Skills Audit

Think back to the research that you conducted for your AS practical work; how have your skills developed since then? Write a short summary of these developments.

When I look back at my past research I can see that I am more prepared for what is to come and how much development and research has to go in before you even begin filming. On the first project in AS I was fairly naive to how much preparation is required before you start filming, however as we went on with the filming I became more aware and more equipped.
In A2 I can confidently say that I am much more prepared for the filming through the amount of discussion and making sure that the entire group agrees with the dates and times and the actual idea of the music video that we are planning on making. My skills that have developed through the year would be the following;
-Editing
-Team work
-Time keeping
- Organisation
- Patience (and yes, that is a skill for me.)
- Camera holding steadiness.
- Choice of miss en scene more accurately and practically.

Summary of the music industry

Summarise what you have learned about the state of the music industry of 2011.

I believe that the music industry has now become very technical, using technology to even play music, not many recording companies use actual instruments for every song they record and produce. Simply because the music industry has evolved, making it a lot easier for the listeners to illegally download music off the internet and therefore not paying for it. Because of this, the music artists are forced to get a profit out of their music albums by promoting their self through touring a lot more now than music artists did in the 1990's.
I also believe that the music which is seen as mainstream seem to be all pop music with the one off alternative songs in the charts. It disappoints me to how the music industry has evolved from bands in garages having a dream to express their lyrics, prove that they are talented through hard work and dedication. To the reality t.v shows of singing 'competitions' that win you fame such as X factor and Pop idol. Many successful (not all) artists in the music industry have had the easy way into the charts by the help of television shows or schools that aim to throw you into the industry such as Brit school. It has become more about the fame and glamour than it is the actual spirit and desperation to express their songs and share their stories inside their lyrics.
Overall, in 2011, the industry surrounds itself in online downloads from either iTunes, Youtube etc. Making the music industry a difficult career if they are aiming for a rich a famous lane as their are literally million dreamers. 50% of them are most likely to be yearning for the fame more than the actual excitement and amazing opportunity it would be to perform your own songs and music in front of hundreds of people.

Planning - Projection Inspiration

For the past few lessons we've been concentrating on planning our music video shoot. We looked at several music videos last week for inspiration, and one that stuck out was Lifeline by Imogen Heap, which comprises entirely of different clips/videos (created and submitted by her fans) projected onto Heap's painted body and face. Since we have access to our college's classroom projectors, we through this could be great to recreate, with imagery related to our song's lyrics projected onto Poppy's face (who will be performing in our video).


We also looked at The Making of Lifeline on Vimeo, where Imogen Heap talks about the music video concept, accompanied with a few on-set shots, from 9:28 to 10:05.

Today, we briefly tested the idea with an image and video animation we found online. In the end, we decided that if we incorporate it into our music video, it won't feature predominantly (especially if we use content from the internet) as we don't feel we could create it as effectively as we anticipated, but we'll see what happens

Testing the projection idea

Planning - Final Song Choice

Our final song choice we decided to go with was Howl - Florence and the Machine.
This song is taken off her album Lungs released by Island Records on the 6th July 2009. We chose this song because we liked the indie pop/ art rock/soul side to her music. This song is upbeat, with meaningful lyrics and a moderate tempo and we feel that it can be very useful in editing and creating an amplified meaning to the song.

 Here I have made some annotations around the lyrics of the text and certain words that stand out and we can play on. I've highlighted words like 'beast, blood, hunters, heart, screaming, possessed and attacked' which convey violence and I think was can create great images. We want to use the idea of dis-juncture with some parts of amplification and have been looking at the types of settings we can use. We are thinking forests as they are quite naturalistic and involves animals and that's a theme explored in the text.

There is no video for this song and we find that quite useful as we can truly use our own interpretation of the lyrics and meaning to construct our own ideas with no influences from Florence's own video.

Planning - Researching Locations

We are considering a good majority of our video to be shot outdoors, with a setting that conveys the wild theme of our song. Here you can see some photos of ideas for potential locations, taken for us by the college's Media department, of which we particularly like those labelled with the number seven (Abney Park). We also collectively came up with several ideas of other parks/forests that we know of.

We used Google image and map searches to further research the locations we have in mind and get a feel of what would be suitable for our music video concept, which we are beginning to formulate.

Planning - Examining Lyrics of Song Choice

Whilst we haven't decided for definite what kind of music video we will be creating (illustration / amplification / disjuncture), I thought it would be worth looking closely at the lyrics of our chosen song for possible ideas of interpretation. On a print-out of the lyrics, I have annotated a couple of preliminary ideas and highlighted specific words that we could use as inspiration:

I have also produced the following graphic using the 'word cloud' generator Wordle, where I simply copy and pasted the entirety of the lyrics. The generator then produced the following image, conveying how frequently the words appear in the lyrics through the size of the words. By doing this, we can now get a better perspective of the kind of imagery that occurs most often in the lyrics, and use it as a possible source of inspiration.

PLANNING: Final Song Choice

The final song we have come to agree on is Howl by Florence and the Machine. The song is from her album, Lungs which was released in summer of 2009. The group decided to choose this song in which to create our music video to was because the majority of the group liked the type of genre the song was assigned to, indie pop. The tempo of the song can allow us to use various camera shot in our final edit as the song begins slow and has a very fast beat during the chorus. The lyrics also allow us to be creative with what we actually wish to show on screen. The song focuses around a woman feeling like a animal after being dumped by her partner, thus making her want to howl. This is the main lyric the song focuses around hence the name of the song being called howl. The lyrics describes her feelings and emotions in the song which is why we chose this song, as we can show this on screen in our video.

Here is the sound track of the song we are going to be using for our music video.

Research - Example of Viral Campaign

I am a big consumer of music and am enjoying bringing my knowledge into this project, so today, I will be talking about an ongoing music viral campaign that surfaced early last year. This particular electronic music project, fronted by Swedish singer-songwriter Jonna Lee, has continued to grab my attention with its innovative marketing campaign and use of digital media.

 
Teaser videos were uploaded from January to March of 2010 on video sharing website YouTube, under the guise of iamamiwhoami, the first of which was sent around to music blogs and journalists. This is the way in which I found out about it, after it was posted on a particular pop music blog that I follow. However, what was so compelling about the videos, besides the dark and strange imagery, is the fact that it wasn't known who the vocalist in question was until much later on in the campaign. Throughout the early videos, the artist's face was obscured and speculation began to spread online about who the artist behind the videos may be, with anyone from Christina Aguilera to Little Boots being put into the spotlight (check out this blog post from The Telegraph that was posted at the time). This is really interesting as, whilst music videos usually aim to build an artist's image, for the iamamiwhoami campaign, we instead had no idea who the artist in question was, which worked in their favour as it got people talking about them.



An image of electro-pop artist Little Boots alongside a face-painted Jonna Lee, posted by one particular music site amidst the early iamamiwhoami speculation

Full length music videos soon began being uploaded, all of which are stylistically consistent, create a dark and mysterious tone, and are accompanied with brilliant mise-en-scène (see here for detailed synopses of the videos). The earlier teaser videos garnered around an average of 300,000 per video, whilst the most popular music video is that of the song 'y' which, at time of writing, holds 2,830,503 views. For a new artist (or at least, new project, since Lee has previous released two albums under her own name), these are promising figures. The full length songs featured in the video were then and still are available for purchase via iTunes and Amazon. The collection of music, which has now amounted to enough material for an album, are yet to be released in any other format besides the individual singles. This is noteworthy as iamamiwhoami has adapted to the recent trend in consumers preferring individual singles over albums.

After the online stream, the concert

was available to purchase in audio

format, again via iTunes and Amazon

Enigmatic uploads to the YouTube channel eventually followed that asked the fans to nominate someone among them. The person in question had the opportunity to be involved in what would be a feature length 'concert' streamed through the internet. As the events unfolded, videos continued to be uploaded from the perspective of the fan during his experience, which proved engrossing to watch and was a great use of social media to market the lead-up to the concert. Even their targeting of music blogs early on to spread the word about the campaign was all part of a very clever strategy – a way for Jonna Lee to reinvent herself and her sound without compromising her artistic integrity.

Planning - Moodboard

After settling on our song - Florence and the Machine's 'Howl' - we created this moodboard to give a feel for the artist we will be portraying in our promotional package.  (Click to expand to full size) 

Planning - Final Song Choice

Above you can see our final song choice, which is Howl by Florence and the Machine, from their debut album Lungs. We settled on this because of the strong imagery the lyrics convey, the atmospheric instrumental and the fact that it is a very climactic song that would be suitable for editing. Because of all this, we were immediately inspired by it, already throwing possible video ideas around such as locations before we even officially settled on the song. In the end it came down between this and Promises by Nero, and whilst I was initially torn between the two, my vote went towards Florence because of the aforementioned reasons, not to mention the fact that they're one of my favourite artists at the moment. I am very excited about working with my group to bring this amazing song to life!