Location Reconnaissance

During half term, we  visited London Waterloo station and took some photos and example shots that we could use in our music video. A lot of our music video will be based in a train station because we feel it shows how difficult it will be to find the girl at the busy train station. London is a very picturesque city and is perfect for our music video. We will also go to covent garden to film some of the street performers and the couple as they begin to meet each other.

The New Idea

Due to the change of song, we have adapted some of our original ideas for shots. There will still be some signs of editing to the beat, however it won’t be anywhere near as much as there would have been with the previous song. This is because editing to the beat isn’t as common within music videos for the style of song that it is. We are still planning on filming around London and on the trains, as we believe the setting still works really well and will help to convey the romance narrative strongly.  Varying shots of street performers, such as long shots and close up shots,  are still within our plan, however the pace of the shots will be different and the quantity will be smaller. The narrative has changed although it is still similar to our previous idea. The difference is rather than having only the males journey to finding love, which was what we had previously envisioned, we now are showing how the relationship forms and grows instead. We are still currently deciding as to whether we should have the ending as though everything seen did happen, or whether to end it as though it was a daydream that he was having.

Half Term Homework

This is the homework in which we were set over the upcoming half term:

You have a choice! Both of these stages of preparation will need be completed but please choose which you will complete over half term:

1. Location reconnaissance- you should travel to the locations where which you expect to film your production and take some photos of possible locations. The photos should be followed up by a summary of the benefits and (or) potential problems of each location (200- 350 words)
2. Costume design- Either gather inspiration from audio visual sources, screenshots or images and design by hand or digitally the likely costumes to be worn in your video. You should try to comment on the connotations of the costume or any symbolic reference in the same way in which you would analyse a media text.

Questionnaire Results

The results of our questionnaire can be seen below:

A total of 18 people completed our questionnaire. The first two graphs show us that the respondents are both male and female, and between the ages 17 and 18. This has helped us as we were hoping to have a older teenage target audience, this is because we are of similar age and think that this will help us to be able to aim it at our audience, and so the results will help us ensure the video fits in with what the target audience prefer. The third graph shows how narrative based videos are largely preferred (over 50% respondents chose narrative), this is greatly beneficial to us as it gave us the ability to start planning our video successfully, and know exactly what style we needed. Indie and Pop were the main answers for the which genre of music was the most popular. The song we are leaning towards doing has a more jazzy style towards it, however it can also be classed as pop. The questionnaire has made it clear that it is the music and the artist that attracts people to music videos the most rather than the promotion or video itself. This makes the narrative of the video crucial to its success and popularity. Each setting had an aspect of interest, however the city was the most popular. We decided to film our's in Upminster, as it was more easily accessible for us and therefore more practicable. Once we have completed our music video we are going to post it on YouTube, The reason for this is that it is the most popular place to watch music video's, this was made clear through our questionnaire. The question on what people like to see in music video's brought back a range of responses. Some wanted a narrative, others wanted dancers and some wanted it to directly relate to the song. The current idea that we have for our music video would directly link to the song, helping us to know that our video would be one that the target audience would enjoy. 50% of our respondents said that they relate to one character strongly. Taking this on board we have decided to have to characters but focus mainly on one. We have decided to end on a cliffhanger despite the results saying only 25% liked cliffhangers. 50% said they liked a happy ending but we thought that as the video was generally happy we would be a bit different and have a cliffhanger ending, as it would get people talking. Over 50% of people said that they prefer the narrative/ music video to match the lyrics, the current narrative that we have in mind fits in with the lyrics and words, which matches the interests of a lot of the people. Our respondents said they watched music videos fairly regularly, meaning the results of this questionnaire are fairly useful . Our chosen narrative genre is romance which was also a popular response within our questionnaire. Overall, the questionnaire was very useful in consolidating our current idea, and it also helped us to further develop what we had already got which will help our music video be more successful.

Change

Today we had a discussion about how realistic our idea for 'Waiting for Love' is. The outcome of this was that we decided to change the song that we are doing our music video to. Originally we decided on ‘Waiting for Love’ by Avicci but we felt like we couldn’t do much of a story line with this song. We thought it would also be incredibly to get the right amount of energy needed to create a successful dance music video. Therefore we changed to the song ‘Haven’t Met You Yet’ by Michael Buble. This song has potential, with the opportunity to create different types of story lines. We decided to do the journey of the meeting of a couple and how she ‘lost her ukulele’ and he found it and went and gave it to her. The lyrics of the song, link with the story line/ plot and would suit it. We plan to meet up later this week so that we can plan our music video in more detail and possibly start story boarding. Below is the link to Michael Buble's song 'Haven't Met You Yet'. 

Questionnaire

After thinking about our idea in depth, we are starting to see many problems with our idea. The typical conventions of dance music video's is that there is a lot of energy, usually portrayed through club scenes. We acknowledge that this would be very difficult to do, and that without it the video may not be very good as it lacks the needed conventions. Our solution to this problem is to change our song choice. To help us decide what song to choose we created another questionnaire with more questions, to add to the help this questionnaire can give us we sent it out to a wider range of people. We used google forms to create this questionnaire. Below are images showing the questions on our questionnaire, along with a link to our questionnaire:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DeZpIBOXD2vyOajSz5A0P1zoq4cB9d83GkZAhEN-M-s/closedform