Locations for shooting Florence and the Machine video

In the group we have decided there are two ideal places for us to shoot the Florence and the Machine video.

They are:

On the back field of college

And near the pond

After looking at the images we have decided to use the pond area because at the back of the field you can see the houses in the background and overall it is a nicer area!

Character profile of my actress Hannah

The person I have found to film for my music video is one of my friend Hannah who is a great actress and singer and also playes numerous instruments. The reason I asked Hannah to be in my music video is because I believe she will be able to play the part very well. She is also a very interesting person who does a lot of different things in her spare time that will be great to put in my video.  

Hannah Colthup

17 years old (born May 1995)

Interests: Performing, musicals, socialising

Studies Performing Arts, English Language and English Literature at Wyke Sixth Form College

Aspires to be a West End actress

Initial email with details of task for Hannah

 

This is the initial email that I sent Hannah informing her of my chosen song and the lyrics that I would need her to learn if she wanted to take part in my project

 

Production plan for Florence and the Machine video

By Friday 28th September we will need:

India - head dress and shirt DONE

Toni - the actual song DONE

Jen - shawl and ask friends who have frees when we have media if they can be in the film DONE

Nadia - find people to film (didn't meet deadline)

27/09 - sort out planning schedule DONE

28/09 - start filming in lesson on the back field if the weather is right, if not in the green room. Jen and Toni can start editing in 5th period in the editing suite. Meet outside the library (didn't meet deadline due to attendance)

01/10 - lesson 4 after lunch filming outside on the back field. (lack of attendance) During media lesson half of us carry on filming and half of us do some editing in the editing suite. (created a new group and started filming)

02/10 - Jen and Toni editing after lunch in the editing suite (not enough filming had been done)

03/10 - after lunch we all have frees (except Jen who is at Physio) and we'll meet to edit of film. LAST DAY OF FILMING! We will decide on how much filming and editing we need to do when we know how far we have got (finished filming)

04/10 - Jen and Toni have a free together 3rd lesson to do some editing (edited)

05/10 - we're all available during our lesson and 5th period (most of us edited)

08/10 - DEADLINE AT 4!! Adding final adjustments during the lesson (edited most of the film together and met the deadline)

We can't get together and film at the weekends because we all live a long way from each other and we all have work commitments/weddings/other cities we have to be in.

We all have each others phone numbers and emails so we can be in constant contact with one another

Deconstruction and reconstruction of a media text

The video we will be reconstructing is Rabbit Heart by Florence and the Machine. We will be doing the first 30 seconds of the song. This is the original video:

There are five of us in the group: Jen Wilson, India Whiteley, Nadia Skalli, Toni Hardcastle and Philippa Branton. WE have decided that there will be different roles within our groups.

Jen - camera/editing
India - camera/editing
Nadia - producer
Toni - camera/editing
Philippa - director

Psychographic of "I Was Here" 2 Jennie

Psychographic of "I Was Here" India

Skills development essay

Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of the Foundation Portfolio

For my Foundation Portfolio I produced a pop music magazine which targeted a market of mainly teenage girls (80% females: 20% males) who are in the social economic groups C2, D and E. I noticed there wasn’t an existing magazine in the pop genre for this group of people so I made it my task to create one using Adobe Photoshop CS5 to edit my front cover, contents page and double page spread together using my original images and text and I also used www.blogger.com to keep up to date with my progress on the project and write about my decisions and opinions of my media text.

At the start of this project I didn’t have any experience with any of the programmes I was going to be using. Photoshop was completely foreign to me so I had to teach myself everything I know now but I know that it was the best decision to use this software because it is better than PowerPoint and Paint as you can manipulate the photographs to a higher standard. I had also never used the blogging system before and on reflection I know I could’ve done this more effectively. Another program I used was Prezi which I found very difficult to use at first and I didn’t particularly enjoy using it throughout the whole process but it is a great way of planning and showing what ideas you have in an interesting production format.

Before I started the main task of creating a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread we had to create a college magazine front cover and draft contents page as a preliminary task. The first thing I did was set up a blog and posted what my brief was. The preliminary task was the most challenging part of the project for me as I had to learn everything from scratch. My planning for this part of the project wasn’t very thorough and I think this lead to my lack of planning during the main project but I will hopefully be able to learn from this while I’m producing my music video for my advanced portfolio. I started by searching the internet for images of existing college magazine front covers and I repeated this process when I started my music magazine. These were my very first posts on my blog. I was then taught how to do a LIIAR analysis which after practice I started to do very well as it is one of my strengths. My Photoshop skills were very poor during the preliminary task and if I hadn’t have done that task I wouldn’t have done very well in the main piece of coursework, affecting my overall grade.  The main issue I had with Photoshop was not knowing where any of the tools were that I needed to use including how to set up a blank page to start my project. We were taught some techniques in lessons but following this I just had to play around with the different tools until I found the one I wanted to use. Eventually I learnt where the basic tools were such as the cropping tool, spot healing brush tool and blur tool and I used these regularly. To use the spot healing tool I would zoom in so the imperfections on the skin were more visible. I would then select the spot healing tool which would bring up a skin coloured blurry circle as the mouse. I would then hover over the imperfection and click on it a number of times until it was blended into the skin. When I had covered them all up I zoomed out to see how it looked and if there were any problems with it I could then make any adjustments needed. When I began creating my music magazine I had to use some techniques that were more advanced so my work was to a higher standard and to do this I watched YouTube clips to teach myself where they were on Photoshop and how they could help me. I also had to make sure my magazine followed basic conventions such as a masthead, main headline, subtitles, skyline, barcode, price and issue number. I incorporated the main conventions of a contents page and double page spread into my media text too. 

While I was planning my music magazine I found that it was very important to keep referring to current music magazines such as Kerrang, NME, Vibe and Top of the Pops. Although not all of these magazines were in my “pop” genre there isn’t anything out there at the minute that would be an accurate magazine to find similarities from. Top of the Pops is aimed at younger teenagers and children to what my target audience were so I definitely found it useful using conventions from the alternative music magazines. There are a lot of similarities between my front cover and the Kerrang front cover that I used. During the planning process I also thought very carefully about my images. I needed to make sure there was space above my models head so I could include a skyline. I also had to think about the appearance of my model. The clothing was very important to get right because I needed them to look old enough for my target audience but not too grown up so I didn’t offend any of the younger readers. The colour scheme was inspired by that of the Vibe magazine and I would say this was unconventional but going back to the Top of the Pops magazine, this is unconventional too.

Creating numerous drafts of my work was great and I also tweaked things to see which product looked better by saving them to my file under many different names . My blog came in very useful when it came to evaluating my project because I was able to use it as a memory device so I knew the exact process I had gone through to get my finished media text. Looking back I think I could’ve done a better job with the blog but I can learn from this. My blog was also useful to compare my original ideas to what I had ended up with. Although these did change slightly I can see I did follow the template I had given myself to begin with. I also found it helpful to take a few days off from my own work and look at other people’s with them so by the time I went back to my media text I had fresh eyes and was then able to make changes that made my product a higher quality.

Word count: 1130

Psychographic video planning with video to be shown

To enable me to be able to produce a media text that is appropriate for the correct audience I am going to ask some people who are also doing A2 media studies to listen to my chosen song "I Was Here" by Beyoncé and tell me what they think to the lyrics and the song as a whole whilst videoing their response.

The questions I want them to consider are:

• What is your opinion on the song as a whole?
• Can you connect to the lyrics of the song?
• What do you think of when you are listening to this song?
• If you could create the music video to this song what sorts of things would you include?
• What form of music video would you choose to create for this song? (Performance, narrative, dance routine, animation, etc)
• How would you edit the video together?
• What would the artist look like? (clothing, hair and make-up)
• Would you use any specific effects such as greyscale or slow motion etc?

Audience key terms

Qualitative Data - this is data collected through considering why people like a certain music video due to their values and attitudes. It considers why and how someone might like or dislike their product.

Quantitative Data - this is data collected in a more systematic manner, it is less personal and based more around facts and statistics.

Demographic Data - this is a profile of the people you market a product to and it considers factors such as gender (the differences between males and females), age (the difference between ages views), social class (people with higher disposable incomes), what their favourite genre of music is and how they listen to their music.

Psychographic Data - this is used to collect data about an audience's personality, values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles.

Genre

Genre is a type of category that differentiates one text from another and helps create a target audience for the producer of the text. Each genre has its own codes and conventions which are the associations and expectations of that specific text. Conventions are what an audience would expect to be in a text and after codes are repeated numerous times they become a convention. Codes are the denotations and connotations of the text such as camera shots and angles, colours and actions.

 

The conventions of a pop music video are very simple. The audience would expect to see the artist in the video either acting, dancing or performing and if at least one of these things aren't used it would be an unconventional music video. Clothing is an important aspect of a pop video as it should be up to date with the audience and outgoing if necessary as it would be expected of the artist. An example of this would be Lady Gaga as she could get away with wearing anything because of her previous history. The camera shots used in a pop video are usually close-ups and medium close-ups. It is not often that long shots or mid shots are used unless they are revealing something or are being used as an establishing shot. The lighting in a pop music video is usually depends on what the song is about. If the song is telling a dark story, the images on screen will match this. If it is a bright and happy song the video will portray a lot of energy and happiness as this is how the artist wants their audience to feel.

Beyoncé lyrics with a few filming ideas and timings

I will take this into consideration when I come to the final decisions about what to film and how long the shots should be. I still think that this video will be great for montage editing. 

MY SONG CHOICE - I WAS HERE BY BEYONCE

I have chosen to make a video for the song "I Was Here" by Beyoncé because I think it would be a fun video to make and would carry a lovely message with it. "I Was Here" was written by Diane Warren and produced by Ryan Tedder, Brent Kutzle, Beyoncé Knowles and Kuk Harrell. It was the only track on the album that hadn't been co-written by Beyoncé herself. The song was influenced by the September 11 attacks and after Warren had played the song over the phone to Beyoncé and Jay-Z she was in the studio recording it in time for the tenth anniversary. The album 4 was held in production for longer so the single could be added to the already finished album.

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter 

Born 4th September 1981

Houston, Texas

From a young age she loved to perform and her voice gained her a lot of attention even at the young age of seven. At the age of eight Beyoncé auditioned for a girl group which after years of line-up changes and group names became known as Destiny's Child. Destiny's Child released their debut album in February 1998 which was followed by another three studio albums, a Christmas album and various compilation albums. They released 19 singles. It is estimated they have sold over 17.5 million albums in the US alone. Destiny's Child announced a break after they released their Christmas album in 2001 to pursue solo careers.

From 2002 to 2006 Beyoncé was in numerous films such as Austin Powers in Goldmember, The Pink Panther and Dreamgirls. She was also very successful in the music industry as her debut solo album "Dangerously in Love" went straight in at number one on the US Billboard album chart and has now sold over 11 million copies worldwide and is still Beyoncé's bestselling album. The lead single off the album "Crazy in Love" which featured Jay-Z spent eight consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard chart. Other singles off the album had huge chart success to and the album earned her 5 Grammy awards. In 2004 Destiny's Child released their final album and after touring around the world announced their final show in November of that year. "B'Day", Beyoncé's second album was released in September 2006 which also went straight in at number one in the US. Grammy awards were won for this album too and also her role in Dreamgirls from 2006.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z began dating in 2002 after numerous collaborations and got married in NYC on the 4th April 2008. Her third album "I Am..... Sasha Fierce" was released in November 2008 and was the third consecutive album to go to number one in the US and has now sold an estimated 7 million copies worldwide. Eight singles were released from this album including songs such as "If I Were A Boy", "Single Ladies", "Halo" and "Broken-Hearted Girl". In April 2009 Beyoncé starred in the film "Obsessed" which grossed $11.1 million on it's first day. In 2009 and 2010 Beyoncé and Jay-Z were named the top earning celebrity couple of those years by Forbes magazine. At the 52nd Grammy Awards, Beyoncé set the record for the most awards won on one night by a female artist.

In 2010 Beyoncé took time out to focus on her life and creating new experiences. She followed this with a change of management and her fourth studio album named "4". This became her fourth consecutive number one album although sale figures dropped dramatically as did the sales figures for the leading single "Run The World" and second single "Best Thing I Never Had". She headlines Glastonbury in summer 2011 and then announced she was pregnant with her first child on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards after her performance of "Love On Top".

On the 7th January 2012, Beyoncé gave birth to a daughter named Ivy Blue Carter in NYC. Since then she has performed live a handful of times and is rumoured to be in production of another two albums. She also has a few films in the line-up including a biographical documentary about her career and life in the spotlight. Her and Jay-Z were also named the highest earning celebrity couple again by Forbes magazine.