Click the image to go to the Influx website

Friday 14 October 2011

Teacher Feedback on the Proposal

When discussing the pitch we gave for our music video with our teacher we placed an iPhone on the table we were sitting at and recorded our teacher's feedback. She felt the idea needed to be changed to make it more professional and less like an obvious student music video. She also made suggestions as to how we should improve the narrative idea. Without Mrs Blackborow's permission it would not have been possible to record her voice, and so we thank her very much.

Production Treatment Feedback by mdcassidy

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Audience Research

When researching an audience for dubstep, I found that they could be categorised into 3 categories: Age, Gender and Genre.

Age: Our primary age group is 16-24 year olds because this is the age that has grown up with the discovery and development of dubstep. Also, this is the main age for becoming more independent and outgoing. Our secondary age group extends to 15-26, since this is really the limit for the age group where dubstep is popular. Also, you can get adults 30+ who still enjoy going to music festivals, concerts and clubbing, however this group is very niche.

Gender: Dubstep appeals to both males and females in our priamry audience, however in our secondary audiences mainly males are interested.

Genre: Of course, there are fans of the dubstep genre. Often, these fans like drum and bass as well due to the similarities in style and conventions of the genres.

Audience Demographics Profiles:

Name: Ben Kaye
Age: 20
Gender: Male
Occupation: University student in his second year - studying business management
Interests: He's an outgoing student, loves to go clubbing, partying and have a drink with his mates. He still thoroughly enjoys studying his degree course though. He regularly plays football for his university team and also goes to Powerleague to play football with his brothers and friends most weeks. Last summer, he went to Ayia Napa, a Greek "party" island, with his friends and felt an andrenaline rush when listening to DJs mixing dubstep and drum and bass tracks and dancing with and meeting girls. He particularly liked the music because the heavy beat and reverberations can be felt pulsing through your body, creating a euphoric and invincible sensation. He said that, "dubstep is like a legal high".


When I say dubstep, what do you think?
Chaos, craziness, colours, pure mental, clubs, an amazing time/night, strobe lights, drugs, alcohol & sex, wob wob wob, current, RIGHT NOW! Subfocus, Magnetic Man, Skrillex, Ukf Bass Culture Concert


Name: Lauren Good
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Occupation: Year 13 at secondary school - studying art, english and politics for A levels
Interests: Very confident, outgoing with a strong, tight-knit group of friends, both boys and girls. She regularly goes to salsa dancing and has a passion for photography. Last summer, she went to Malia for a week with her best friends and never wanted to leave. She said "boys, best friends and dubstep / dance music is the best combination. Perfect Summer!"

When I say dubstep, what do you think?
DANCING! Incredible beat, boys, partying, clubbing, simply crazy, awesome, current, my iPod, mental, Flux Pavillion, Subfocus, Doctor P, UKF Bass Culture Concert.


Reflections:

After interviewing these two people and absorbing what they had to say I found that although they are different ages, opposite gender and are studying very difficult subjects, they both shared common interests, particularly with the clubbing and the dubstep lifestyle. This highlights the fact that this audience is very diverse and has an extraordinary variety in personalities.

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Treatment: Promises

1. The Track
The track we have chosen to use for our music video project, is the song Promises by Nero (Remixed by Skrillex). The song belongs to the genre of Dubstep, a genre that has only very recently become popular. Due to its contemporary nature, there is not a huge range of existing music videos, allowing us to be very creative in what we do and giving us a lot of opportunities, whilst still having enough content for us to draw inspiration from. The song is very electronic and drum/bass heavy, giving it a unique sound and making it great to edit to



2. The Music Video
The idea for the music video is split between performance and concept. The performance will focus on the band and creating an image and identity for them, whilst the concept will relate to the song and the idea of promises being broken.

The Peformance
This will take place in a clean white room, well lit, with pale white and blue light. The two DJ's will be raised on platforms, playing on their decks, whilst the lead singer remains on the floor.
The group will be dressed in black - the DJ's in smart, cool suits, whilst still wearing their masks and headphones, whilst the female lead singer wears a sexy black dress, with tied back hair and striking make up.
The performance will all take place in this room, with a lot of fast paced editing and camerawork.

The layout of Chase and Status's performances will be similar to ours

The Concept
The concept will put each of the band members in a different situation, each with their respective partners. The band members will be dressed exactly the same as they are in the performance, but in very normal situations, such as at a dinner table or in the back of a car. Each situation will present the relationship in a negative way, with the partners emotions changing from happy to angry as the video progresses, until the band members leave their situations, get picked up in a car, and drive away. The final shot we see is of the cars number plate, with the band logo stuck over it, as the car drives off.
This is to show to the audience that our music genre is a source of fun and escape in an otherwise undersirable situation, such as a relationship going to shit, with promises that are hard to keep.

3. The Artist
Our artist is called !nflux.



Artist Name: Influx meaning an arrival or entry of large numbers of people or things. Chosen because it’s short, memorable, looks and sounds good. Has connotations of a gathering or massing of something, like a crowd or a build up on a song. It incorporates the X which is in the names of many dubstep artists.

In the band there will be three members - Female lead singer (Charley Packham), and two DJ's Red and Black (Adam Romo and Daniel Sheldon). The female lead singer will be the lead performer, whilst the DJ's identities remain anonymous, but their masks create a front. Overall, this creates a unique band identity, having enigma to create audience interest, but still having a strong identity to create a recognisable image.
The bands motif will be the headphones and the masks they wear, as the masks will have been personalised by them and will represent them in some way. They represent the club and rave scene, as they are a current band performing contemporary music, Dubstep/Drum and Bass.

The inspiration for the masks came from 'Hollywood Undead' who do a similar thing.
4.The Audience
We found that our audience could be categorised into 3 categories: Age, Gender and Genre.

Age: Our primary age group is 16-24 year olds because this is the age that has grown up with the discovery and development of dubstep. Also, this is the main age for becoming more independent and outgoing. Our secondary age group extends to 15-26, since this is really the limit for the age group where dubstep is popular. Also, you can get adults 30+ who still enjoy going to music festivals, concerts and clubbing, however this group is very niche.

Gender: Dubstep appeals to both males and females in our priamry audience, however in our secondary audiences mainly males are interested.

Genre: Of course, there are fans of the dubstep genre. Often, these fans like drum and bass as well due to the similarities in style and conventions of the genres.

Audience Demographics Profiles:

Name: Ben Kaye
Age: 20
Gender: Male
Occupation: University student in his second year - studying business management
Interests: He's an outgoing student, loves to go clubbing, partying and have a drink with his mates. He still thoroughly enjoys studying his degree course though. He regularly plays football for his university team and also goes to Powerleague to play football with his brothers and friends most weeks. Last summer, he went to Ayia Napa, a Greek "party" island, with his friends and felt an andrenaline rush when listening to DJs mixing dubstep and drum and bass tracks and dancing with and meeting girls. He particularly liked the music because the heavy beat and reverberations can be felt pulsing through your body, creating a euphoric and invincible sensation. He said that, "dubstep is like a legal high".

When I say dubstep, what do you think?
Chaos, craziness, colours, pure mental, clubs, an amazing time/night, strobe lights, drugs, alcohol & sex, current, RIGHT NOW! Subfocus, Magnetic Man, Skrillex, Ukf Bass Culture Concert


Name: Lauren Good
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Occupation: Year 13 at secondary school - studying art, english and politics for A levels
Interests: Very confident, outgoing with a strong, tight-knit group of friends, both boys and girls. She regularly goes to salsa dancing and has a passion for photography. Last summer, she went to Malia for a week with her best friends and never wanted to leave. She said "boys, best friends and dubstep / dance music is the best combination. Perfect Summer!"

When I say dubstep, what do you think?
DANCING! Incredible beat, boys, partying, clubbing, simply crazy, awesome, current, my iPod, mental, Flux Pavillion, Subfocus, Doctor P, UKF Bass Culture Concert.

In order to appeal to our audience, we would market the artist and the music in the following way.

5. The Ancillary Tasks
For the ancillary tasks, we will make an cover for the debut album, and a website that will be the hub of the marketing campaign.

Album Cover: Will have a black and white theme. The front cover will be white with influx in black in the top left corner and a picture of the band in the bottom right corner. The picture will be a high angle and shot of the band with the female singer at the front and the two faceless DJs behind. It will have a very simplistic look and the band will look like they are coming from the light.

On the inside cover will be one of each the faceless DJ’s on each side against a black background with possible light sound levels that you would find on a DJ mixer behind them. They could either be standing with arms crossed or playing on decks.

On the back will be a beauty shot of the female singers face along with all the relevant song information etc against a white background. The inside covers will be each of the DJ's, either similar beauty shots, or long shots of them behind their decks.

Website: The website will follow the same black and white colour scheme. It will have a very simplistic and modern colour scheme with shots of the members of the band all over it. It will have a link bar with links to Home, News, Events, Music, Video and Store.

The Home will have our debut video and specific news. One idea we would like to implement in the website is a remix competition - any member of the audience will be able to download the individual parts of the track and create their own remix.
The winners remix, judged by the audience, will then make a place on the next album and the winner will be publicized and endorsed by the band. The website will have lots of social networking opportunities with commenting and Facebook and twitter incorporated wherever possible. YouTube and UKF dubstep links will be on every page.

6. The Practicalities
The music video could be shot in a few shoot days - 1 day for the performance and 2/3 for the narrative performances.
The performance would be ideally shot in the seward studio as it has the best lighting facilities available to us. The narrative could be shot in Daniel's car, in a quiet car park (like that found in Forty Hall), in one of our houses and at a quiet bus stop.
In terms of casting we would use 2 out of the 3 group (Daniel and Adam), and Charley as our female lead singer, all of whom worked on the music video project last year and understand how to perform and lip synch.
As for the narrative, we would like to use Josh Pedro and Lauren Good, actors we know to be reliable, and another actor we have yet to confirm.






Problems that could arise could be the weather, for some of the outdoor shots. Setting up the performance in the seward studio would require a lot of prior planning to ensure it goes smoothly and looks good. We would also need to rehearse to ensure the performers feel a comfortable as possible and perform as well as they can.

Monday 10 October 2011

Green Screen Testing

We decided to do a test shoot of our infinite white background idea which would dominate the performance. We took this initiative early so that we could also do a test edit of this and work out if this is a viable path to take.

We booked a slot in the Seward Studio (a brand new studio in our school) and we used a green screen that the school owns and is normally used for photography along with a larger green screen which I brought in. In the studio, we positioned the camera and lighting as best as we could to good the optimum quality shots, however this proved difficult since both green screens were too small.

To test our faceless artist identity idea, we painted Adam’s face green and took some shots of him. After capturing and editing the footage in Adobe CS5 After Effects we realised that the final result was not as desired due to the dull paint that we used. That, in combination with the small green screens not allowing us to film our desired varied shot types, allowed us to come to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be able to produce a strong enough end result so this was definitely not a viable option.

Friday 7 October 2011

Analysis of One Direction's website

One Direction are a debut artist formed in 2010 and were signed by 'Psycho Records'. I have studied there debut website and discovered that it acts a central hub for their own marketing campaign. The type of marketing campaign they use is called 360 degree marketing as the artist is promoted through many different areas such as interactivity and purchasing opportunities and with the website at the centre of this campaign.



Interactivity

As the website opens there is there is the opportunity to simply click play and watch the debut music video in full screen. Also, on every page, including this opening page, the audience can comment about stories, events, pictures and any compinent of the website through Facebook and Twitter.  Where there is the icon for each social network you can see the number of 'likes' (Facebook) and 'tweets' (Twitter) which let's the viewer know how popular each post is in the eyes of the fanbase.

 Having the audience first see the YouTube clip allows them to make comments, share the video with friends and subscribe to the YouTube channel and then to the website. To further get the audiences involvement with 1D there is a news feed on the homepage about upcoming events such as concerts and just generally where the band goes.


For the record label, the website provides many sources of revenue because on every page there is a link to buy the debut album and its very easy to navigate to the 1D store to purchase merchandise surrounding the band.


On the page before the main site there are clear dates for downloads and store release and there are download links for iTunes, Amazon and HMV.com.

There's an option on the site to change the currency (GBP, USD, EUR & JPY) showing the global attraction to One Direction as a brand as well as an artist.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Coursework Progress Details

Over the last few weeks my group for my coursework music video (Adam Romo, Michael Cassidy and myself) have had several meetings with our media teachers and our technician.

We spoke to Miss Blackborow and we played her our song choice (Promises - Nero [Skrillex remix]). She loved the choice and said it reminded her trending music in the 90s. We agreed that being so contemporary was a dominant positive in the decision to stay with the track and so decided that as long as we can decide on a concrete idea for the video, we could go ahead with the song.



We had to cut the down the song to the required song length of around 3 minutes. I produced a trial edit using Garage Band on my Apple iMac at home and posted this initial edit in our group message thread on Facebook. By doing this I could gain feedback from my team as well, which i would use to improve on this. They said that I needed to reproduce the edit on a high definition sound quality track (which I didn't have). So at school, during the open evening I editied a higher quality version of the track (with the help of Michael Cassidy) down to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, with permission from Miss Blackborow.


In our last lesson with Miss Dymiote, we brainstormed ideas on our artist identity, inspirational artists for our music video and whether we would be most successful constructing a video dominated by narrative, concept or performance. After producing this brain storm, we circled in green any key elements which particularly stood out to us and which we would elaborate further in our process in creating our music video and artist identity.

In this lesson, we also discussed our basis for an idea with our teacher and described to her, with the aid of the Modestep music video for the track, Feel Good that we felt it would be most appropriate to use a concept based video which merges into performance since its a convention for this dubstep genre. She agreed, and we conveyed to her an idea in which there are tensions within a relationship between a boyfriend and girlfriend and where the feminine identity here breaks the stereotype by being the unfaithful one in the relationship. This concept works in synergy with the lyrics, however at this moment in time when we described this idea to our media technician, Chris, he said it needed "fleshing out", which we took on board.

We played him the track now and he said that the initial build up is calling her something to be thrown in slow motion and then when the verse hits the height of tension and the lyrics say "Promises" for the first time, the object smashes. We found this feedback very useful and have considered this an essential aspect of our video.

Yesterday, we had a meeting with Miss Blackborrow and Chris in which we gave a latest position in our progress, which was mandatory before getting the go ahead for the formal pitch. We described an idea we discussed over Skype the night before, with Michael writing a draft treatment for our idea.

We had gained feedback from other media students in the day, however Miss Blackborow was the first to say she disliked the direction we took with the scenes of the relationship.

This lead to further discussion, in which we swayed from this narritive dominant idea to a more concept driven one where we would use a neverending white set for the performance and most of the video itself. Since, we wanted the identity of our DJ's to be hidden, we thought it would be engaging and enigmatic to actual remove the facial features of each person.

These ideas have lead to early test shots in the Seward Studio (a studio in our school) to test for green screening, lighting and camerawork (including shot distance, angles and pans) and generally experimenting to see where boundaries can be broken.

This is the latest progress on our coursework and I will continue to update the blog with this infromation.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Initial Song Idea

After much discussion with my group (Adam & Michael) we have decided to go with the song choice of the Skrillex remix of Nero's 'Promises' from the dubstep genre. We chose this song because it is contemporary, we are fans of the dubstep genre and we enjoy listening to the song. We also knew that we wanted to do a dubstep track and typically dubstep doesn't have many lyrics, however this one did have enough. We know we can develop a strong artist identity and narrative idea, so I look forward to the future of this project.






Lyrics:
   You got me so wild,
   How can I ever deny,
   You got me so high,
   So high I cannot feel the fire.
   And you keep telling me,
   Telling me that you’ll be sweet,
   And you’ll never want to leave my side,
   As long as I don’t break these,

   Promises, and they still feel all so wasted on myself (4x)

   You got me so wild,
   How can I ever deny,
   You got me so high,
   So high I cannot feel the fire.
   And you keep telling me,
   Telling me that you’ll be sweet,
   And you’ll never want to leave my side,
   As long as I don’t break these,

   Promises, and they still feel all so wasted on myself (4x)