Equipment Available for Use

Before we started filming our video we looked at what equipment we had available to us so that then we could decide about what sorts of things we could do.

For our music video task, we have a lot of professional equipment available for use. These being equipment we can borrow from the college, or our own equipment from home.

College Equipment:

3 X Sony HDV-Z5E  (1080p HD Compatible)

2 X Canon XM-3

2 X Canon HF 21 (1080p HD Compatible)

2 X Nikon D90 (720p HD Compatible)

3 X Professional Video Lights

Video Light Gels.

Black curtain screen

Green curtain screen

Black Room Video Studio

A3 Colour Lazer

Macbook’s With Final Cut Pro Installed

Own equipment:

1 X Nikon D3000

1 X Sony HX-1 (1080i HD Compatible)

Macbook’s with Final Cut Pro Installed

Variety of Probs

White umbrella for studio lighting. 

Treatment Ideas

Here is just a quick audio blog just noting down some of the ideas that we have before the final treatment is written up and produced.

Music Consumption

The way music is consumed is for every changing.

Music is now not just on radio and CD, but there are an every growing list of music channels on cable and satellite.
There are services such as youtube, Spotify, iTunes store and even artists websites with more and more multimedia content been available for audience consumption.

YouTube

Youtube is becoming the most popular way people are watching and share music videos. It is available on many different platforms. Mobiles, iPads, Apple TV, Game Consoles and even some Blu-Ray players and TV's have a youtube player built in them.
Vevo is a Music Video Distributer that is a joint venture between Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Abu Dhabi Media which has EMI licensing to its content. Vevo hosts its music videos on YouTube which is accessible in the UK & other continues, countries without access to the content will get a message saying 'This video contains content from VEVO, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds'. This service is a good way of making music videos available on-demand.
Stereophonic's use Youtube to share their music videos across selected countries. Sterophonic's Youtube Video Playlist - This is to the thanks of VEVO.

Spotify

Spotify has become popular services which is growing in users by the day. It is a swedish DRM-based music streaming service offering unlimited streaming of music from major and independent record label including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group & Universal. 

Spotify is available on a wide verity of platforms, Windows, Linux, Mac, iPhones, Android devices, Symbian (Nokia Phones), Windows Mobile & Palm Devices. This making it accessible to virtually anyone with a smartphone and laptop.
The services is free to stream music, although adverts will play between tracks (aprox. every 15 minutes of listening). Users can pay for a premium account, which allows for offline listening, no adverts, and steaming via their phone.

Location Research

Me and dan meet up at my house to discuss some places for the location of the narrative based footage. Instead of going out on the bikes to look at locations we used google street view, meaning we could search further afield to where we can bike to today.
Below is a series of locations we are thinking of using.

Nantwich:

A very quiet area, and some long paths we could do some jump cuts with.







Audlem

Another quiet area, with a powerful looking church, could be used for a good backdrop.







Prees

A really local place to us. We could shoot some footage under the bridge, and some shots of the actor sitting down on the platform on the bridge.

Genre and Target Audience

The genre of the music that we have chosen is rock and brit pop. We chose this genre because it is very popular and it appeals to a wide range of audience. It is suitable for teenagers and the older generation but it is mainly aimed at teenagers. The original music video has currently 439,174 views on youtube so it is successful and popular.  

Our target audience is predominantly teenagers because I think that they can relate to it more because its modern and new. 

After our target audience research it was very popular with older teenagers and the older audience.
To found out our audience we did some research by giving a questionnaire to a range of people to find out what audience they think will like it the most. 

Audience Research Feedback

After asking questions to members of my media group who like the stereophonics as well as the stereophonics forum i have collated the results that i gathered and have made. We found in our research that most of the people we are asked were of the male gender, and of the age between 25 and 30 this is therefore our target audience that we will focus on when making the video.

Our people that we asked said that they did not partially like the original video, this was mainly because the video was hard to follow. This straight away told us that for our product we would need the storyline to be simple if we were going to do a narrative based video. Our focus group did say though they liked the black and white effect in the video. In inital discussions with the group we had considered a effect on the video and since finding this out we have decided that we will do some testing useing a effect to see what it looks like on our product.

To find out what sort of video our target audience want we asked them if they wanted a narrative based video, a perfomance based video or a bit of both. From what our target audience said most of them prefer like the original video a narrative and performance based video. This is the idea that we had from the start and in line with what we had thought about doing, so for our product we product

Audiance Research

For our product we first before drawing up ideas, We first started looking at what our target audience was and what we could do to meet our target audiences requirements. To do this we first did a google search, while doing this we found there official website as well as a fans forum. This allowed us to see a insight about the sort of people who are fans of the stereophonic as well as what a typical stereophonic fans likes and dislikes.

To do the research we posted a thread of the forum with a number of questions, these question asked the fans about what they wanted to see in the video and also any ideas that they had for our video. The questions we asked them are below and we will do a follow up post showing what we have found out.

1. Are you male or female ?
2. What age are you ?
3. Do you like the original video for "Maybe Tomorrow" ?
4. What do you like about the original video ?
5. What do you dislike about the original video ?
6. Would you prefer a narrative based video a performance based video or a mixture of both ?
7. Would you like any extra footage (EG Michael Jackson's Thriller) ?

These questions will be asked to fans as well as normal members of the class to get a accurate answer of what our audience want weather they are die hard fans or just people who like the same genre.

Permission Request

Now that we have decided on what track we will be using we sent a letter to the Stereophonics record label. The reason we did this was to ask permission to the groups label to make sure that it was fine that we used there music in our video.

We explained in the letter about what we needed the track for and how we would be using the track, as well as a background about what we are doing in our media lessons.

Below is a copy of the letter.

This is the music track that we have chosen to make a music video for. The original music video is filmed in black and white and it is set in the past. It is mainly set in corridors with loads of straight lines.
The paste is quite slow which suggests the audience is relaxed and calm. This follows the name of the song because the name suggests that they don't do things today they do things tomorrow. There are a few pans and tracking shots in the original music video. The opening shot is of a close up of a door and a man taking a sign off the door handle. It tracks up the to the mans face and him shutting the door.
The next shot is of a corridor with loads of straight lines which draw the eyes to the end of the corridor.
Then there is an over the shoulder shot of someone writing something down. It the cuts to a shot of the person thats writing with a guitar which suggests that he is writing music. We then see a medium close up a metronome ticking away which suggests that it is set in the past and it shows that time is passing.
It then goes into focus on the back of the metronome and then it fades to black and a transition is used to go to the next shot of a road and it quickly cuts back to the corridor we saw before and we can see a sign on the left wall saying stage which suggests that they are about to go and preform on a stage.  Then a POV shot is used as they walk down the corridor and it goes to a tracking shot of three men with guitars it then cuts to a high angle shot of a man with no top on and starts walking down a corridor. It then cuts to another man with a white shirt on a guitar in his hand. It is a mid camera angle and there is low lighting and the man in the white shirt is lit up to show he is the most important thing in the scene.
Then we see a woman in a black shirt which symbolises a maid. The camera is positioned behind the woman and tracks behind her as she walks.
Then a POV shot is used as we see another maid walking past and it quickly cuts to another POV shot of someone typing on a type writer.
We then see a medium close up a guitar and a mic stand. We will be using a mic stand in our music video as well. 
The next shot is of a of a room and the props suggest that it is a dressing room because of the way the room is lit and the mirrors on the wall. It then pans across and then there is an picture effect where it is quickly edited to show different still shots. Then there is a medium close up of a a bin and the man opens it and we see his reflection. It cuts to the same shot as we saw before of the road. this is used as a time laps. The next shot is of the man we saw before standing in a wind. This shot is framed so the man is in the centre of the frame and he is looking down which shows that he is powerful. The next shot is an a high angle shot which pans up as the man runs up the stairs and the end of the shot shows a theatre type building with a stage and seats facing it. A high angle tracking shot goes on to the stage and it pans across to show everyone coming on stage.
The end scene is of a tracking shot which is going backwards down the corridor. 
We are going to use the tracking shots and studio take in our own music video that we are going to create.