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

Analyzing my preliminary task

I do feel that the overall outcome of my preliminary task is well managed. There are a number of good points to the video, as well as there also being a large number of parts that I would change and will learn from next time.

The video itself has produced a good result, and it is watchable, which is more than i thought it would be when we had finished. I think that we chose some really good songs, and the video has a humorous side to it, which I think is a good thing to have when showing it to other people.
One major lesson I have learnt from this project is how I should stand the camera's next time, as you can see from a number of parts throughout the video, the picture is quite wobbly, and does not look very professional, therefore we should have used a tri-pod more often than we did to get a clearer picture and a more stable image. This will make the video easier for us to watch as well as making it simpler for me when videoing.

Lip-syncing is a huge part of the video making and in parts of this video, it is not very well matched. I found that it was very hard to match the lips with the music perfectly, in fact it was a lot harder than i was expecting it to be. If the lip-syncing is out then the entire video looks awful. Therefore when choosing actors/artists for my next video I should make sure that they are very well pronounced with a lot of confidence, as that way they will be more confident when videoing.
As I have never used the software before I was very uncertian about how it worked, therefore a lot of my time was spent exploring the software or asking other, more experienced users how to work it. For example, I spent a long time working out how to mute the sound from the video when the music is playing, but as you can see I soon discovered, that in order to do this you must cut the exact part of the music that you require and place it on the storyboard, as well as cutting the same amount in the video that is in sync with the music. Then once this has been cut, I had to right click and find volume, therefore lowering the sound completely. At some places in the video this has been done very well, but in others, either the clip has been cut too early/late, the music has been cut too early/late, or they are not in time.  This has made me think more carefully about what song I should use for my music video, as I do not want to be using a song that is too quick and the words can not be very easily heard/seen.

The mise-en-scene in a number of these clips is not very well constructed, for example in 'The Candy Shop' scene, there are clothing rails and buckets in the background, this does not go very well with the image I am trying to put across and the same goes for a few of the other clips. I should have thought about where the camera angles were, where I was going to stand and where I was going to have the actors stand to gain the best shot before I begun filming.

Another serious issue that I must ensure that I check before I film next time is lighting, in a few shots the lighting is irregular and this does not help with the overall image. In some cases, the light may be over exposed and we are unable to see everything clearly, and in others the light is too dim and we cannot see everything that we need to.
I feel that the editing and cuts between each clip has not been done very well and the general 'flow' of the video is not very good, it is very jumpy and it shows that the video has been done to a lower standard. I'm sure that when I begin to understand how the software works a bit better, I will work out how to make these transitions look better and more professional. For example using different effects and transitions would have helped the video to go easier and would have also made it easier to watch as apposed to the jumpy way it does now.

So frustrating!

One huge problem I have found with the school software, is that it tends to crash a lot. I began to analyze my video and believed that when I logged off at the end of the lesson, everything I had written had been saved. However, as I found when I logged back on again on my own computer, the work I had previously done, has been lost. This is frustrating and a waste of time. I really hope that this does not happen when it comes to creating my real music video.

Our video!!

We have finally finished our video and uploaded it to Youtube. Overall I am initially pleased with the quality of the video and I think that as it is a preliminary task and I was completely new to all the software and technology within this project, we have done a good job.

Firstly, I do believe that the picture quality is good, and the general visuals are acceptable, however one thing I know I would and will change for my actual task next year is to mainly use a tri-pod to shoot my video.



Ready to start editing

Now that we have finished our exams we are able to devote more of our time to the editing of our video, we have finished filming as well as having all the correct songs.
So, using Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 we imported all of the clips and songs, the problems with this was that because we used two cameras, one hand held camera and one on a tri-pod, the scenes were not all together which was a slight problem when trying to find the best take of each scene.
Once this was done we then put the required song with the right clip, as I had not really used this software before I was a bit unsure of what to do, so with some help from the rest of my team we were able to work out what different controls did what we needed them to do.
Muting the sound while the music was playing was a large problem that I came across but once wokring at it for a while we soon worked out what to do. In order to only mute a select part of the song we had to cut the clip just as the actor started to sing with lyrics and just as they finished, then going to volume controls we were able to turn the volume completely down and insert the small part of song lyrics that we had just cut from the entire song. We then had to watch this part over and over again to ensure that the lip-syncing was as close as we could get it. This process was also very long winded and was not very fun to do.
However, continuing with this process throughout the whole video we soon had roughly a 2minutes 30second long video. Eric, Alex and I, all had a shot at editing different parts of the video and also advised eahother on what to do to help.
Because we all had work experience we were unable t do as much work to the video as we would have liked, but we all managed to spend a few hours throughout the week to finish it.

Re-takes!!!

A large problem we came across was having to re-take different clips when things went wrong, this was very frustrating for both us as filming directors, and the actors, as they were getting annoyed at having to do the same part over and over again. As you can see in these two clips, it was very difficult to get the right angles, as well as telling the actors where they should stand so that we can see their lips, as this would help us to lip-sync. Nearly every scene had to be shot more than 3 times, as well as being frustrating, it was also very time consuming.

Putting the clips together

Today we did another part of filming as it was raining a little bit, trying to find a time when all of us are available and it was raining has proven to be very difficult however i think that filming today went ok and we have now nearly got all of our clips we need.
As we were filming another part of the film we thought of other parts we could put in rather than the scene in the dining hall, therefore today when I was about to start putting the clips together I found that we were unable to as we did not have all of the required songs. Therefore 'Eric' another person in my group had to spend most of the lesson finding these songs on itunes and buying them.

As it was my first time on Adobe Premiere Elements I was a little bit unsure on what to do, therefore I did not get much done, however I did learn a few things such as how to cut clips in order to delete unwanted parts. I can see that it may be quite hard but hopefully when i get the hang of it, it should be ok.
One major thing that I was not expecting was the horrible background noise left from the cameras, especially in shots done from outside, removing or covering up this sound may be difficult and will be something that I will have to try to work out how to do next lesson.

Filming

This week we finally began filming and so far it has gone well. We have filmed a number of parts of our overall video so far and with a few trys, we think we have quite a few clips that are worthy of being in the film.

Top 10 tips on how to make a music video

Having researched ways to make a suitable and convincing music video I found that these 10 following tips were very useful and all relate perfectly to everything I need to do for both the preliminary task as well as my main task.
Top 10 Tips
1. Choose your song
2. Get a team and equipment
3. Plan your shoot
4. Filming
5. Capture live footage
6. Use stock footage
7. Editing
8. Get the right software and hardware
9. Be creative
10.Beware

'Filmmaking tips'

I found this video on you tube which was actually quite use full, although I knew most of the things that it said it was a good refresher and has helped me to visualise these things as apposed to just reading them. Some of the parts in this video are irrelevant to me, such as the small parts for the creator of this videos own personal uses. I thought it was good research and could be very useful for when I create my real music video.

Cameras..

While filming a couple of scenes we found that it was more difficult that we had originally thought to get a close enough view of the lips to help with lip-syncing and yet a long enough view to get the rest of the scene. So in order to over come this we set up two cameras, one hand held and another on a tri-pod from a different angle, this not only helped us to use different angles, but also gave us more clips to work with. I found that using the tri-pod was much more useful and logical that holding the camera, this is because it gave a steadier image and we were able to direct it as well as having to worry about what the camera was doing. We are going to use this two angled view approach for all of our clips as it will help us in the long run and we will then be able to make a better overall video as we will have more to work with and more examples of clips.

Problems so far..

As we have planned out our storyboard to be different times throughout the college day we need a number of different settings to play as the mise en scene and fit the song. For example, we were unable to film one particular scene as we needed it to be raining for it to fit with the song ' why does it always rain on me'This is where so far we have found it difficult to film, and one small problem we have had to over come. Another problem is having time with the same people to use as our 'actors'. Therefore we have had to try and film as much as possible in a short period of time.

Story board and songs

What is a storyboard?

Once a concept or script is written for a film or animation, the next step is to make a storyboard. A storyboard visually tells the story of an animation panel by panel, kind of like a comic book.

Your storyboard will should convey some of the following information:

• What characters are in the frame, and how are they moving?
• What are the characters saying to each other, if anything?
• How much time has passed between the last frame of the storyboard and the current one?
• Where the "camera" is in the scene? Close or far away? Is the camera moving?

Why make a storyboard?

Creating a storyboard will help you plan your animation out shot by shot. You can make changes to your storyboard before you start animating, instead of changing your mind later. You will also be able to talk about your animation and show your storyboard to other people to get feedback on your ideas.

Here you can see our ideas for the story board, we thought of ideas and drew them as they came to us, then as you can see we have numbered them in the order that we will aim to film and put them together in.

These are examples of other story boards for a variety of things, I found them very useful and a good source of research, they show a number of things such as:

- Structure

- Images

- Wording

- Planning

We tried to base our own story board on this, however as you can see, not as higher standard as these. 

The story board on the left is a very detailed and high quality story board, it shows camera angles and even facial expressions, although doing a story board to this much detail would be very time consuming, I can understand why it would be useful for when creating the final product as it would save more time when deciding what they wanted. However, the story board on the top right is more like our own, where it has simple drawings and short hand notes, however it also has much more detail such as saying in places where they would pan and zoom etc.

However we are also aiming to hopefully entwine more songs as we film and think of other ideas. So far we aim to use the following songs:

Leaving on a jet plane-

Umbrella- Rihanna

L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N- Noah and the whale

All of the lights- Rihanna ft. Kanye West

Bright Lights, Bigger City- Cee Lo Greene

Buzzin'- Mann Ft. 50 Cent

The Fast Food song-Fast Food Rockers

Frisky- Tinie Tempah Ft. Labrinth

The Lazy Song- Bruno Mars

OH NO!- Marina and the Diamonds

Smack That- Akon Ft. Eminem

Hello- Martin Solveig Ft. Dragonette

Rain on me-

Friday- Rebecca Black

Next we need to find approx 10 people to appear in our video, and begin filing using a 'Panasonic HDC-SD60 Full HD'

Preliminary Task

We watched this video called 'Songs in real life', which is a video made by a group of teenagers in America. The use normal conversation but with song lyrics and the song to make a video. We have decided to make one of these video ourselves as it will help us prepare for making our actual music video.
I hope to learn how to lip-sync which making this video and will therefore be able to complete my own full music video to a higher standard.
I think that this video is very well made and the lyrics to the song fit perfectly in time with the words being said/sung.
In preparation for making our own 'songs in real life' we will first create a story board with a number of ideas, then once that is completed we will ensure we have all of the required songs and then begin filming.