Initial Ideas for Ancillary Products

Below are our initial ideas for our ancillary products:

There are some changes we want to make after talking to our teacher, as we feel there needs to be more colour on the magazine ad and that there needs to be more synergy across the images of the digipak.

First Draft of Shooting Script

This is the first draft of our shooting script, we need to add more graphics of the numerical statistics about the couple and also colour code the different locations to help us organise our shots when filming.

Final Treatment

Artist: 

The artist we are working for is Jasmine Thompson, an English singer song writer.  We are using her song "Run" from her album for our music video. We contacted her on Twitter to ask for permission, originally seeing her covers on YouTube and hearing her on the radio with her hit 'Ain't Nobody'.  She is represented in a way that makes her relatable to the audience being a young, teen girl through the way she dresses and the lyrics of her music as on her album, a majority of her songs are based around the theme of love. Her brand image represents her as pure and innocent, her music videos not offering a sexualised view which is typical of younger female pop artists. Richard Dyer's theory of Character and Personality can be applied to her as she begins as a 'real human' rather than being viewed purely as a USP for her music, but it is likely that as she becomes more popular she will be made into a construct.

Audience: 
Our target audience would be young girls around the ages of 13-18. They are likely to listen to popular radio stations like Capital and to keep up to date with the charts, rather than favouring one artist in particular. Typical artists they may listen to are Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato and Ellie Goulding. After analysing our research from our target audience we made an audience profile. 

We carried out a survey and vox pop with our target audience. The analysis of audience research showed that the majority of artists mentioned by our audience were very current and were popular in the charts. Also themes they wanted to be explored were Romance, which we had already incorporated in our idea but also Rebellion. This was shown in both our survey and vox pop meaning we will incorporate this theme more to appeal to our audience. 

It is clear that the audience want to be able to relate to the characters in the music video as they wanted them to be around the age of 17/18 and also wear what is fashionable amongst teens today, as seen in mainstream female artists music videos such as Taylor Swift. Through our survey we found that a mix of narrative and performance is the most popular option for style of music video which we had already planned to use.  To appeal to our audience more we are planning to incorporate the theme of Rebellion, for example have the boyfriend drink/smoke more and him trying to force her to do the same. We have decided that this would give the music video added interest and also a reason for the relationship breakdown.

Our vision: 

Music Video

The music video will be in a narrative and performance style, as this is typical of the pop genre and our audience research showed that this was the preferred style. The narrative style is going to be restricted, as it is told from the point of view of the girlfriend as we want the audience to sympathise with her rather than than the boyfriend. The costumes used would be the current fashion amongst the target audience age group to create further appeal. This will represent our artist's brand as an ordinary teenage girl to make her relatable for our audience.The shots will be filmed in first date locations such as cinema, bowling, park and restaurants to make them appear a typical couple at first. The montage of happy memories slowly change into the destruction of their relationship. This will be shown through low-key lighting and grungy locations to emphasise the effect of drinking/smoking. The editing will be cut to the beat of the song, with faster editing during the chorus showing the montage of the couple and longer shots of the photo album. 

Ancillary Products: Digipak & Magazine Ad

The digipak and magazine ad will both have a similar colour scheme to show synergy between the two products. Based around the photo album in our music video, they will all have a handwritten theme; this will give the products a more personal touch from the artist. As she is an up and coming artist, this theme makes sense as she has not been made into a USP yet, and is known mainly for her music. The magazine ad will include a packshot of the album cover and the main image will have the same background. The back cover will consist of a notepad background, with a hand written track list, along with musical doodles around it. This will give the artist a pop brand image as the digipak will have lots of images of her; this is very conventional for the pop genre to focus everything around the artist as they are the main selling point of their music.

The Key Concepts: 

The music video will conform to the Hypodermic Needle Model as the messages will inject the meanings into the audience. The audience therefore are passive and will accept the media text offered to them. We feel strongly not to have the typical view of women in pop music videos that offer a sexualised view, so we will challenge the audience theory of the male gaze proposed by Laura Mulvey by not focusing on her body, instead her emotions through close ups of her facial expressions. Instead we want her fashion sense and other aspects of her character to define what the audience will think about her. We will also focus around Hall's preferred reading which is a way that the audience's views are consistent with the director of the text. 


Our Vision:

PINTEREST:

Technology Use

During filming we will either use digital video camera from school or we will exploit the use of our own canon camera to film our shots as this would allow us to produce our work in a higher quality. Whilst filming, we will also use our camera to take photos as we go along for our digipak and magazine ad, mainly of the artist in different locations that we find. Both of these technologies are easy to transport, allowing us to travel to where we want to film easily. We will also use a tripod when filming for some of our shots, but we will mainly focus on using hand held shots as we do not want them to be static, and it is very conventional for music videos to be hand held with constant movement. 


During post production, we will be editing on the school iMac's, using final cut to edit our music video together, which we also used last year. For our ancillary products, we will use fireworks to edit the digipak and magazine ad as we feel confident on this programme from previous experience and hopefully make it look as professional as possible. We will exploit these programmes at both home and at school as we are able to access and use them whenever. 

Logistics

For our music video we are planning to film our narrative parts of the couple in typical first date locations, such as the cinema, bowling allies, arcades, parks, restaurants etc. To make our production successful, we will always refer back to our shooting script, stating when and where we will be filming each day. We will make sure we have permission to film in these public places, for example in the cinema, we have planned to film during the day when it is not busy, and ask a member of staff if we can film in-between the screenings. Our local shopping centre has a cinema, bowling, arcades and restaurants altogether on one floor, so this will be very convenient for us to film there. For the photo album shots, the artist will be sat in her bedroom, this will add a more personal feel to the music video as it is in a real life, natural location. This location will highlight her young age as the bedroom will be filled with posters, and photos on her walls, making it easier for teenage girls to relate to her as a person as this is a common teenage girl's bedroom. 

For the performance parts, our locations will not be as public, for example, the artist's bedroom, underpasses; places where the focus will be purely on the artist, not what is happening around her. We are planning to start filming in November, as soon as we have our shooting script established. As it is half term next week, we will have some free time to go out and film establishing shots of some of our locations, around Central London, Southbank etc.

We have really thought about who we are planning to cast for our music video, we originally planned to cast Jordan, who featured in our project last year; but her look did not match the voice of the artist we are using. During our pitches it was suggested that one of us should be the artist as I have the right look to the artist's voice and have the same style as the type of artist we want to use. This will be very convenient for us as it will allow us to film when ever needed, instead of relying on other people to keep performing for us. We are currently trying to find a boy to play the part of the artist's boyfriend who will fit the role, as the boys who have featured in our previous work do not have the right look for the part and were disapproved by our teacher.

Week Six Reflection

This week we analysed 3 music videos to help us organise and add to our own ideas for our music video. We analysed pop music videos that have similar themes that we were looking to explore. 

We analysed Taylor Swift - Mine as this video has images of the couple and looks back over the relationship. The shots have an effective use of dark lighting representing times of argument and bright lighting during happy times such as marriage and having children together. This video impacted our ideas as it has a very nostalgic look provided by the amateur style of filming that makes it look like a home video with zooms in and out. This could be replicated in our video through the characters filming each other as well.

 We also analysed Rihanna - We Found Love as our research showed that our audience wanted to see the theme of rebellion in the music video. The relationship shown in the music video is quite destructive with scenes of rebellious behaviour such as drug use. This music video will help us convey this theme to our audience, for example the use of motion tracking conveys the effect of drugs effectively.



Lastly, we analysed Demi Lovato - Give Your Heart A Break which also looks back through pictures showcasing the couple's memories. This video will help us gain ideas on the type of shots we can use to show the girl looking back through the images. 

We also did a Meet My Audience to show the audience we are targeting: 

Digipak & Magazine Ad Research

This week we analysed digipaks and magazine ad's to help us with our own ancillary products by understanding the conventions of both and how pop artists are presented through them.

Music Video Analysis

This week we analysed 3 music videos to help us gain an understanding of music videos within the same genre we are planning to use and state how elements of that music video impacted our own ideas.

Meet My Audience

Below is our Meet My Audience. This outlines our target audience, what they like and other media products they are interested in. 

Analysing Our Primary Research

Vox Pop:

Question 1:  What is your favourite music video within the pop genre and why?

•  Majority of artists mentioned by participants were current and more than once leaders of the charts
• Popular reasons for liking that music video was the fun and colourful factors but also the way a story was told

This question allowed us to find out our target audience's favourite music videos which we can now watch and gain an understanding of why this video is popular. This will help us when making our own music video to take inspiration from these videos to attract this audience. 
Participants that said they liked the way a story was told or the expression of the artist shows us that a narrative element would be popular amongst our target audience which benefits us as our music video will predominantly be narrative.

A video that was mentioned was Beyonce - XO:

This video could benefit us as it incorporates themes of love, colour and fun which is what our target audience seem to like in the video. From this video, I may take the effective use of location which brings a colourful touch to the video, this could be used in our own music video as one of the memories that the couple look back on.

Question 2: What themes would you like to be explored in the video?

• Romance and Rebellion seemed to be the most popular themes amongst our target audience 

 This result benefits us as we wanted Romance to be a big part of the music video, although it would be made clear to the audience the couple have now broken up, we do not want to dwell on it too much. This answer may be inaccurate for the teenage girl population as a whole, but appears that most want it to be incorporated.
Rebellion was a surprising result for us, but we are now trying to find ways that this can be incorporated as it seems it is popular amongst our target audience of teen girls. We may even use it as the boy being quite the rebel, but the girl very much opposite, but we are not sure if this is too cliche.

Question 3: What would you expect the characters to physically look like?

• The characters are to be young/around a similar age to the participants e.g. 17/18
• The characters are to wear what is current among teenagers today
• No ethnicity specified/favoured - multicultural?

From seeing what most girls wear, and typing in "Typical Teenage Girl Outfit 2015" into google images, this image seems accurate in what is popular in fashion for girls of the age group specified.This may be something we conform to, or we may want the girl to be portrayed differently, to take on board the idea that one of the participant's said about having complete opposites attracting.

This question benefits us when casting actors for the music video, and we can consider factors such as their style and image to decide whether they are the right representation.


 Question 4: What would you improve about our idea?

• Most liked our idea, the elements of the photo album and text stating facts about the couple's history added something more unique
• 1 Participant said that we should try make the idea less stereotypical compared to other music videos within that genre

This result benefits us as it proves our idea is attractive to our target audience so it has the potential of being a popular music video, therefore a beneficial way of promoting the artist. 

The video has to have some similar elements to other pop music videos, as it has to be recognisable to our audience but we can try to find ways to make the idea less stereotypical.

Survey Analysis:

Week Five Reflection

This week we went out and filmed our Vox Pop. The participants were teenage girls as this is our target audience and asked them various questions about music videos and themes. We also told them our idea and asked them to make improvements and tell us what our characters should look like in terms of what they would wear and their age etc. 

We now need to analyse our primary research (vox pop and survey) and decide how the results we have will affect decisions for the music video. 

For example, who we will cast and how to incorporate other themes into the video which we may have not considered would be popular among the target audience prior to the research.

This week we also started to research into digipaks and magazine adverts of albums to get ideas and analyse what they say about the artist and also understand the conventions of these typical ancillary products. Conventions for pop artists especially include their name and an image that provides the audience with recognition so that they will buy the special edition album in store. For example, in both the examples, here, the main image is of the artist to draw the attention of the reader/audience and show that they are the main focus and selling point of their music.

Week Four Reflection

At the beginning of this week, we put our ideas together deciding that Nicole's idea will be the music video we make with some of my ideas incorporated. This was because her idea had a clearer structure than my own with a finished narrative. Both of our ideas were similar in terms of themes for example, first love and heartbreak. This made it easy to amalgamate our ideas.

Our key concept that we have been focusing on this week is audience, as we have made decisions on who our music video is being aimed at and started to research our target audience. 

We made a research plan where we decided the type of research we wanted to carry out to gain a better understanding of our audience. We decided to use primary research (vox pops and survey) to hear about what our audience expected from a music video and secondary research (YouTube stats and Twitter and Facebook stats) to help us understand pop artist's main audiences.

We started to prepare for our vox pop, by thinking of a representative sample of our target audience (teen girls) and thinking of questions that we may ask and discuss.

We then created our survey on surveymonkey.com to gain a wide variety of opinions:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/T9PNKN8

The secondary research we carried out was YouTube stats of pop music videos. The 2nd most viewed YouTube music video was Justin Bieber - Baby with 1,216,729,955 views which is a conventional pop video with romance and first love themes.
Also the 3rd most viewed YouTube music video was Taylor Swift - Blank Space, also a conventional pop video had 1,173,509,710 views which we believe would be a popular artist among our audience.

We are also planning to research into the followers of similar artists that our target audience may listen to, which would give us a better understanding of their characteristics.

Advanced Production Rationale

We decided to pick Nicole's narrative and performance music video idea as it had a clearer structure than my own idea. She had a better idea of where the story would go, the beginning, middle and end whereas my idea was just the beginning of the story and I was unsure of where the narrative would go. She also had more ideas about the camera style for example the type of shots she would like to do. An example of this is the camera focusing on a picture from a photo album, tracking into it and the still picture then becomes a video montage of the couple at a certain location. We both planned to use the camera hand-held so the music video has a lot of movement, so this was easy to agree on.The editing style she planned to use will match the mood and pace of the song so it is aesthetically pleasing for the audience.

The idea of a music video based around a relationship is a conventional theme of the pop genre, which shows that she had a clear understanding of who we were aiming the video at and what theme they would most likely want to see or being used to seeing. Her inspiration for this idea came from watching music videos within the pop genre, since her idea is narrative and performance which is a common style.

The only issues we face with this music video idea is the use of a DSLR camera as we would like to use it to film but we are not sure of how practical it is.

We also need to find the right cast, as the actress we had in mind may not match the voice of the original singer and we need someone who is accessible to film over the period of production, which we are planning to research more into now.

We have not fully rejected my own idea and plan to incorporate it to create an amalgamation of our ideas. The idea we had to put it together was that the numerical facts about the relationship could appear as she looks at each still picture in the photo album.