Influences

Looking through music videos I realized that quite a famous band has the same sort of colour scheme and contrast that I have going on with the black white and red idea. The White Stripes also use the same concept throughout their videos and this works especially well with the fact that they have a female drummer as it makes her stand out. However the main reason that this works for them is because by using just the three colours the contrasts between the colours are used to make the band stand out much more for us to see. An example of this is below in their video of seven nation army. As you can see in the picture the colours of the clothes they are wearing tend to blend with or contrast the colour of the moving background, and by doing this immediately draws your attention to the artists themselves which is where I got my inspiration to do the same for my artist in my music video as I think that selling the artist works well in a performance based video especially when you are using voyeuristic traits when filming my female singer.

Digi Pack Research

For my Digi Pack I am looking for inspiration from other artists that are sole performers or their cover art is sort of along the lines i am sort of looking for. My idea is that i want to have a picture of my performer on the front of my cover and still having the monochrome contrast effect that i am having in my video take some element in the digipack. For the inside pictures of the album digi pack i am going to have one long picture across the three pannels of her in her whit dress across the drama studio with the lights and microphone set up and across the the back i am going to have pictures of her walking down the alley with the contrasting dress clour staggered image edited so that it all looks like one photo.

These are some examples which gave me abit of inspiration as i really liked the vulnerable look you have on Adele's Album which is also the same sort of feel you get with one aspect of my music video the part when she is filmed in the white dress, however at the same time i am also tying to make it look appealing and by conforming to the male gaze theory i would like to have her looking slightly more seductive like madonna yet at the same time not so much that women find it offensive so actually i'm sort of going for both types of audiences but mainly focusing on the male buyers.

The aura round the women on the muse album is a really nice effect and oit really excentuates the fact she is isolated from everything and in the blackness of space she is almost like a star and this type of effect could be really nice to play around with seeming as i was thinking of calling my album echoes and the aura effect sort of gives you that idea.

Camera Experience

I found it quite hard to get to grips with the new camera's so over the holiday i took it with me to cornwall to get used to the different settings i could use and also using the manual focus and other useful settings such as changing the colour scale and whether or not to use different effects.

This is the opposite hillside to St Ives and i was just trying out different shots seeing wether i could capture the rustic seaside feel of the town as the lighting and the sky seemed right to take it. This was just using the auto setting first as i just wanted to see what quality i would get and how good it would look. Looking back to edit this photo i would take some of the sky out so there is not so much of an expanse.

After getting used to the auto settings and what i am was getting from the picture's i set it to the P setting on the camera which required me to manual focus and i had my own user settings so for this i played around with the sepia tone effect which gave a completely different feel to the pictures as you can see in the one on the left i took of the old peir at low tide. It just gives it a very old earthy looking effect and that is quite a nice rustic feel for the scenery i was taking the picture of.

The next effext i played around with was using the monochrome and what advantage that gave me and it soon became apparent that for the old buildings in the alleyways of St Ives it gave a really crisp picture and added to the age of the buildings. The very crisp edge feeling i saw in the quality of the pictures meant that i now knew that using this effect would definatley work and give it a really nice finish when filming.

For this last photo i really liked the cloud patter and it gave alot of depth to the photo. This one made me realise that i do have to think about what angles would be best when filoming my artist in the alley scenes as i will want depth in them aswell and by shooting her dead on won't really give me that effect, so this is a usefull reminder for that.

Overall the reason i was taking these Photo's was because when i tried a photo shoot with my artist Effie i had alot of problems with the camera which i did not know how to solve and i also wasn't getting the desired effect that i wanted so by playing around and getting to know the camera a lot more by taking photo's and at looking at the different settings i feel as though i can maximise the effect of my music video.

Costume

With the use of one of the greatest online shopping sites (Ebay) i found some dresses which are the similar sort of style i would like lead singer/Performer to be wearing. So obviously following on from the main concept i have  i am using only three colours Black White and Red all simply because the contrast of them all paints the perfect feeling of lust, emotion and a sense of freedom that i would love in my music video. This is the sort of black dress i am going for, i want it quite tight fitting because i like the feeling of it being quite buisness like and serious as this would contrast with the white.

With this white dress I think it gives the feeling of being free and and it would make her appear quite young because you get the sense of innocence with white which i another reason i would like to use it as it would look very ironic with the type of dancing i would like her to be doing. Also the frilly kind of texture it has adds to the innocence while at the same time shows more skin and this links to Goodwins Theory of Voyeurism as whoever watching will be completely focused on the artist herself especially when she is wearing more revealing clothes, so obviously would be looking at a largely more interested male audience therefore playing of the male gaze theory aswell i shall be keeping in mind if i would like more views.

Finally the red Dress. I have chosen to add the colour red into the contrasts of black and white because this colour could also be a contrast in the fact it is technically the only vivid colour and because of this it will emphasise it's effects which will make my artist look very seductive and again this will add to the male gaze effect that i want as obvioyusly it would make people pay much more attention especially men. The red dress will really work for when she will just be walking because it will change her movement of being just a walk into a very attractive catwalk like motion which will suit the effect i am going for.

More Inspiration

Another video i have taken some inspiration from is atari teenage riots song blood in my eyes. The inspiration from this video just from watching the singer. I really like the way how she is singing into the camera which is above her and at the same time the area that is lit up for her sing into, she moves in and out of it which creates a really good effect and i think it especially suits the emotion and power parts of my song, especially when she starts singing the chorus i could see it working very well as it fits into the whole feel that i want with my music video.

This next video Runaway by Ladytron was really useful to me as it gave me another concept of how the black and white contrast can be used because i always had in my head the idea of black on crisp white background and the same the other way around however the effect you get from the lines in the video gives the look of something a bit more hectic and that might suit the lyrics of my song a bit better than having it all so crisp and neat. Another point i like in the video which might be hard to do myself, is the lines going up the walls in the background are going in unison with the music and this emphasizes the main underlying beat which gives you more of a feel for the music and rhythm and subtle things like that  would also be nice to have in my music video. 

Creative Block And Inspirations

For a while i have been coming up short on my ideas and i couldn't understand why ideas weren't flowing so i had a little think about what i want to be shown and how to show it and have come back with lots of new ideas and inspiration thanks to alot of new videos that have been shown to me. On one of my earlier blog posts i showed the idea i had in my head about having a few different shots of an alley with the girl walking down it, and now with inspiration from La roux's video of BulletProof, i have decided to get three different shots of her walking down the alley but each time wearing a different dress and then edit them all to look like one shot however different parts of her are obviously in the different colours which i think looks really cool.You will find this example towards the end of the video.

The concept of my music video is to have contrast hence I am using Black and white because for me you can't really get any more contrasted than that and it also gives a sense of neat and crisp which i really want for this type of music video. A video that helped influence me was the video by Phantogram "When I'm Small" in this video it is constant black and white and the use of having a black liquid on the white is something for me is really quite attractive. There is also a part when the lead singer is singing with the black background behind but as she is moving she has the different coloured ghost trail that follows her and that is a really cool and i really want to use this for when i film in the drama studio and i will hopefully, using adobe premier pro cs 5.5, create a trail to follow her but my ghost trail will be red as i have realized i only want Red, Black, and White.

Record Label Searching

So I have been searching for the record companies and the best way was by using wikipedia, this was really useful because it has a long list of different independent English record labels and it was also good to see how you can type in the name of a similar band and then find their record label and see what other bands are also listed under them. As you can see i have screenshotted the different ways of getting to the final page of the record company.

To know whether Fierce Panda Records were the company i would like to choose i used a music site called the Hype Machine and on that i entered some of the band names that are listed with the fierce panda records and listened to some of their tracks to see if they were the sort of genre i liked. In the end i actually found a few tracks that were close to the same genre so from there i used another website which would help me even further Last FM.com.

ShitDisco were the artists that were quite similar and so using the advantages of Last FM and having a look at similar artists i gathered that actually my song was quite similar to these bands and if fierce panda records would sign ShitDisco then they should quite feasibly be able to sign my singer.

Fierce Panda Records is the company I have chosen because they sign bands that are similar but also they are an independent UK based record company for independent artists in England so i think they would be the write people to help promote my Album.

FeedBack

I got my feedback from the presentation i gave to my class. I found it really useful because i knew all the shots i wanted to use in my video however i was finding it really hard to put a narrative into the lyrics. It was then suggested to me that i should actually change the idea of using narrative to doing a performance based music video as it also made sense because alot of the music videos i have been looking at are mainly performance based so it will also provide me with more ideas as now they are alot more relevant.

Inside My Head

So i was finding it hard to explain the way i would use the alley shot i would get so i edited the clip using adobe premiere i then found the alley clip and the shots i wanted from Florence and put my music with it to give you the kind of effect i want to have when putting my clip together. Because it's quite hard to describe to someone when you can so clearly see it in your head but this is as close enough example i can get without doing it myself.

 

Camera Shots

Im just trying to get other examples of the shots i have in my head from other videos. So as one of the reoccurring pieces of footage i wanted my character to be either lying on her bed or on the floor i'm not really sure however the angle of the shots and what shots i want are almost perfectly replicated in the intro to cosmic love BY good old Florence + The Machine. I know they are a completely different genre but if u ignore the music and put mine over the top i can actually see it making sense and looking rather cool here are the screen shots and the whole thing. The reason why i want this is because it can really show the vulnerability of the girl in my video and it also gives the character the innocence needed so that it can be ruined by what actually happens.