Research and Planning

The Group: 

I am working as part of a three to do a practical production of an A2 media music video. I am in a group of three. the other two member of my group are Karin Latham and Peter Hoyles. We decided to work as a group because we were all part of a group for AS level when we had to create a short film opening. I think this helps the group as we know each other and we are all friends. Another reason why we decided to work with each other is because we all work well for AS level and we were efficient. We also know that we can rely on each other and we know that we can trust each other.

Lessons: 

In recent lessons we have been planning and researching what our music video could contain and feature.

We had to decided what music we wanted to use. We were unfortunately told that this year we were not able to use copyright free music. We knew we had to work around this although it was a bit  of a problem. 

One of our teachers at school was part of a band so we thought that it would be a good idea if we went and saw him and asked him if we would be able to use any of his music. When we first went to ask him he said he was not sure and that he would have to ask the other members in his band. He came back to us with a CD with a number of different tracks. We listened to a few of the tracks and we were not really sure about a few of them however we liked one of the slower tracks. I asked the teacher to write out the lyrics and we decided to see if we could find anything else just incase. 

As Pete and Karin had taken up music technology they had come back to me with a song that they had found whilst on a trip. They had asked the people in the year below who had written the song if it was ok for us to use their song and they had given us permission. They decided to play me the song and i thought that it was a perfect song choice. So we had now decided to pick this song.  The song was called " The City " this falls into each all of these genres: 

   

• Easy Listening/ Middle of the Road
• Slightly Indie
• Acoustic

As we had now decided what song we were going to use we now needed to carry out the research into the conventions of music videos from the same genre. We decided that we should look at male acoustic artists as we thought that they would be similar to what our song is like. This is the list of artists that we chose to focus on:

• James Blunt
• David Gray
• Jack Johnson
• Jason Mraz
• Newton Faulkner
• Jose Gonzalez
• Paulo Nutini 

After looking closely at each of their music videos for knowledge and inspiration we found that each of their videos contained the following: 

• Mixture of performance and narrative
• Performance - guitar shots
• Slow Motion
  
• Close Up, Panning, Tracking, Establishing
• Black and White
  

These are therefore 5 things that we will make sure are in our music video