Diary of Filming (Day 4)

We headed down to Linton to film the performance today but the weather turned foul. 2 of the members of the band were also sick. It looked like we were going to have to pack up and go home but we called a couple of people out to stand in. I ended up being the lead singer! wasn't expecting that. The weather was really misty and it was raining lightly throughout the whole performance which we were pretty unhappy about. Hoping we can lighten it when editing. Overall we got all the performance done in 1 day so at least the continuity is there.

Diary of Filming (Day 3)

Yesterday we were going to film in Linton again but the weather turned horrible. We went to Radwinter instead to film some more narrative shots of just Frankie.

Diary of Filming (Day 2)

Yesterday we filmed the drummer's narrative scenes. We went to Linton at 11.30am to make most of the daylight. We started by scouting out possible locations. We were searching for an urban shot, a rural shot and a shot involving a point of interest in the background. Luckily we found an industrial estate in Linton that was perfect for our urban shot, we also found an overgrown public footpath for our rural shot. We ended up finding an interesting shot but we couldn't get permission to film there.
We set a drum kit, with the drummer, up in each location and filmed Frankie (main protagonist) walking past without noticing him. A problem that we came across was that Frankie's car, which we were using to travel in, was too small to fit the drum kit and the cast and crew in. We had to first transport the drum kit to the location with the drummer then drive back to pick up the rest of the crew. This took up a lot of our time meaning we didn't have time to film footage for a 3rd scene. We don't foresee this problem happening with the other band members; they just have guitars.

Diary of Filming (Day 1)

Yesterday we filmed from 1pm to 4pm in Saffron Walden. We aimed to film all the necessary footage for the introduction of our music video. Our introduction was planned to be around 10-12 seconds long for which we filmed a good amount of footage. 
Our establishing shot is a long shot of a slightly urban house and a grungy styled male walking out of it towards the camera.
The next shot is of him walking out of the camera and away from it, towards a car. He then enters the car. In the narrative he will then turn the volume dial up and the song will start as he drives away.
This was a very successful day of filming.

Weather Forecast for Filming

We are filming from 12 - 3 today. checked the weather forecast and it should be a good day.

Costume

The 1990s began the anti-fashion, "anything goes" clothing approach which continues throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Most of the fashion trends of the 1990s were based around the Casual style, such as blue jeans and the T-shirt.
In the mid-1990s the grunge style resulted in a decline in bright colors from 1995 until the late 2000s, and was dominated by tartan flannel shirts, stonewashed blue jeans, and dark colors like maroon, forest green, indigo, brown, white and black.

Example of the flannel shirt and curtain hairstyle

of the grunge era.

Storyboard

These are the storyboard sheets we have drawn to plan for our music video.

Shooting Live performance

A band called "The Strangers" came in today, we filmed them in the pit in groups of three. Personally I was on the walkways above them taking some nice high angle shots. It was great practice and good fun. They were much better live than in their recorded stuff.

Comparing Golden Earring - Radar Love

Feet were out of sync. The drumming was well framed and perfectly on beat. There was a visual build up to match the audio build up.
Actor was in slightly retro clothing. Live performance links to the old music videos where the whole band is together. Letter boxing built up the anticipation of what the next box would be.
I think that more instruments were needed, faster cuts to match the tempo of the song.

Music Video Research

Having watched several Nirvana Music Videos such as "You Know You're Right", "Heart Shaped Box", "Come As You Are" and "Sliver" I now know that Nirvana's style around the early 1990's was partly experimental, mostly performance and lots of slow motion editing and distortion effects were used.

Most of the videos that contain narrative are very obscure, most of the time props and motions performed by the actor are experimental but sometimes they have symbolic meanings.

Barthes Symbolic code is seen throughout Nirvana's video and rarely ever do they have a straight forward narrative storyline.

Examples of Symbolism:



Example of Experimentalism/Performance:

Finished Golden Earring - Radar Love

The cuts mimicked the beat of the music and the mirroring effect was used well.
The mirroring effect meets the audience needs because it's cut in time. It keeps the audience interested. Distortion of the bass form. Distortion of reality. Lip syncing was very accurate.

Music Video Research

This Parody of "Smells like Teen Spirit" pokes fun at Kurt Cobain's singing style and the structure of song as well as the original video. Although hilarious, it is quite educational in the fact that it points out most of the generic conventions of both the song and it's video. It also makes it very clear who the target demographic is by casting most of the "live" audience as long haired rocker types.

Generic conventions comparison

Effects Research

We were researching in to what effects we could use in our Smells like teen spirit video that would match the conventions of grunge in that era. We found that the sepia colour filter is used throughout grunge and slow motion/sped up motion is used throughout as well. We will try and incorporate these conventions in to our video.

Editing Golden Earring - Radar Love

We edited our 30 practice music video today and are happy with the outcome, we think it is well paced, cuts line up to the beats and we have some funky effects that match with the generic conventions of that era.

Copyright

We fired off some emails to who we thought held the copyright to Nirvana's songs but there are some complications. When Kurt Cobain died he left his wife the rights to Nirvana's songs but since then the rights seemed to have been passed from place to place and now the current Copyright holder is untraceable.

The Vixens

Just researched in to a blog by a group of students that achieved level 4....and WOW! These students have put in an enormous amount of time, energy and a bit of money too.
Their planning and research is meticulous to the point of obsession. They blog conversations between them, every item they need for shot and editing sessions.
Even though it is sometimes a bit tedious to read through irrelevant conversations, it provides a sort of narrative glue that holds the whole blog together.

Lyrics

These are the lyrics to lip sync to.

Load up on guns and bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's over-bored and self-assured
Oh no, I know a dirty word

Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello

With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido
Yeah, hey, yay

I'm worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end

Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello
[ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/n/nirvana-lyrics/smells-like-teen-spirit-lyrics.html ]

With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido
Yeah, hey, yay

And I forget just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard, it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, nevermind

Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello

With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido

A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial, a denial
A denial

Target Audience

When asked via Facebook questionnaire, "What genre do you listen to the most?", these are the results we collected from 27 people. If we add together Rock and Grunge as they will have a fairly similar target audience we can say that the majority of our results consist of our target audience.

Music Video Research

We decided that 'teen spirit' was the best choice for us to make a video to as a narrative is easily produced for it. The parts are playable by the musicians we have and overall it has a great pace.




As the official video to 'smells like teen spirit' is almost purely performance it leaves the opportunity for narrative wide open.

Music Video Research

So we settled on 'Smells like teen spirit' after looking through Nirvana's songs and other music around that time such as 'Crazy Train' by Ozzy Osbourne.

Shooting Golden Earring - Radar Love

We Shot our footage for the 30 second video today. We just used a room in the music block because we wanted to use a real drum kit and we couldn't take one out. Everything went smoothly and we got some good footage to use.

Song Choice

At first we wanted to produce a music video to a song from the 'Metal' Genre. After researching some of the existing techniques and narrative for current 'Metal' videos we decided that it was outside our budget, and experience, to produce one. For example, 'Indestructible' by Disturbed uses many props and locations that would just cost too much.


So we decided to choose a "softer" genre but didn't know quite where to start. We finally started looking at classic rock and pop artists such as Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton through to bands like Skid Row, Metallica and Nirvana.

We settled on Nirvana and set about finding the right song.

Music Video Genres

Music videos are usually split in to 3 genres:

Performance: Footage of the band or artist playing/singing sometimes in front of an audience.

Narrative: The video will have clearly defined characters and a story to follow, sometimes linked to the lyrics of the song.

Experimental: These video usually don't have a meaning behind them and sometimes use animation or symbolism.

Media Theories - Uses and Gratifications

Uses and Gratifications Theory is an approach to understanding why people actively seek out specific media outlets and content for gratification purposes. The theory discusses how users proactively search for media that will not only meet a given need but enhance knowledge, social interactions and diversion .
It assumes that members of the audience are not passive but take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives. The theory also holds that audiences are responsible for choosing media to meet their needs. The approach suggests that people use the media to fulfill specific gratifications. This theory would then imply that the media compete against other information sources for viewers' gratification.

Media Theories - Reception Theory

Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading.

This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

Media Theories - Hypodermic needle theory

The "Magic Bullet" or "Hypodermic Needle Theory" of direct influence effects was not as widely accepted by scholars as many books on mass communication indicate. The magic bullet theory was not based on empirical findings from research but rather on assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along" (Lowery & De Fleur, 1995, p. 400). The "Magic Bullet" theory graphically assumes that the media's message is a bullet fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head" (Berger 1995). Similarly, the "Hypodermic Needle Model" uses the same idea of the "shooting" paradigm. It suggests that the media injects its messages straight into the passive audience (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). This passive audience is immediately affected by these messages. The public essentially cannot escape from the media's influence, and is therefore considered a "sitting duck" (Croteau, Hoynes 1997). Both models suggest that the public is vulnerable to the messages shot at them because of the limited communication tools and the studies of the media's effects on the masses at the time (Davis, Baron 1981).

Media Theories - 2 step flow

The two-step flow of communication hypothesis was first introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet in The People's Choice, a 1944 study focused on the process of decision-making during a Presidential election campaign. These researchers expected to find empirical support for the direct influence of media messages on voting intentions. They were surprised to discover, however, that informal, personal contacts were mentioned far more frequently than exposure to radio or newspaper as sources of influence on voting behavior. Armed with this data, Katz and Lazarsfeld developed the two-step flow theory of mass communication.

Planning Golden Earring - Radar Love

We are planning to use 3 cameras to film close up shots of the drum kit on thursday.
2 cameras to film the base guitar from a N,E,S,W view with the base at the center.
2 cameras to film the guitarist playing and singing with a high angle shot on the guitar and a close up of the side of the vocalists face singing in to the microphone.

Storyboarding Golden Earring - Radar Love

As part of research we are making a 30 second music video for the song "Radar love" by Golden Earring.
We are in the initial stage of storyboarding at the moment.

Golden Earring - Radar Love

We are planning to practise our filming and editing of a music video by producing a 30 second clip of the song Radar Love by Golden Earring.

Introduction

Welcome, I'm Graham and this is my A2 media studies blog where I shall be posting about, you guessed it, media studies work.
This year I will be producing a Music Video as part of my coursework.

U2 Performance

The things I noticed about this performance were that the camera is almost never static.
At first each band member is introduced as their part is the predominant instrument in the mix. Afterwards, the crowd is introduced and Bono starts singing as it cuts to him. All this is done to grab and keep the audiences interest as they can't get the 'live' feel. At some points the camera work is done to contrast the size of the band members against the enormity of the crowd.

This shot frames the bassist, Bono and the crowd amazingly well. Bono is in mid shot with a close up of the top end of the base fret to show the fret work. The flags in the crowd are highly visible and being waved by the excited crowd.