In the mood board above we have created a montage of screen shots from Kate Nash’s videos, we have selected things that stood out to us, and these things will influence us in our own Kate Nash music video.

The main thing that stood out to us was the use of bright colours in every video, contrasted with the one black and white shot which was used in the introduction of one music video. The bright colours represent the poppy conventional genre.  The colours may also represent a range of emotions that Kate sings about.

There are a large range of close ups used in Kate’s videos, mainly close ups of herself although you can see close ups of inanimate objects which she makes come to life, such as toothbrushes, and shoes and a cake. These show closeness to her and the objects show a random, quirky, and alternative side of pop music that Kate Nash likes to portray. 

From doing this research we have decided that we will use close ups of the main girl in our video, and also of inanimate objects just like Kate does, this is so that we will be following her style and keeping in line with her imagine. 

There is a cartoon like feel to her videos which is represented through the colours and vintage style clothing in the music videos. Kate’s classic button up dress and short fringe is used throughout most of her videos to keep her audience identifying her style and brand which helps her to sell her music.

The styling used is bright, vintage, florals and big bold patterns, we will use what we have found and combine these influences into our own Kate Nash music video.

Chosen Song Choice: DO

Initial Ideas

Initially when we began our A2 coursework, we decided to create a music video.  We went through a range of ideas when considering what song we wanted to create a video for. 

A few of the song choices we came up with were:

·         Heartbeat by Nneka feat Chase and Status

·         Radio by Beyonce

·         Stay awake by Example

We began our project with Stay awake by Example, we later then changed our idea to Kate Nash Mouthwash.  We decided to change because we thought that we might struggle to film this song, as it is a male song.  Hopefully now that we have changed our song this will help us get a better overall grade, and create a professional and sellable music video.

The do's and dont's of making a music video

What is a music video?

What is a music video?

A music video is formed of recorded music and video shots and still images to help act the lyrics to the song which boast record sales. In a music video there should be a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals which link the music and moving images together. A music video is a performance of a recorded popular song, normally by a signed recording artist and usually they may have a dance sequence and visual images interpreting the lyrics. Music Videos are mainly the key to success in the music industry and chart success for most artists. Music videos demonstrate characteristics of their genre, for example a rock video stereotypically be dark and consist of low key lighting throughout and rapid editing for the beat of the song whereas a classical music video would stereotypically have high key lighting, longer shots as the rhythm in songs are calm and slower.

Peter Fraser defines a music video as:

‘a short, moving image product, shot for the express purpose of accompanying a pre-existing music track and used to encourage of sales of the music in another format.’

This is a poster for the Superbass video by Nicki Minaj, a video which is of high success; it holds all the key components of a successful music video. It has the bright colours used to attract the audience into the video and therefore lead to success of the record sales. There are lots of shots of Nicki in the video; these shots are using voyeurism through the pop music to attract both a male and female audience.

The fashion and costumes used in the video is to attract a modern and young audience, the props such as the motorbike she sits on make it easier for Nicki to reach out to an even wider audience, and the poses she does are sexual to attract male buyers and awareness.

The hair style Nicki has (bright pink) is also making a statement to increase viewers, it is a popular fashion statement which may even represent a new era and style of the 21^st century. Every artist thrives to be individual, and Nicki Minaj shows how to make a successful music video through this song Superbass.

Swot Analysis

Evaluation of AS Coursework

Evaluation of Year 12 AS Coursework

When starting year 13 coursework, we wanted to think about the ways in which we could better ourselves from last year.  So here I want to evaluate the things I think that went well, and the things that perhaps, didn’t.

Firstly ill start with the things I think went well…

In the picture above you can see the colour scheme, title and background of our AS blog.  I think this works well, because it shows knowledge of the stereotypical colours used in a thriller poster, could also link to intertexuality of the thriller genre conventional colours.

I think this screen shot shows a positive aspect of our blog because it shows multi media posts.  We have uploaded a video and then analysed it.  This is good because it creates a more visually dynamic blog and will help gain more points. During our evaluation tasks especially we showed a range of different media texts being used, for example, power-points, videos and also written posts.

In the pictures above you can see there is a poster that we created for promotion, we all felt that the poster we created was really good and effective.  The post underneath is a poster evaluation, so you can see we have planned to get to the stages we reached.

Things we need to improve...

This blog post here looks dull, and only uses one type of media.  It is all typed out and doesn’t include any pictures or videos to make it more entertaining. In year 13 this will be improved to make a better blog.

Above is a word cloud I created online, it shows the words most commonly used on our blog last year.  This has shown me that this year I need to use more media specific terminology whilst blogging.  I understand that doing this will better my grades and help specifically focus on the important parts of the blog.

The word audience is bigger which means it was more commonly used on the blog which means we were focussing on the target audience, this is positive and it good.