Different music video genre's

In the music industry there are hundreds of different genres. Depending on your tastes and interests, depends on what type of music you like and will listen to. Here I will name and explain a few of the more popular and common genres and give a few examples to help explain the characteristics of each genre.
pop (Justin Bieber, Rihanna, LMFAO)
Rhythm and blues ( R&B) (Adele, Lady gaga, Chris Brown)
Rock ( Queen, Pink)
Country (Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus)
Acoustic (Jack Johnson) 
Hip hop & Rap (Eminem, Pitbull, Wiz Khalifa)
Dance (Katy Perry, Pizie Lott, Swedish house Mafia)
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.

Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. In terms of performance, the major categories are live dance music and recorded dance music.

Laura Mulvey's feminist film theory

Best known for her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
One part of her theory suggests the 'male gaze theory', this is based on the assumption that the majority of the male audience will be drawn in to something, if it is visually pleasurable, such as attractive women in music videos. This is highly believable as if you are to watch a large group videos, a lot of them will have women dressed up in an enticing manner.
The other part of her theory suggests that women are only portrayed as one of two possibilities. Either a ' virginal innocent charater' or a 'sexy whore'. Mulvey calls this the 'virgin/whore dichotomy'
Here are a few examples of videos in the official top 40 at the moment. As you can see all of them confirm the Mulvey theory as all the girls are dressed up in a 'sexy' way.

Target audience

In advertising a Target audience is a specific group of people within the general public, at which the marketing message ( in this case a music video) is aimed at.
This audience can be made up and formed by a range of people, for example age and gender.
Deciding who your target audience is is very important, as you do not want to market a particular product  to one category, if the actual audience whom will be interested, will not be attracted to the advertising.
For my music video I must decide on a genre for my video, and from there research who my target audience will be. That way I am able to design everything to be appealing to that specific group.
For example, if I chose to do a classical song, my target audience would be men and women of the older generation, as they would have grown up with those artists, therefore I do not want to create an upbeat, urban video.
From here I must choose my song soon and possibly put out a questionnaire to discover my target audience.

analysing 2 music videos

This is Beyonce's music Video, if i were a boy. It is a narrative based video, and has a continuous story line throughout the whole thing. It is filmed in black and white which I think removes all emotion and makes it feel very plain, However not so plain that it is boring. The song is about Beyonce singing about wishing that she could be in her boyfriends place, and make him feel like she feels, byt the way that he treats her. We are shows her emotions from close ups of her face and seeing how she acts towards him. I really like this video, and think that it shows a lot of emotion.

This video has a lot of meaning to it, as explained by the title 'No regrets'. This video shows Dappy, the artist, singing while there is a story going on inbetween and in behind him as he sings. I really like the way it does this because it really emphasises she lyrics against what is happening. If we were to see him singing the whole thing as well as seeing him acting, then we would not know what to focus on, where as this video shows the lyrics being played out by the video. The video is in colour, which I think shows the emotion, unlike the previous video. I like the way there is a seperate story line, and it has a number of strands. It gives the video more dimensions.

Andrew Goodwin's theory

Andrew Goodwin has identified a number of key features in music videos. They are:

- A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the lyrics.
- A relationship between the music and the visuals, with the visuals illustrating, amplifying or contradicting the music.
- Genre-related style and iconography present.
- Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist.
- Voyeurism often plays a major part, especially in relation to females.
- Intertextual references to other media texts may be present.

He says that music videos are often constructed by the link between the visuals and the song plus the artist. Relationships are built between these in the video, and the close-ups of the artists gives them the representation and publicity they require. Voyeurism is used to increase the video’s attractiveness, particularly to males, whilst intertextuality is often employed in humorous videos.

Many of these features are present in all music videos, depending on the genre of the song and the aim of the record company/artist

Monday 19th

In this lesson we looked alot at stop-motion and how it can be used quite alot in some of todays most popular music videos. Two very different videos, with a large year span between them have used stop motion and in this lesson we analysed these videos to see how these effects are used and what they represent/ do to the video.

These videos are: Peter Gabriel- Sledgehammer and Cold Play- Every teardrop is a waterfall. After watching the peter gabriel video I found that the video is very unsual. At the beginning the relationship between the music and the visuals is almost perfect, for example, where Peter gabriel sings about a steam train and the editing shows a steam train in the video. However, later in the video, it becomes very random and there are faces made out of fruit, which has no relevance to the video. I am not sure why they have done this. Despite this, stop motion is used throughout the video, which I find very impressive. If I do some more research and practice how stop motion works, I may decide to use it in my own video.

sample clips and pictures

Here are a sample of clips and stills we have taken over the last few filming days, fingers crossed we will have enough to work with and create a sufficient music video. As you may see with a few of these clips and a problem we found, was clothing, our singer did not have on the same clothes each day, so using the same backdrop and seeming as if it is all the sasme day, yet having different clothes for each, may not look too good.

More problems

Yesterday we attempted to start editing our clips, and had to stop not long after as we had software issues. Our biggest problem was sound, we were unable to get the sound from the audio to play on any of our computers, we left the computers to re-boot, and waited until today to try again.
This morning we encountered the same problems again, except this time, the sound bagn to work, then suddenly the sound went again. We changed computers and did it all slowly, and luckily, it worked.
The next problem we had was the soundtrack we downloaded from itunes, was a faster version of the song we had originally used. So we immediately rocognized that lip syncing would be a huge problem. Therefore more time was wasted trying to find the correct version.
Eventually we did, but more software problems arrised- our clips were quite jumpy, and we were finding that difficult to sync with the music.

good and bad things about the footage..

The biggest problem we have with the footage we have, is that the camera does not like the effect that the strobe light has, and when we watch it back on the computer, it looks crackly, and flashes part of white. Although this will have a bad effect on our karaoke video, it has warned us prior to us making our own video if we choose to use the lights and setting.
Another problem we have is that one of the cameras is quite old and only has 2.8megapixel, as apposed to the other cameras that has 5 megapixel, so the quality of the other camera is not as good and looks very blury and quite pixelated. Therefore we may not be able to use alot of the footage, unless we use just footage from that camera.
However on the plus side, we do have a lot of footage and a lot of different angles, and from all the practice we have had on the lights we managed to time them quite well and also achieve colours to go with the words and mood within the song. For example, at a point in the song the word 'happiness is sung and the colour turns to yellow, which is associated with being happy, aswell with the timing, when the music speeds up or slows down, the light flash slows down or speeds up with it.

Starting the karaoke video

The song we have decided to use for our practice video is   Florence and the Machine- Dog days are over.

We started filming our karaoke video today after about 3 days of practicing with the lights and sound. Our first few takes of the video didnt go too well as we could not seem to get the correct lights with the music. One of our cameras also died which meant that we could not get all the angles we hoped for. We played around with the other 2 cameras and decided that the best outcome and variety of takes would be to have one static camera sat on a tripod, and one moving camera which circled the singer. Although this did give us a lot of different angles, we cannot use a fair bit of the footage as we can see eachother in the takes. However, this should not be too much of a problem as we are able to cut and slot in different parts. The only problem that may occur is that it could be quite jumpy and may not flow very well. 

Research..

In doing some research about production and other people music videos I found a very useful website which was full of information and links to other blogs.
http://www.longroadmedia.com/
I looked mainly into the links for - 'music video project' and 'production evaluation' Both of which had links to blogs and research links.

Evaluation questions

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

lighting

As I have been thinking about lighting alot and how I plan to use the lights in my video to create effect, such as using a spot light on my singer. I thought it may be useful if I were to research how lighting has been used in other music videos and films. I found this video which I felt was very useful as it gave a definition of the lighting technique's and then examples of real music videos where it has been used. It has given me a few good ideas and even if I dont use them for my video, they may come in handy for the karaoke video.

Ideas..

Whilst playing around with the lights I was thinking about my own video after and had a number of ideas incorporating this technology, as i think it would be a shame to not use it. My favourite song choices at the moment are Adele- Rolling in the Deep and Adele- someone like you. I think they both have great lyrics and could immediately think of some good ideas for a music video. Today however whilst testing the lights and sound I had some ideas of how to make my video unique and how to take advantage of the technology. As there is also a large drop down screen with a projector, I have thought that it may be a good idea to create my music video out and around using the story line I will create, however rather than just having my entire video as that, I can have my main artist and person in the video sat on the stage with a spotlight with the video and footage running in the background, by which I will swap back and forth to the video and to my artist singing. However this was just an idea and may think of something different and more appropriate.
If I do choose to use the song 'Someone like you' I may choose to have someone playing along with the piano as i think that could enhance the slow tempo of the song, where as if I were to do that with 'Rolling in the deep' it may ruin the flow of the song.

Thursday 8th lesson

Today we had our first lesson on how to use the new software and technology in the hall. We learnt how to use the lights and sound and how a 'few' of the controls work, it was very confusing as there was so many different controls. when we had a try out for ourselves we found that the effects for the lights were endless and looked amazing on the stage. Next lesson we must have chosen a song and be prepared to start filimg our final practice video. So far our favourite idea is 'Tracey Chapman- fast car' as it is simple and will be a nice song to be able to lip sync to. For the next week we will be up in the hall practicing how to use the lights and how to adjust the sound.

Todays lesson

In today's lesson we read over a section of 'MediaMagazine September 2011' written by Pete Fraser. From this small part we picked out parts that were relevant to our coursework and found information that would help us. From reading this we found a sub heading called 'Karaoke music video' this said......"..." Which we felt was extremely relevant and would help us in the production of our own music video. Therefore in the next few lessons we have decided to make a short, 1 minute video as a group. We have a great location with high-tech lighting and sounds, this will give us more of an idea on how it will be to make our video, and may also give us tips and how to/not to do things in the future. We will also have to think carefully about how to not complicate this video too much as we need to keep time and ideas for our videos. This is primarily to help us understand and more about camera angles and lighting, as well as mise en scene, because despite our location being very useful, the back drop and area is not very appropriate. One idea is to use the green screen, however I am worried this will use up too much time. Now to choose a song..

"In defence of media"

Having read an article in 'Media Magazine September 2011' by a media teacher Nick Potamitis on production and his own experiences and reflection as a producer I found a number of interesting points that are relevant and that i can relate to and understand. Having referred to himself as a 'geek' he explains how he feels that this title comes with many perks when in the process of production, one of which is creativity............

Song ideas so far..

Lemar- Someone should tell you
Adele- Rollying deep
Maroon 5- She will be loved
Maroon 5- Runaway
Ed Sheeran- The A team