Story board development and our Animatic

Risk Assessment

Representation and Theorists

Further editing practice for the Advertisement/digi pack

Exclusive Photo shoot with Eve T

Music Video Preperation

Lip Sync Practice

Test Shooting

Below is a short clip of Katy and I in our second location - the field. As soon as we found this location we decided to start taking a few recordings to get an idea of the lighting, the quality and the overall turn out of the videos. 

The beginning of a music video...

As we've now reached the point where we're now putting together our storyboard I began questioning how to actually, effectively, begin a video. It's vital that it doesn't come across false, tacky, and it must be attractive and remember-able. So to avoid this, I've had a look at some other videos.
All three that I've looked are very different from my artist and genre however I love the beginnings of them. Why? Because they're enticing. Further through the video I have also picked up on some of the effects they have included which I feel would work within our music video. It's helped me to realise what kind of beginning is remember-able and why that is, however, a lot of this is linked with the music and in all fairness- the intoduction to our song isn't very 'dramatic' so we have to choose a beginning shot that would flow with our music. However to create that dramatic effect I feel that we will be able to use a variety of quick shots at the beginning, which will be a continuous effect throughout our video due to the music being a quickened pace. Using this quick editing will encourage people to watch the video again so that they feel they have actually seen everything.




The first video is Madonna 'Vogue'. Aside from the music I really like the stillness of the beginning and the fade in of some of the shots. I also liked how they kept showing short shots/glimpses of the artist to create that 'upcoming' effect. As Eve is the only person in my video it'll be difficult to not put a lot of shots in of her at the beginning because there isn't that variety of people. However if I do a lot of quick shots of her it still creates that upcoming effect because you aren't looking at her in long period lengths. Also in the video it creates the attractiveness to the eye through this upcoming effect as it's making you want to see her. It's also in a way - using male gaze to create that seductive look which demostrates a way of marketing the video.




The second music video of Lady Gaga is one of my favourites out of her videos. I again love the upcoming effect, it's dramatic, seductive, and mysterious. The jerky editing is also something that works well with drawing in the attention and I would like to use that in my music video too - especially when the pace quickens and there's jumps in the music and singing. However I don't think it will work well as the introduction as our song has more of a musical flow to it rather than lots of beats to work with.




The final video I chose to look at fits with my music - whereas the two above are contrasting our music style. I thought I'd look at this video to get a generalisation of what works with my style of music. It includes close ups of the artist and long shots of external settings. There is also use of panning which me and Katy have chosen to develop into our music video where the tempo of the music and the speed of it changes.
In one prospect Emeli's video fits with my external locations and I could use techniques of speeding up the shots of outside to fit with the speed of our music.  This is something I may consider when filming by the sea. Furthermore it seems evident that I could use a shot of the sea as an opening. However personally I feel that it'll look to false so we think beginning the video with a close up which then leads to long shots - introducing the locations and artist. Then on top of this we hope to add effects such as jerking, lights, faded close up shots  to work with each of our shots. 

Further Artist Promotion

As Katy and I have started developing idea's of marketing, promotion and how we're going to apply that to Eve T we're learning more about the right look for Eve in the video - so we get a further understanding of artist presentation. We've come up with a list of promotion techniques that we are planning to do. One of which is a flyer. This idea has come from what we've seen at festivals, gigs etc.. People hand out a flyer with the artist on it, stating a time of when and where they are playing in order to get more people going. My idea for this is to create a flyer about a gig Eve is doing in the Leicester O2 academy. Flyer's will be handed out to people queuing when seeing an artist or band to make them buy tickets to see my artist later on in the week/month.

When creating the flyer it helped me get an idea of how advertisements work, i.e. catchy font, the catchy writing and more importantly the picture. This will help me later on when I come to create the digi pack, poster and website. One thing you must avoid is the common response of people dropping the flyers straight onto the floor. I used a close up of Eve so it's the first thing to look at. However when positioning the writing I felt that it didn't work and didn't come across appealing. At first I considered changing the font, however, I then flipped the image which brought upon a more direct eye contact effect which in turn - is more appealing. I then went on to researching what information is included on flyers and what it is that will make people want to come and see her. The first two lines beneath the 'Eve T' are the phrases that act as the 'persuasion' in the flyer. Therefore I positioned them in the order of how you would read the flyer - to produce effective advertising. 

Eve T Flyer

Below are the print outs of the flyer, that would be put around the area and also handed out.

and again below..

...our flyers spreading like wildfire. 

Applying Theorist's to our Video...

In today's music industry, you rarely see an unattractive female artist/girl band. For example, The Saturday's, Cheryl Cole, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Beyoncé etc. they are all attractive, even to women! Alot of music video's you see on music channels, on the internet, and advertisements on the TV conform perfectly to theorists which have researched into a thing called 'The Male Gaze', where women (or men) are used for visual pleasure and are objectified as something for the audience to look or 'gaze' at. Music video's are the perfect example as to how the male gaze is used in order to pull the audience in and grab their attention, Rihanna's 'Rudeboy' video is one which comes to mind instantly, as is has a sexual context and i analysed it in AS, the camera frequently focuses on specific parts of her body such as her bum, or boobs and use slow paced editing and shots which create the prospect of a male's gaze, and the parts of a woman's body that men tend to look at.


 In some cases, for example, again, music videos, there is alot of eye contact with the camera and body language which suggests the female artist is in control and is an intimidating character in their video, which i think fits perfectly with our song choice for our music video, Ellie Goulding's, 'Animal', the title indicates a sense of domination and the fact she is referring to herself as an animal. Our artist Eve T, is portrayed differently this year rather than previously in AS, she is back with a glamorous, rockier style and has a new attitude which will be made obvious in the video, the video will contain lots of close-ups and eye contact, and elements of the male gaze, as Eve is very pretty and will come across to males as very attractive, the use of direct address and the look of the camera i think will come across as very effective in the video as Eve is referring to herself as an animal, which could very much so come across as intimidating to males. Trevor Millium produced a theory which he used when analysing magazines, but i think some of the gazes can be used in the context of a video aswell, such as attention directed  towards the reader/audience and attention directed towards others. 

Inspiration for Photo shoot with Eve T

These pictures i have chosen from the well known fashion photography website, lookbook.nu. I have chosen these pictures because i think the style and the poses of the uploaders are ones i would consider looking at when doing the photo shoot with Eve on friday, i really like the contrast between pretty, girly, floaty dresses/tops with a leather jacket and the simplistic black jeans and a casual tee look. The look we're trying to go for for Eve is to show that she's grown up in herself and found her own style, and to create the impression she is comfortable in what she wears. We're trying to achieve 2 initial looks for Eve in the video, though i think 3 would be more appropriate as we're looking to shoot in 3 locations, even though this is only a photo shoot i think it would be a great oppurtunity to see what outfits Eve we can create to fit in with the locations. Most of the above pictures are taken in the street or are just outside with an interesting backdrop, i think to get the professional look we're going for. the photos we take are going to have a white background.

Facebook Page

Following the creation of the twitter page for Eve, we felt it was also necessary to create a Facebook page too - in order to promote the band. This is a common, modern, marketing technique used for all bands and artists. It builds up a fan base, it's easy to follow, and it keeps fans up to date with what's going on. Katy created the page along with our biography of our artist Eve T. We both encouraged our friends to start liking the page. We also actually managed to make a friend believe it was a real artist from just making the page... until we let them know it was for our media - obviously our promotion techniques are so far, successful! 

Pitch Feedback & Evaluation

'Like the others, I think that you're carrying on from AS is a really cool idea. Your pitch is full of information! It's good to know what you're doing in detail so we can get a good idea of what your plan is in our heads, and it looks good, suitable for your audience!'


'I like how they have got a lot of ideas for the location, so they always have a location to fall back on just in case something goes wrong. But I do think doing it by the sea will be a lot of hard work and unreliable because of British weather.'


'Nice idea to take the band from your AS work and work further on that, it was a nice pitch.'


I'm really happy with all of the above feedback, it's all positive and there is one aspect in which i'm going to comment on, as the second comment says, filming by the sea will be hard as we can't guarantee we'll get the perfect weather on the day we choose to go, but we're currently looking for other locations which feature water, as it is a location we really want to include in our video, back up plans are currently being though of. The feedback is all constructive which i'm really happy with and we've not been scrutinized on anything which is also a bonus, i'm glad our pitch included enough information for our audience to get a clear idea of what we want to do which is what we wanted to achieve as we included as much information as we could in our pitch. 

Evaluating feedback

‘We love how your carrying on your AS work and developing. We think its good how you’ve gone into so much depth especially the locations.’

‘I think developing the artist from the AS magazine coursework is a really good idea as your artist already has a style. Something that you could be more sure on is the location, for example whether you are set on an interior location or outdoors or even a mixture of both! :)’

Both comments are positive which we’re really pleased about as we included as much information that we could think of in our pitch. The second comment is something we’ve been discussing about. So far our ideas are three locations: the sea, in a field, and in a studio. The sea location, we felt, fit perfectly with the music however when showing the pitch people found it quite shocking as it’s such a hard location to get perfect. As we are a good two hours away from the seaside, we are not guaranteed that the weather and wind on the day we choose to go will be in our favour. Obviously we’re looking at weather forecasts and plan to film by the sea ASAP before the winter weather kicks in. However we’re looking into alternatives i.e. by a lake or maybe even cut out that location idea. Even so, we really will do our best to ensure that we can still use that location – however back up plans are more than necessary to come up with.

Photo shoot prop list

Analysis of CD Cover

Looking at magazines

Pitch Script

Pitch

This is the pitch for the idea's developed so far. By presenting it on Animoto, we're able to show photo's alongside with what we have scripted (post above). The pitch consists of images, music, inspirations, and all the idea's simplified into one presentation. As I already mentioned, we have also created a script so we can present, talk about, and show our idea's in order to receive the best possible feedback. 

We caught up with Eve T herself!

Look who we found in Starbucks!
One afternoon our roving reporter bumped into Miss Eve T herself, sipping on a Latte and cookie from Starbucks. Our most upcoming artist right now greeted our excited smiles and happily accepted our requests to answer some quick questions about her upcoming single! We love her!

                                 

Setting up EveTofficial!

The print screen below is of the Twitter page for my artist Eve T. Twitter is one of the most popular ways to communicate on the internet (celebrity's especially) so it’s important to create an account in order to help publicise Eve more. The display picture is of one of her releases, helping to promote that. I’ve also included a link to her Twitter in the gadget section of the blog (right hand side) updating her tweets as she does herself.
 Follow EveTofficial now ... http://twitter.com/#!/EveTofficial

Our Current Schedule List

Things are still to be added to our schedule list, this is just to keep ourselves organised at the moment and is something to work around with...