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.