Wednesday 28 October 2009

Story board for the Music video

This anamatic video was created by my partner, Francesca Baldwin

Tuesday 27 October 2009

Course on General Linguistics (1916)

The course on General Linguistics is the influential book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, that is based on notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva between the years 1906 and 1911.

It was published after his death in 1916 and is generally regarded as the starting point of structuralism which is an approach to linguistics that grew vigorously in Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempt to analyze a specific field such as mythology. Although Ferdinand was specifically interested in historical linguistics, the Course develops a theory of semiotics that is more generally applicable especially within France.

He first describes the science of seminoilogy that is, the deconstruction of the significance of images and words.

The sign is described as a "double entity", made up of the signifier, or sound image and the signified, or concept. The sound image is a psychological, not a material concept, belonging to the system. Both components of the linguistic sign are inseparable. One way to appreciate this is to think of them as being like either side of a piece of paper - one side simply cannot exist without the other.

This is related to our coursework as all of the scenes are related as they all coherent with one another as they ‘cross lives’ with one another.

Ferdinand De Saussure was one of the founders of semiotics who can be seen below:


Semiotics that we intend our music video to include:

- Symbolic references are made as the teenagers drink from a cider bottle near the end of the music video in the park. Choosing cider as the beverage of choice is to show that even though it has a strong taste, the teenagers still choose to drink it opposed to something sweeter like bacardi. This in a way is a symbol of rebellion, adolescence and youth culture. The media play a major part in this by creating an image of a teenager such as defining them as binge drinkers, violent etc which many teenagers adopt and play on the role of a. It is a symbol that has been defined by society and culture within certain countries, UK and Scotland in particular with its high under-age drinking rate.

- The boyfriend will swear to the camera as he leaves the room in the first scene. This is symbolic and indexical. It is symbolic as he is simply putting up his middle finger; this symbolises a rejection of the girlfriend as she is accusing him of something which he is denying. The middle finger has become symbolic within society as being the acrude offensive gesture however it is acceptable as not being that vulgar. However, it can also be looked upon as an index as when someone looks upon the character swearing at the girl, it implies various emotions and feelings that the character might be experiencing; this therefore leads the sign to be indexical. Just like a scar is a warning of inhury, a middle finger signals anger and unhappiness.

- Again, obvious symbol the beggar on the street. The audience can clearly see he is a beggar by the way he dresses, his location of choice (sleeping on a towel on main road) and his overall appearance. All of these represent his status in society. We can see many people avoid him, this is common in todays society whereby most people avoid those of whom are more needy than them - in a sense they stick to themselves

- Icons will be used as the two girls await on the park bench for some male attention. Their short skirts and low tops symbolise their goal; they are dressed provocatively and this connotes sexual desire that the girls want, or passers by also desire. Their clothing is symbolic of the female seductress as this is how, conventionally, people in our society judge other individuals by their appearance. The boys are instantly attracted to them for their 'easyness' appearance and ditch the girl that is with them. This also relates to patriarchy within society whereby it is the men who have the dominance over the women - it is the men who feel they can leave anyone and move onto someone new at the same time.

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Previous Work

Previous to the music video, I have had various experiences with creating and editing videos.

The first example I have was done for my AS level project. We had to construct a horror sequence. I entitled this 'Rope' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnaZ4ouxD7k

From doing this, I learnt different type of cut shots such as Jump shot and filming techniques like panning etc. I would say this helped me when editing the music video as it taught me the overall guide onto how to produce a video by using the in house editing suite. I used the same techniques and effects such as cross fade and ghosting to implement them in my music video.

At the end of year 12, we did a preliminary task to master lip syncing. This task however was very hard as we didn't have the audio present with us so we had to think about the song and try and match the motions of the mouth with the actual song. This proved successful as we can see below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InfqUG1y_1U

We didn't want to have as much lip syncing in our music video as we saw it as a problem as there arent many lyrics within the actual track. We thought it would be better to put it at the end of the music video as a sort of 'relaxing ending' whereby we see all the actors together lip syncing the lyrics. We found this to be very effective on our audience.

Present main ideas & thoughts

Our main ideas and thoughts at the present ...

The aim of this music video is to show the loneliness that people suffer (in accordance to the lyrics) and by documenting various people, their way of life and the decisions they make, the audience will see this loneliness.

Our shots:
- In the first scene, the opening shot will consist of the couple arguing at each other - face -to-face. This is also where the soundtrack begins. The close up shots of each of their faces will show both of their emotions and anger.

As above states, the close up and extreme close up shots will be used mostly during the start of the music video and after the boyfriend leaves the room we will then see the full body shots. With these close up shots of the couples argument, the shots will switch and jump cut to various shots such as medium close up, medium long shot & long shot to show the boyfriend leaving the bedroom swearing at the girlfriend after she slaps him and walking on a road - all in time with the beat.

Cut-away shots will be used in the video. When our beggar character is being laughed at by the group of teenagers in the park, a cut-away shot will be used to show the point of view of the tramp aswell as the point of view from a bystander walking past the attack.

As we wanted the underlying theme to be loneliness, we will represent this by having one of the characters who is mocking the tramp to then be rejected by the rest when they go off to see the two girls in the park. We will have a panning shot of the teenagers reaction as the as the camera will then pan in the direction that the teenager is looking at to see the remaining group of teenagers flirting with the girls.

Our narrative
When constructing the script for the music video, Francesca and I had decided that we want to have a linear structure meaning that everything will happen in order - each action affecting the other just like a time line. This will not only emphasise the realism that we want to portray but we also want our audience to understand what is happening with all the individual characters rather then seeing little snippets of them and not getting the full effect of their isolation from society.

Our props:
For the props, we needed something for the girlfriend to throw at door when the boyfriend exits. We thought that we could get a vase however we would only have one try at it as if we don't capture the shot correctly it is very expensive to use another so I thought that the girlfriend could chuck a hairbrush as it is light but is also something which could be at her hand when in the bedroom.

We will also need turntables for the shot of the hand pressing play on the turntable. The last prop we will need is the bottle of vodka for the tramp to be drinking and a bottle of cider for the teenagers to be drinking as it is a common scene to see teenagers drinking from a cider bottle nowadays.


Our locations:
For the first and last shot we are going to be using my house. In the first shot, it will take place in my bedroom as we have enough space to film and we have access to lighting aswell as having the turntables present in my room which will be used for the shot of the hand. We will be using my living room for the last shot when the teenagers sit on the couch as the room again is large enough to film and there is lighting which we can use.



The aim of this music video is to show the loneliness that people suffer (in accordance to the lyrics) and by documenting various people, their way of life and the decisions they make, the audience will see this loneliness.

Our theories
Hegemony is a derived term from the Greek language emphasising power amongst leaders. This power and notion needs to be considered throughout the meaning of the music video. In our case, Francesca and I have the power as we are the directors of the music video, who are exerting power over the other audience as we have the choice on what to put into the music video. In a sense, we are feeding them with the visuals to make them think and learn.

In the music video, the audience can relate to the teenagers as they are sitting on a park bench on a cold day. They are dressed provocatively and are seen to be drinking alcohol in public which in todays society as anti-social behaviour. This then 'injects' the audience with thoughts and images of negativity just like the hypodermic syringe model whereby it is explained that the media 'inject' their audience with visuals to rule their decisions. Similarly, it is obvious that we, as consumers, have been manipulated by the media.

In relation to this model, we are told that people dressed in that manner are, in fact, seductive characters, and have been manipulated, without knowing, to believe it. This is because the audience are convinced by the media that if you conform to a certain socaial norm, you are infact playing that part - this is otherwise known as the self fulfilling prophecy. In our music video there is a high level of hegemony; as there are stereotypes of all different social groups, these being age (teenagers), gender (attrative females) and status (homeless man).

Following a different theory, E. A. Kaplan explores the way in which the artists face and image creates a visual hook for the audience and is used as a basis in gathering the audiences attention. This is not in connection with Dubstep as dubstep is seen as a subgenre whereby the mainstream music industries haven't grapsed the structure of dubstep and how it is supposed to be presented so the conventions that Kaplan describes are not necessary in the dubstep music video, which we will create. This is because dubstep in a sense is a rebellion against mainstream music. We wanted to portray this in our music video by rejecting the usual norms and conventions of music videos and to do the complete opposite. Kaplan explains how the audience habituate with the artists face and image and get to understand their positioning and reasoning behind some of their actions they do on screen. This is the complete opposite to our music video as in our video, we don't have any lead singer, we have numerous characters taking on the part of the singer by lip syncing the lyrics.

Below is an image of the front cover of Kaplan's book:



Some may consider our thoughts and ideas to be similar to the teenage drama 'Skins'. Certain elements, like the underage drinking of alcohol and promiscious girls in particular, allow the ideas, and the potential music video, to include and have a sense of intertextuality behind them. This is because our main focus and overall reasoning behind our music video is that we wanted to play the part that apparently teenagers act and so by playing these roles that are given to us, we are in a way mocking societies pre defined views. The image below is of the characters of skins. The mono-chrome effect used in this image is something that both my partner and I appreciate as it gives a sense of 'dirtyness' and rawness that some advertisements might not go for as they might choose to use more colour as its more eye catching. We will implement this effect in the post-production process, whilst editing.

Ideas for Primary CD Covers

Taking images from our storyboard and actual music video, we have come up with two rough ideas for our Digipak for Stenchman.

The Two Ideas

1. The first idea was to have the artist (Stenchman) hand pressing play on the turntables. This can be drawn and coloured by hand and then scanned into the computer and edited in Adobe Photoshop CS2. Using design package will allow us to be more creative and format the text etc.

2. The other idea we thought was to use every character involved in the music video and to display them in a grid. We will use a 3 by 3 grid with name of Stenchman being in the top left box, whereas the other 8 boxes will include a straight-on shot of the 8 characters with sad emotions. After thinking of this idea, we then looked for other CD covers that were similar, to see where we subconsciously got our idea from. When we looked around at various images, we discovered that our concept was very similar to that of the American sitcom show 'The Brady Bunch'. Please see the image below, similarly also with 9 boxes.



The image below is an interpretation of our idea for our CD cover. As we do not have the still shots yet, I have used the original pictures of The Brady Bunch family, just to show our idea of adding text to the image. As the image below is just a prototype, when it comes to creating our final product, the images will be of our eight characters involved in our music video.



Following this idea of 8 images in a grid/table, the clubnight 'Joyride' used a similar aspect in one of their flyers for their New Years party by getting all of their djs to pose. A Polaroid image is taken of them which gives a gritty image of them. Their flyer is very informal whereas in our CD cover, the story behind the characters is much more serious of that of their party.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

The Digipack cover & Homepage

For our coursework this year we do not only need to create a Music Promotion Video, but we also need to create a Digipak CD Cover and a website Homepage for our artist (or band). I have done some research into some different bands and genres of music to give us a basic idea as to what guidelines we need to follow when it comes to making our own.

Silkie - City Limits

The first artist I looked at was jazz dubstep DJ 'Silkie'. His debut album are not only various images of London (where dubstep originates) but is also in contrast with his title 'city limits. The images look fairly bland due to the colour and resolution. They would not be seen as 'limiting the boundaries of conformist locations' which is suggestive in the title. The simple use of photography is seen in each image. It is well crafted and it appears to be a scrap book like a collage.

'Hidden' on top of the images, you can find a pair of headphones. This reflects his musical enthusiasm and relates to his DJing. The background and mellow tones in the album cover represent the minimal style of music that he produced for this album.

The text used on the album cover is a stencil font which again is minimal in itself as there is no tone or fill colour.

As for the Homepage on his website (myspace), the background is completely different to his album cover. From the screenshot of his Homepage (click here)http://i34.tinypic.com/wwdqpc.jpg, the font appears as arial and bold. This gives the website a 'hard-lined' effect and the lack of bright colours add to this. With simple content on the page such as videos and images, Silkies myspace is easy to navigate around. When the cursor hovers over each link to the page, it underlines the link; please follow this link below to Silkies myspace http://www.myspace.com/silkie86



The Rolling Stones - Exile of main st


Similarly to the Silkie, The Rolling Stones use a very simple concept in their album and digipak artwork. The cover has various obscure and bizarre pictures all in black and white. The effect that this has is very powerful as the contrast of the images have a much more powerful effect on the view. This can represent the segregation of ‘freaks’ in society. People who didn’t conform to the average look. This reflects the title of the album ‘Exile on the main ST’. The dark colours portray an eerie or scary effect, but the viewer may also be confused as it is a very abstract design. It has a ‘vintage' & possibly ‘alternative’ look to it, this can maybe imply the kind of music the Rolling Stones play.

The image below shows the Rolling Stones website homepage. Having the background white, the effect that their famous slogan (the tongue) is very powerful as its bright red and catches the viewer’s eye. Having simple grey font, this colour scheme enables the duo to appear quite professional and mature. The navigation along the top is in a times new Roman font which makes it easy to navigate. The simple and straight lettered font also shows the band's rawness and maybe a rock attitude as well. A slightly more interesting feature is that users can register on their website to access ‘hidden’ material such as a forum and to listen to their music. As you move the cursor along each word in the navigation bar, the page links turn yellow; please follow up this link to their website - http://www.rollingstones.com/home.php

Friday 2 October 2009

Role Allocations

After the majority of our previous actors letting us down yesterday, it was decided to select new actors and re-allocate the roles to more reliable and suitable people. We feel as if these new actors will offer us a hybrid of identities as they are all individually different.

Please see the final Role Allocations below which displays the people we will use when we next film (hopefully this will be next Friday). The Suitability for Role column was written after we asked them to act out a couple of scenes as a 'mini-audition'. For example, we knew that Hayley Minn 'acted drunk very successfully' after we asked her to practice for us in this 'mini-audition' session we held.

Laura Mulvey's 'Scopophilia'

After doing much more research into the theories that are present within music videos, we came across Laura Mulvey's theory of 'Scopophilia' which can be found in her book called 'Visual Pleasures.

In the music video, Francesca and I had decided we would want to have have two girls who will look look promiscuous, seductive and sluttish. We will be wanting these two girls to invite the two boys male gazes by taking advantage of their provocative clothing and sexual appearance. This is achieved by them wearing short skirts and a lot of makeup. This is a typical stereotype that is portrayed with teenage girls.

This objectifies the two girls as they are having to use their physical appearance to lure the male companions 'in'. This is seen throughout many music videos most commonly used and contested within the Hip Hop genre. Rappers such as Ludacris have portrayed women within their music videos as ‘sexual objects’ and conforms with the theory of patriarchy within society that men are dominant over women and they are there just to please men through their sexual acts. Ludacris has been criticised by feminists with his hit song ‘What’s your fantasy?’ in which he describes the women of having to fulfil his sexual needs and desires.


This is similar to the pop band 'The Pussycat Dolls' in which they use their glamorous lifestyles and attractive bodies to win over the eye of their audience.


We did not want to promote the extreme element of sex continually in our music video as even though dubstep is a generally a more male dominated genre, sexual imagery is not really present within any of the artwork or graphics used in Dubstep, so we didn't want to change that convention however by showing a few shots of the girls, we hoped to include the reference to the concept of Scopophilia.

Lyrics of the song

Below is the set of lyrics from Stenchman's music track. Some of the verses are quite distorted yet the words can still be roughly heard.


"One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one

One is the loneliest number
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number

One is the loneliest number
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number

No is the saddest experience you'll ever know
Yes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever know
`Cause one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one"

Locations, Cast & Roles

After carefully looking into a range of different locations and cast, this is the final plan.

Locations:


Cast & Roles