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.