Pitch Two

Our second pitch stemmed mostly from the idea of a church and the religious aspect of our song. We thought that a church, particularly one with a large stained glass window would be ideal to shoot our band in. We still wanted to keep a partial narrative to our video, but decided that it would be better if we devised a narrative that wasn't to far different from our performance. We thought the best idea would be a confession box within the church were the band are performing, featuring only the lead singer as he 'confesses'.

We had many ideas for the beginning of our video, for example:
A close up of the stained glass window, then a pan down to the cello as the song begins to play
A tracking shot of the lead singers feet as he walks up the aisle towards the rest of the band at the beginning of the song
A long shot as the lead singer opens the door to the church in slow motion and enters

The main instruments that would be priviledged are:
The cello
The violin
The drums

There will be many close ups of the singer throughout the song, and many of our camera shots will onvolve movement as the pace of the song picks up. We could imagine a shaky camera focusing on the violin as the speed of the song picks up.

Song Themes and Ideas

The strongest idea we had for a music video was based on the idea of confession within the song. We thought that a church originally was the best place to set the music video as it a place people go to for confession and redemption. We liked the idea of having a stained glass window behind the band as they performed and as we studied the song closely we thought that shots of the lead singer sitting inside a confessions box would be ideal. We studied the lyrics in more detail and jotted down some ideas and shots we would associate with certain lines:

'Something to get off my chest'

Ideas of secrets, lies, and confession, with the singer appearing upset or guilty

'Need something that I can confess' 

Would be an ideal line to say whilst inside a confession box, once again implying that the singer has done something wrong that he is ashamed of

'I'm gonna give all my secrets away'

 Relates to confession and being open about something, a shot could involve the singer gesturing strongly to show he is open about giving away his secrets

'Come by it honestly I swear'

 The word honest ties in with the themes of confession and secrets

'My God, amazing how we got this far'

 This line shows that the lyrics could have been talking about a journey of lies and dishonesty and now it is coming to an end, the confession box could be end of the journey.

All display religious or confession imagery and make a church setting even more ideal. Lines such as 'need something that I can confess' could be performed from inside a confessions box and would a way in which the video reflects the song lyrics. These ideas have added a small narrative option to our video which we had not previously thought about before, as we had originally decided to create an entirely performance video. However our ideas have changed the more we have thought about the song and setting.

Video Ideas and Brainstorm

This is a spider diagram showing our intitial ideas. The ideas need to be developed and prioritised, but we chose to use a spider diagram because we could spread a large amount of ideas onto one page.

Lyrics - Secrets

I need another story Something to get off my chest My life gets kind of boring Need something that I can confess Till all my sleeves are stained red From all the truth that I've said Come by it honestly I swear Thought you saw me wink, no, I've been on the brink, so (CHORUS) Tell me what you want to hear Something that were like those years I'm sick of all the insincere So I'm gonna give all my secrets away This time Don't need another perfect lie Don't care if critics ever jump in line I'm Gonna give all my secrets away My God, amazing how we got this far It's like were chasing all those stars Who's driving shiny big black cars And everyday I see the news All the problems we could solve And when a situation rises Just write it into an album Singing straight to cold? I don't really like my flow, no, so (CHORUS) Got no reason Got no shame Got no family I can blame Just don't let me disappear I'ma tell you everything (CHORUS x2) All my secrets away (x2)

Pitch One

Our first pitch of ideas involved more of a narrative style of video. We had already identified the theme of the song as confession and dishonesty, and then linked this to the line 'Till all my sleeves are stained red'. We then thought that this lyric could imply that a murder has taken place and perhaps the singer is feeling to guilty and emotional. We were going to have a narrative and performance based video, but concentrating mainly on the narritive part. Our teacher then told us that a murder is probably to powerful to display in a music video, and is rarely seen. We knew that controversial videos like 'Smack My Bitch Up' did include involve these sorts of narratives, but the peaceful nature of our song compared the the song by The Prodigy did not make it a good narrative for our song. We then began to plan a more performance based video.

Audience Research

An interesting and authentic music video and promotion package can seriously affect the success of a band. This document gave me a lot of advice in its marketing chapter on page 20 about how the success of a band can rely on their music video and promotion packages, as well as specifically researching their target audience.

"Videos are an essential tool for reaching music fans through services such as YouTube and social networking sites as well as specialist TV channels".

Stronger video, shot in 2007, had a reported budget of more than US$1 million and was filmed on location in Japan over nine days".

"Digital technology can be used to develop relationships between artists and fans".

I also researched into Q magazine as this is the sort of magazine that our adverts will be appearing in.

Q is a monthly music magazine with a total circulation of around 80000. It features a wide range of music and reviews of many different bands, spanning from the rock bands to the pop artists.

The magazine has a large review section, which looks at bands, artists and live performances. The majority of the interviews are taken with popular artists, no matter what genre they happen to be in.This type of magazine makes it ideal to advertise our band in.

 I looked at an issue of Q myself and found that there were 146 pages in the magazine. This is quite a lot of pages for a magazine considering most others have less than 100.

There are 24 pages of adverts, most appearing at the back of the magazine. 16% of the magazine is advertisements, and overall, there are 15 individual adverts for albums. On some pages, more than one advert is featured on the page.

There is also a huge section at the end of the magazine devoted to reviewing albums and promoting tours and gigs. This type of magazine would be ideal for our magazine advert.

What Music Channel would it appear on?

When looking into the the target audience of our video, we had to bare in mind what channel the video would be featured on. As there are so many different genres of music, MTV have expanded so that it has individual channels for each genre of music.

Our video would fit best on MTV Rocks. From the playlists and highlights section, you can see that this channel displays simiar artists and music to what we are using in our music video.

Target Audience

The music video will be used in order to promote the band as a whole, so we felt a performance video would do best at establishing iconography and the roles of each band member. This is also a common feature of music videos in the genre so would make sense to follow the conventions.

Looking at the site UK Tribes, I began to plan who our target audience would be. Clearly it would be anyone that likes the rock/alternative genre or One Republic, but other interests such as hobbies, fashion and media consumption needed to be looked at to produce a video and ancillary tasks fitting to our target audience.

The target audience most likely to consume our video would be the Young Alts 'tribe'. Tribe icons include Green Day and Kurt Cobain, fitting to the genre we have chosen.

UK tribes states that:

'Young Alts are after something different, but beyond that, they’re not exactly decided. They’ll read about or listen to a huge variety of bands and try Skater, Emo and even Urban fashions. They also love a lot of mainstream fashion and music.

Young Alts are wide eyed to the world and can be influenced by TV, radio and mainstream media. Of course, the biggest influence is the playground and their friendship groups, and they constantly scour specialist magazines and the internet for news and clues about their favourite scenes.'
I found these points interesting as it shows that the target audience we are aiming at is extremely flexible. This allows us lots of options when it comes to filming the video concerning fashion, props and general mise-en-scène. By studying the media consumption table and the description of the tribe, I found out many useful things about the tribe and how it could be targeted. 

The target audience have an extremely high consumption of both TV and magazines, so a magazine advert for the band and an effective music video is likely to attract people from this tribe.

Young Alts also like 'a lot of mainstream fashion' so by choosing a smart/casual look for our band members in our performance video we can address the style and fashion sense of our target audience.

In relation to the magazine advert, the magazine that it would appear in and the genre of the song greatly affects the layout and presentation of the advert. As the screen grab from UK Tribes suggests, our target audience like to read many magazines such as Kerrang and NME, but also 'listen to a wide variety of bands', meaning that a magazine such as Q would be appropriate for our target audience as it includes a wide range of bands.

Copyright Permission

After choosing our song, we had to gain copyright permission to use the song. Ryan Tedder, the lead singer of One Republic, wrote and produced the song so we needed to contact him in some way. We found an e-mail address related to the band, and decided to send an e-mail asking for copyright permission.

Chosen Song

Our chosen song is 'Secrets' by One Republic. They are an American rock band, formed in 2002 consisting of:

• Ryan Tedder - lead vocals, acoustic guitar
• Zach Filkins - lead guitar
• Drew Brown - acoustic guitar, keyboard, piano
• Eddie Fisher - drums, percussion
• Brent Kutzle - bass guitar, cello

'Secrets' was released in 2009, classified as both pop rock and cello rock. It was written by Ryan Tedder, and the original music video is both narrative and performance.

'Secrets'

'Secrets' by 'One Republic' is our first choice of song to create a music video for.

Our first idea as soon as the song begins to play relies on the powerful introduction of the cello. We immediately decided that a close up of someone playing the cello would be the best introduction to the video. However, as finding someone who can play the cello may be a challenge, we had to come up with a second idea in case.

One idea that everyone liked was setting our video in a church, with the band positioned in front of the stained glass window. Ideally, we would not need much lighting of our own as the light coming through the window would give us enough.

We then believed that another interesting introduction to the video would be a slow camera movement through the aisle of the church, moving towards the band positioned at the alter. The camera would reach the lead singer as soon as the singing began, and the slow movement of the camera would reflect the cello but it wouldn't be necessary to see the cello.

Other instruments we could hear included violins, drums, and the keyboard. The vocals were the most prominent part of the song apart from the cello, so we thought that emphasis would be on these two factors the most. The violin becomes more important towards the end of the song, but we realised that some instruments were not essential to the overall video.

For the first 10 seconds of the song, we expect to have slow moving camera movements, possible with pans and zooms to reflect the slow pace of the cello. As the singing begins, we expect to cut to the lead singer with a close up and as the song picks up pace rapid cuts will be used.

We aimed to have lots of close ups of the band and they played the instruments and sang, without a narrative or storyline to the video.

Intial Ideas

We began brainstorming our ideas and came up with a number of artists and bands we could use for our music video.

After listening to various songs, we narrowed down our choices to 'Pumped Up Kicks' by Foster the People, and 'Secrets' by One Republic.

Editing in Music Videos - Tips

Tips for Production on Prezi

Conventions of Rock/Alternative Music Videos

For my music video, I am looking at the Rock/Alternative genre. The music itself can be interpreted in many ways as well as being easy to recreate in a performance video because of the instruments used to make the music.

Generally, in Rock/Alternative music videos, there are many shots of the band or artist, along with their instruments. The visuals typically illustrate the music, whereby the band are seen playing the instruments we can hear.

The range of shots used in a video include close ups of the vocalist, close ups of the instruments being played, long shots of the whole band, panning shots, whip-pans, high angle shots, and hand-held shots. There is a strong focus on instruments in this genre of music video, unlike pop videos which concentrate more the artist themselves. In some videos, there can be cuts between performance and narrative. The narrative generally plays upon a small part of the lyrics or just one line, and in many cases the links between lyrics and narrative visuals are unclear. Some visuals are intertextual references or metaphorical links to the lyrics. Camera movement can be frantic or slow, depending on the music. Slow motion and distortion effects can also be used.

Cuts and edits relate to the beats and instruments played in the music video, there are usually successions of quick shots during the song. This can change at the bridge of the song, but then editing will change with the pace of the music. It is unlikely that you will find a song with shots lasting longer than five seconds. The drums are a key instrument to drive the pace of the editing.

Many videos are filmed on a stage, rehearsal area, outdoors or in a small room. Low key lighting is used to reflect the genre of music and mood, and the scene will be based around the band and their instruments. What the artist is wearing depends on the song and whether it is a performance or narrative, with slower songs tending to depict more formally dressed characters.