Research and Planning Evaluation

The Name Of Our Boy Band

As you can see from our CD Digipak, we have named our band Quadratic Formula. The definition of the scientific and mathematic quadratic formula is:

"The quadratic formula is the formula for determining the roots of a quadratic equation from its coefficients: ."

 

 

 

It is common knowledge that the term Quad means four and as there are four members in our band, this seemed appropriate and well thought out. We wanted to get across the message that all four boys worked well together hereby creating a 'formula' for success. The name Quadratic Formula seemed catchy and would appeal to a wide audience of maths nerds as well as people who want to seem like they're good at maths.

Although I personally know nothing about maths, a member of my group does it for A Level and she liked the idea of bringing this intertextual reference to music. If our band was to produce some other music, I think it would have an electronic/video game/ nerdy feel to it in order for the band name to make even more sense. 

The Quadratic Formula is an equation to solve the trickiest of problems. The band Quadratic Formula is an equation to solve the missing gap in the music market.

Official Instagram Of Quadratic Formula

In order to add multi-media context to our music video, we decided to create an official Instagram page for Quadratic Formula, our band. Instagram is a photo sharing site which is an app you can download on to your phone or you can log in on a computer. You can have millions of followers and you can follow as many people as you want in order to see their pictures. 

Many popular artists such as Beyonce have official Instagrams in order to make her audience feel like they are in her day to day life:

As you can see, Beyonce has 21 million followers but is following absolutely no one. This is a sign that she already had a massive fan base before creating her instagram and through word of mouth, using social media and the internet, she has created a huge following of people just wanting to see and know more about her day to day life.

We thought that by creating an official page for our boy band that it would increase our following and make everyone more aware of the style of the band. Although we know our band is not real, it is interesting to find out where this ends up and see what effect it has on social media and also through word of mouth at our college.

Although Quadratic Formula are a new band, I have already gained a following of 18 people who are interested in knowing more about the band. It will be really interesting to see where this ends up.

CD Digipak: Second Draft

As our shoot day is over and done with, we decided to created a better rough version of our CD Digipak for our artist, Quadratic Formula. It looks a bit like this:

I am aware that some things are spelt wrong but overall I am happy with the way it turned out. As you can see, we have stuck to three primary colours including black and white for our CD cover. We thought this made the design simpler without it being too boring. As our music video uses a lot of colour, we liked to incorporate this in our CD Digipak by using a well known painting as the background for CD part of the Digipak.

Hopefully this will be improved even further although I really liked the pictures and colours we used and I feel like everything goes well together. I feel like the design brings across the 'boy-next-door' vibe of the band that we were going for.

Further Editing On Our Music Video

Whilst editing our music video, we have come across some problems such as videos getting out of sync. This set us back a few hours as we had to correct every scene. Another problem we are facing is keeping the video edgy and interesting without making the video seem jumpy as most of the shots are static. This is an issue we would like to rectify by using split screen which would look a bit like this:

However, this is something that we are keen to move on to due to us not being happy with the rough cut. Although we have a solid rough cut, it will be good to move on to the proper editing using Premiere Pro. These will be good skills to learn so we can use these effects in later projects. 

We have realised that continuity within the powder paint sections of our video is also a difficult task to edit. This is because once our actors were covered in paint, there was no easy way to clean them up for the next shot. However, this has proved as detrimental because most of our shots are of them covered in powder paint whereas we don't have many shots of them being initially hit and of them initially throwing the paint. If we were to do our shoot again, we would change this and put more cameras on each person at once. This was impossible as we didn't have the budget.

 

Editing Our Music Video

Currently we are in the editing process of our music video. As the song we picked has a fairly steady beat, it will hopefully be quite easy to create a rough cut. 

This year we are using the editing software called Premiere Pro which is a semi-professional editing software system:

This editing software is really easy to use and is similar to the software we used last year. As we intend to use a lot of wipes and split screen, hopefully this system will co-operate with what we want to achieve. 

In our first editing session we had to sync all of our videos so that when we eventually wanted to edit the shots where the singer is lip-syncing otherwise it would look weird and out of place. This was a tedious task but now that's it's done we get can started on the more exciting task of editing all our shots together. 

Personal Achievements On Shoot Day

On the morning of our shoot day, I felt excited but a bit anxious to start the shoot as we still had a few things to be done before we could start filming. We had not set up the background so this was a task to complete and also there was the dilemma of costumes. The costumes were done very last minute so this is something we would do more in advance if we were to do it again.

I felt like I took up many crucial roles in order to get the day done and dusted in as little time as possible. I think it is fair to say that I took on the role of the director and watched from behind the scenes and told our actors how to improve and how to act. I also took pride in coming up with the ideas for the wipe shots which will be further enhanced in the editing process.

I felt that as the director, I managed most of the actors in our video and some proved a little difficult to work with. As I act myself, it was fairly easy to get everyone's blood pumping and the energy up as it was a Monday morning and I had a feeling a few people wanted to be elsewhere. However, as soon as we got the powder paint out, everybody livened up and did a good job.

Evalution Of Our Shoot Day

On Monday, we had our shoot day for our music video which is something we had all really been looking forward to. After all of our hard work and change of ideas, it was time to finally get the cameras out and make something that we'd been working on for four weeks come to life. Last year, we made thrillers and used cameras called Sony NX5 to create shots, however, this year we used a more professional and advanced camera that included ten or so different lenses that you could switch. One of these included a slow motion lens which would come in handy for our powder paint scenes.

We started off the day by getting all of our cast members dressed and made up for the shoot ahead. Obviously, the girls took longer than the boys but we got this done efficiently within one hour so not much time was wasted. We put all the girls in the same white dresses but with different coloured ribbons as belts:

                            

The boys also wore similar white outfits but instead of ribbon, they wore different coloured braces. We decided to stick with the same colour for the opposing counterpart also. For example, the boy singer was wearing red accessories and so was the girl singer. 

                           

 The day started off not messy because we were filming shots of just the band in he performance element. This worked out well because it was not difficult and everyone co-operated well to get the job done, including the actors. We got various wide and establishing shots of both bands as well as close-ups to show the detail of the actor's faces and of the musical instruments. A hurdle we hit was that some of our actors could not actually play the instruments they were given which was a bit of a struggle at first, although everyone got into it and looked comfortable towards the end of the day. We also filmed some tracking shots which show the competition between the two bands and we will hopefully edit these to look like wipe shots. 

In the afternoon, the powder paint started being thrown. We made sure that every camera and every angle was correct before throwing the paint because it is impossible to get off and start again once it has been thrown. Here is a slow motion video of one of the first throws of powder paint which hit Leona. We tried to make it look as if one of the boys had thrown the paint so therefore threw it from the left hand side. This will be made clear in the editing process:

                       

 Once the first bit of paint had been thrown, it became easier and slicker when we threw the next bunch. This element of our video eventually became the easiest one because everyone was so up for it and co-operated well with each other. At the end of the day once we had all of our shots filmed, we decided to do one final slow motion shot of everyone throwing paint at each other. This proved to be a bad idea as it was complete carnage and lots of people ended up getting paint in their eyes. If we were to do a shoot like this again, we would think more carefully about our stupid and dangerous ideas and not do a shot like that again, although it looks great on camera.

Overall, I felt that the day went really well considering it being a very daunting task for all involved. Everything ran fairly smoothly and there were no arguments or disagreements. I feel that the editing process is also very daunting and we will need a lot of help but overall I am happy with the footage we shot as it all looks great. 

If I could do the shoot again, I would make sure we were more prepared with our storyboard and with costumes as this provided unnecessary stress during our media lessons. However, everything turned out okay despite this. I look forward to editing the footage and creating a final product from all our hard work.

Powder Paint Test

As our shoot day is coming up, we decided to test out the powder paint we would be using to see if it worked well and stuck to clothing and skin. As all of our cast are going to be covered on Monday, we decided to throw paint at Lulu who was very up for it. Here is how the test went:

As you can see, the paint was very effective in the way it stuck to Lulu. We also discovered that slowing the video down created an even better effect and this is a device we will use on our shoot day. We decided that more than one colour looks a lot cooler than just one so we will use this effect on our shoot day. This also means that if the set is messy with more than one colour then it won't matter for ontinuity purposes if everyone is covered in lots of colours.

First Rehearsal With The Cast

Today we had our first rehearsal with the cast of our music video. We had a pretty good turn out and it was good to see everyone come together as the bigger picture was finally coming in to focus.



We partnered up our two lookalikes and got them to copy each others movements in order to get the really androgynous feel. We also felt like we wanted some symmetry so we got them to do the same movements in exact unison.


We have another rehearsal planned in which we are going to set up some specific placements and movements for all of our cast and we are looking forward to seeing it all come together on our shoot next Monday.

CD Digipak Research

After doing an initial first draft for our CD Digipak, I decided to do some research into the definition and what a CD Digipak entails. From the Wikipedia website, it says that Digipaks usually have a gatefold (book-style) paperboard or card stock outer binding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside.


Seeing as we've already drafted a Digipak and downloaded a template online, the next stage is to start playing about with photoshop in order to create something that looks professional.


We also took a look at a video of Andrew Kelsall explaining his example of a CD Digipak:








We also had a look at the term 'intertextuality' which could potential be a very prominent theme on our Digipak. We will develop this idea further and see where this concept goes towards our final product.

Permission Slips

In order to have our full cast which is the size of a whole netball team plus a sub, we needed to get permission from everyone's teachers on the day of the shoot. We found the most effective way was to use Blue Cards which all of the individuals teachers sign and date in consent.

This was a lot easier than us emailing all teachers excusing specific people as we have a lot of other thing to be doing in preparation for our music video shoot. Hopefully we will get these blue cards back in enough time as we have effectively planned two weeks ahead:

CD Digipak Rough Draft

As our music video includes eight people and two bands, we decided we needed to make it really clear that 'Quadratic Formula' was an all boy band. On the front cover, we are going to have all four band members with five different pictures each, pulling funny faces to portray them as endearing and likeable. 

The back cover just has a list of song names and we may put in a picture using the powder paint we are using for our video. The inside cover just includes a picture of the band playing their instruments to portray the star image as a naturalistic and talented group. 

Cast List For Our Music Video

As our music video is supposed to have an androgynous and twin-like feel to it, we needed to cast people who were similar to each other but also conveyed the overall concept that they were meant to be similar bands by picking individual looking people. 

For the lead singers, we picked two blonde people called Jake and Leona:

For the guitarists, Fin and Ellie:

For the keyboards, Felix and Issy:

For the drums, Edmond and Poppy:

Requesting Permission From The Record Label

Recently, we decided to write a letter to the record label of The Kinks in order to request permission to use the song. However, we found it a bit difficult finding who to email as The Kinks are no longer a fully functioning band. Despite this, we found a website under the name of Decor Records who suggested that they dealt with a lot of the band's special appearances and websites as it says here on their website:

 http://decorrecords.com/artists/ray-daviesthe-kinks-project-management-only/

Here is the copy of the letter I emailed in the hopes that I had found the right people/company:


'Dear Sir or Madam,

We are a group of A Level students working on an A Level project for a qualification in Media Studies. We are writing to request permission to use the following track as part of this project:

‘You Really Got Me’ – The Kinks

With your permission the track would be used as the accompaniment to a short form video that is made purely for assessment purposes and will have no commercial usage. The video will be viewed only by members of the school community and the assessor of the examination board.

The artist and the copyright holder will of course be fully recognised in the pre-production and evaluation material that accompanies the project. We can also include a full copyright notice if required both in the planning material and on the video itself.

Yours sincerely,

Claudia Fielding

Lulu Bradshaw

Katie Sonina

Hurtwood House School'

Music Video Treatment

Here is the link for our treatment for our new music video idea (click on the picture):

Presentation On Our Music Video Concept

Meeting With The Lighting Designer

Once we have developed our idea thoroughly from the slow paced song we chose originally to the upbeat and fast tempo of our new song, we decided to have a meeting with a lighting designer in order to set in stone our concept. We talked to George who thought that lighting our music video with a very white, bright light and fairly soft. This hopefully will portray a happy, go-lucky vibe and go with the overall easy and breezy concept of our 'battle of the bands'. The lighting we're hoping will look a bit like this:

We also had an idea for our set design. As we are going with the powder paint idea, we have decided that an all white background with maybe a raised white platform for the band to perform on as the paint will show up really well against the harsh and bright background. We also toyed around with having an all black background but we decided that this looked too dark and sinister for the happy song we are filming to.

Research Into Powder Paint

As we have decided to keep the powder paint concept of our video, I decided to do some research in to the most effective, cheapest and simplest way to film this idea. I found a really interesting website which provided some helpful tips. The link is: http://www.iheartfaces.com/2013/04/holi-powder-photography-session-tips/

We also had our doubts about being able to pull off this idea due to not really knowing much about it at all. To improve our skills here, I looked at some videos with similar concepts and found them really useful:

A tip that we picked up from these videos is to separate the powder paint in to plastic bags for efficiency and also so it's cleaner and neater. This will help us to measure out how much powder paint we need for each shot.

Our Music Video Concept Change

After doing a lot of thinking about our music video, we have decided as a group to change the song AND the concept of our music video. The song we are now doing is called You Really Got Me by The Kinks.It sounds like this:

They are a fairly old and retro style of band. We have decided to re-create this vintage style with a classic four-man boyband. We are envisioning them all being dressed in white suits, a bit like this:

We are sticking the powder paint concept but because the song is a lot more upbeat, we feel the idea works even better now. We want all four guys playing instruments so this aids the performance concept that we didn't have with the original idea. The twist in this concept is that we are going to have four girls playing in an identical band with androgynous feel to the two bands. We want the girls to look similar to the guys and all dressed in white. An idea we had was to have all of the performers wearing different coloured headbands but the same colour as the person they are performing opposite.

We are planning on using a lot of split screen to portray that this video is sort of a 'battle' for the spotlight. For example, one shot will be the lead girl vocalist 'pushing' the frame of the shot so that the boyband disappears and the girlband are on the full screen. Another idea is to have match shots so for example, if the drummer is hit by blue powder paint on his face, we will get the girl drummer to also be hit by blue powder paint on her face.

Another idea is that we can have the girls and vice versa the guys throwing powder paint at each other in similarity to the Easy Jet advert where the advert is continuous across multiple screens. So the girl will throw some paint and it will hit the guy in the next shot along. It looks like this:

I think this will be really effective and is a much better and more fun idea than our previous one. I also really like the old-fashioned and fun vibe that the song gives off and look forward to portraying this on camera on our shoot day.  

An Update On Our Music Video

Recently, we have been doing a lot of work on writing our timelines and storyboards for our music videos. However, we have come across a little difficulty in the planning process due to the lack of a strong idea to correlate with our powder paint idea.


This has resulted in our storyboard not being ready for an animatic to be created although I am sure that it will come soon.


In other lessons, we have been learning about Media in the Online Age which is a very relevant subject to do with our music videos as they will all go up on YouTube. Nowadays, putting something on YouTube seems fairly normal, but only twenty years ago there was no such thing and people were still only watching music videos on the TV and if they bought them especially. Although this seems weird to people of my generation, I realise that this might be even more strange for the older generation who have to adapt to the knew digital technologies associated with the music industry.


The fact that everything is now sold and bought digitally online is a very novel thing for the older generation as they are used to buying cassettes and CDs from record stores. However, the use of vinyl is coming back in to fashion so this is also something that the younger generation have to adapt to, as I am sure I know people who wouldn't know what to do when they saw a vinyl record. This is a very interesting development because there is no particular reason for vinyl to come back in to fashion but it has so much so that there are vinyl sections of well know retailers such as HMV.


This is very interesting development and I look forward to seeing what the music industry is like in the next fifty years time.

Lesson From A Speaker From Polydor Records

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of being taught a lesson by two women who work at Polydor Records which is a subsidiary of of Universal. Their job title was video commissioner and they basically decided on the concepts of music videos from choosing from a wide range of ideas. They pick the concept by looking at various treatments and picking the ones which best suit the artist and the song. A fun fact we found out was that when it is a new artist and a new single, they prefer to have a performance element in the video just so that the audience can tell who the artist is. This is a useful tip as for our coursework we have to produce a video for a 'new artist' and it would be helpful if the audience knew what they looked like as a marketing campaign.

Firstly, we looked at the video for Goodness Gracious by Ellie Goulding. This video was shot over just one day and we were given the treatment and the end product i.e. the video looked very similar. This told us that we needed to be very precise about what we put in our a treatment and make sure it correlates between what we see in the video and what we see on paper. For example, here is some pictures from the treatment of Ellie's video:

And here is a final video that came from the treatment:

The video is very similar to the treatment and this made the job of the cinematographer and director a lot easier and enabled them to do a more concise job.

We also looked at another artist, La Roux, and her song Kiss And Don't Tell. The concept for this video involved the use of an adult chat line and hundreds of old fashioned phones. The treatment for this video used images a bit like this:

  









And here is the final video:

A cool thing that companies use nowadays is using interactive elements in their videos. In this video, the number that keeps getting shown on screen is a real number that you can call and there is a message recorded by La Roux. This is a good marketing technique because it makes the audience feel as if they are included in to the action of the video. This is especially good for new artists as it adds another dimension to the marketing campaign and allows the audience to see another side to the artist. 

Overall, talking to the people from Polydor was really helpful because it taught me what a treatment entailed and had to include. It also helped me establish some good ideas in how to portray a new artist in the best possible light. I'm looking forward to developing my idea for a music video with the rest of my group now that I have this knowledge.