Digipak Research

A digipak is a style of CD and DVD packaging. They consist of a book-style paper binding, and have plastic trays capable of holding a CD.

Examples of digipak covers in recent times:

Possible Shots for the Ancillary Tasks

Whilst we were filming our scenes at Charlotte's house, I made sure to keep my camera with me at all times so that when I saw a potential photograph that could fit into our ancillary tasks (magazine advertisement and digipak) I could snap it.

These are a few of what I came up with:

Starting Filming

We filmed the overdose, rose, love and argument scenes at Charlotte's house, because it was the biggest house between us, she has a field out the back of her garden which we could have use of.

After learning how to use the camera and eqiupment...

and applying the necessary make-up...

We were ready to film.

Time Management

So that all of our group knows when they have to be available for filming, we printed out a calendar and wrote on the days that we are all free. This way can can keep on top of the work and meet deadlines.

Characters, Props and Outfits

We have now decided on our main characters for the video, Claire and Jack. Seeing as they are in the group, we all felt they would know how to portray the feelings we want the audience to see better than someone who did not have that knowledge. This also meant that we did not have to arrange our filming schedule around someone who wasn't in the group, so we have more of an opportunity to film on any day we want to.

Props

The main props that we need are roses and pills. We were able to get theseeasily from a supermarket quite cheaply.

Outfits

Claire will have 2 main outfits, one all in black, and one cream/white dress. These colours are to reflect her mood at points in the video: happy and sad.

It really did not matter so much to what the boy is wearing, as he is simply the catalyst for what is going to happen in the story, so he can just be wearing casual clothes i.e. jeans, t-shirt and jumper.

Copyright Letter Update

We have not yet received any reply from the record company about whether we have permission to use the track, which means we can continue to use it until they object.

Pause in Filming

We have been unable to do any filming this past week due to heavy snow. This meant the school was closed so we had no access to a video camera all week. We now have to really focus and get all of our filming done to the very best of our abilities before the deadline in a week's time.

Location Shots

Our whole group went out to take some location shots in a church graveyard in the village of Horton Kirby. This is the main place where we are planning to shoot our video in. We chose this place as we knew this church had a graveyard apart from the rest if the church, which meant that we would have less chance of being disturbed whilst filming. The graveyard has a metal gate onto the road, which is perfect for the ideas that we had in mind for the main character's bullies to be seen by the gates looking ashamed.

We will definitely be using this location for filming again.

Claire has put together a small slideshow to show photos of this location and what parts of it we would use whilst filming.

Deciding on Our Ancillary Tasks

We had 3 options to choose from for our 2 ancillary tasks:

- A website homepage for the band

- A cover for the music video's release as part of a digipak

- A magazine advertisement for the digipak

As a group we have unanimously decided to create the digipak and magazine advertisement, purely because we all feel confident in our abilities to use Photoshop confidently, which we will be using to design these 2 products. We felt that is we had chosen the website option, we could not have been sure that it would end up looking the best that it possibly could as we would have no previous experience of the programs used to create it.

Looking at Current Alternative Music Video's

In order make our group's music video as professional looking as possible, we need to have an idea of the rules and conventions of current music videos in that genre: alternative.

I started off by looking at the music video for Caesar: I Blame Coco feat. Robyn.

The first show that I really like in this video is the close up of Coco's eyes with make up streaming down her face. This is the type of shot I would want to use in my group's video as it is an effective way of showing the audience how the character in the video is feeling in a hard hitting way. This would work beautifully in the video that our group has planned, as it could be used to show how our main character feels about her cyber bullying.

I love the use of close ups of objects or certain things to subtly show the audience what you want them to focus on the most. we are planning to use this idea in our video to put focus onto the girl's rose in our story.

I think the iconography in this video is very good, with Coco wearing a leaf metal crown, synonymous with the Romans, tying in with the song's name: Caesar.

This iconography continues through the video with someone holding up a flaming torch to the sky, also reminding me of the old Roman times.

Our group is planning to relate our visuals to the lyrics by having the rose as a symbol of love, and as the love dies throughout the video, so does the rose (petals being picked off, being left by a grave).

The Animatic

In order to see how our ideas fitted in with our music, and to work out timings of shots, we had to create an animatic. This way we can hear the music being played with our shots and we can see if the ideas we have are appropriate for the different parts of the music.

We did this by getting Char, the only decent artist among us, to draw out on paper all of our shot ideas, so we could scan them into the computer, edit them using Photoshop to insert into our video using Final Cut Express.

We feel that this animatic is an accurate vision of what we plan our actual final music video to look like, but that could still all change from any feedback we receive from our peers or teacher...

Work So Far

This past week, whilst Jack, Claire and I have been updating our blogs with target audience research and looking at the potential music channels and platforms that could show our finished music video, Charlotte (the only artist among us!) has been drawing out the images for our animatic to be uploaded onto our blogs. This will show our ideas drawn out alongside our track, so that we can see how our video will pan out in terms of scenes, shots and timings.

Letter To The Copyrighter

To be able to use this song for our coursework we need the approval of the songs copyrighters. Claire has sent off an email to them asking for permission to use The Funeral.

Link To Letter

How The Story Will Pan Out

Story Outline

A girl has has committed suicide by overdose because she saw her boyfriend with another girl and has now been dumped by text. The new couple now rub their relationship in her face i.e. laughing at her behind her back, posting facebook status (i love blah.... so happy right now etc.). She receives abusive texts from them and other people, belittling her confidence. Eventually she will snap and decide to take her own life. The story starts with her already dead, and uses a series of flashbacks to tell her story. The end of the video will be of her family surrounding her 'grave' with the people who have made her do this are standing apart from them looking guilty. The idea of this video is to provoke a reaction from the audience and make them think about how we treat people.

Sections of the Music

Instrumental - Starts with her laying dead, flashes to happy times, then gets increasingly gloomy. We see that they are growing apart (shown by the shots off them together quickly followed by her sitting by herself) it finally boils down to her seeing him with another girl, and she explodes with anger just as the music changes and gets rockier.

Main Music - Could have her leaving objects of significance near the boy the flower on her chest at the start of the video (that he could have given her in the happier flashback?). The abuse over the internet begins, and we see her losing control, this section of music ends with a particularly nasty text. We see frequent references to death (black clothing, cuts to petals being picked off the flower?)

Breakdown in Music - This is the point where she eventually cannot take

any more and decides to kill herself.

Back to Main Music - See her laying out pills as the new couple are perhaps laughing?, she succeeds and we see the 'ghost girl' smile (to show her new freedom?), ends with a shot off her family standing around the grave with her abusers standing apart from them.

Here is the new moodboard I have created to capture the mood of our new idea:

Pitching Our Ideas

After collecting together our ideas, we pitched them to our teacher. We soon began to realize that although we had a number of good ideas for shots and themes for the video, we did not actually have a story to fit with the ideas. Mrs McLuckie suggested that we could use cyber bullying as a theme, and use it to make a thought provoking video. This way, we can still use most of our original ideas but put them into context within a story, as we came up with the idea that the cyber bullying leads to a girl's suicide, continuing with our theme of death.

Our Target Audience

Band of Horses

Whilst thinking about the band we are using for our music video, we realized they are really hard to pigeonhole into a set group. The band are described by wikipedia as an American rock band, but when listening to them they are not exactly the heavy metal sound you would associate with 'heavy metal'. After searching through uktribes.com, I have chosen 2 social groups which I think our song could fall into. The first are Young Alts:

"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. The Young Alts make for a largely safe and non-judgemental Tribe in which to experiment with all of these styles."

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Looking at the media consumption, it is encouraging that there is a high level of Internet, TV and radio consumption among Young Alts, which of course is where music and music videos are most likely to be heard and seen. The associated brands also shows me that this group is exactly who we are aiming our music video at. Band of Horses have played at many festivals in the UK and in the USA, and live music and reviews are featured in magazines such as NME and Kerrang!, as well as being shown on YouTube. As with pretty much every young person in the country, Young Alts are likely to have a social networking account and regularly use the Internet, which can be used to find out new tour dates and check out live performances bands. As they like to experiment with different styles, it is quite likely that they would stumble across this band.

Tribe icons for Young Alts are people such as Kurt Cobain, Hadouken!, Greenday, Bring The Horizon and You Me At Six. This is the typical looking Young Alt:

The second group I discovered are the Metalheads:

"An enduring tribe consisting of those into metal, heavy rock and a bit of old school punk. Damnation, Download and the Carling (Reading and Leeds) festivals are popular destinations for members of this tribe - as are most opportunities for violent slam dancing in big, sweaty arenas."

As with the Young Alts, metalheads have a heavy consumption level of radio, TV and the Internet. The metalheads are more into classic heavy metal, and are keen on mixing older style music

with the new. They are more than likely to be wearing black, or sporting a band t-shirt.

Tribe icons for Metalheads are people such as Metallica, Dita Von Teese, Lemmy, Dani Filth and Five Finger Death Punch. This a typical looking group of Metalheads:

Where would our finished music video be shown?

NME TV is a the music channel counterpart to the main NME magazine, which was launched in November 2007. The station will be used to show exclusive NME footage from gigs and events, as well as content based heavily on chart music and recent offerings from up and coming artists in the indie and alternative scenes. Paul Cheal, the publishing director, said this of the brand: "Our target audience is promiscuous in the way they consume media, so we want to be able to deliver the brand in whatever format they prefer. Ideally, an NME reader can flick through the magazine during the day, visit the site in the afternoon, come home and watch NME TV, before going to an NME club to see an NME gig." I have chosen NME TV as a potential channel that would show our video because according to uktribes description of a 'young alt', NME is one of the brands that they are associated with.

Another channel that could be used would be Scuzz, a brand associated with 'metalheads', which launched in April 2003. It is described as 'total rock', and the station encourages viewers to "rock hard, only with Scuzz." Scuzz tends to play more underground music videos, and it also shows exclusive music videos. This would be perfect for the music video that we are looking to create.

Ideas

The main theme to our video will be the death and the connotations surrounding death. I have created a mood-board of images which I think reflects the mood of the video we have in mind to make.

Ideas our group have had so far:

- Flashes to a candle/cigarette burning down until it finally goes out at the end.

- Filmed all in black and white, apart from fast flash scenes.

- Have people in the woods wearing tuxes (funeral outfits) whilst miming the words.

- Someone running and falling into a hole (grave).

- Maybe film in a graveyard/church.

- Using tarot cards to tell the story.

- We see the main character being violent towards someone who's face we never see, until the end where we find out it is them.

To get more ideas for our video, Char has printed off the lyrics and written some analytical notes about them, and the rest of our group has also added small contributions.

As you can see, we are all agreed about what we interpret from the lyrics, which makes life a lot easier for when we begin to storyboard and plan the video.

Final Song Choice

At the moment our favorite so far is Band Of Horses: The Funeral

I'm coming up only to hold you under

I'm coming up only to show you wrong
And to know you is hard and we wonder
To know you all wrong, we were

Really too late to call, so we wait for
Morning to wake you; it's all we got
To know me as hardly golden
Is to know me all wrong, they were

At every occasion I'll be ready for a funeral
At every occasion once more is called a funeral
Every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

I'm coming up only to show you down for
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
To the outside, the dead leaves, they all blow
For'e they died had trees to hang their hope

At every occasion I'll be ready for the funeral
At every occasion once more is called the funeral
At every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

When I hear this song I can instantly see the video I would make for it. It would definitely be a narrative video, not a performance. This song is called The Funeral, so immediately I think of death being the main theme. Whilst listening to it we thought that there could be a twist to our video were you think that the main character throughout the video is alive, but it turns out he has been dead all along (in a Sixth Sense kind of idea).

The Search For A Song

After deciding as a group (Me, Charlotte Bailey, Claire Martin and Jack Jarvie) the genre of music that we wanted to use, we now have got the tricky task of finding the right song for our video. We want the song to be unknown by any of us, as we think that we will then not have any preconceived ideas about the real video to the song and therefore will not try to emulate it.

We decided that the best way to find a song that none of us would know would be to type little known songs that we know on youtube and then trawl our way through the related videos. I also tried finding obscure music by looking through the line-ups for festivals, plus lists of Mercury Prize nominees. Whilst listening to the songs, we didn't watch their videos, as watching them would distract us from actually listening to the sounds and thinking about how the music makes us feel. We learnt how to do this in class by doing some listening exercises where we all wrote down how the song was making us feel and what we visualise when we hear it. It was surprising to me how similar everyone's ideas were.

After this long process we have started to create a list of possible songs we could use:

I Was A Cub Scout: Pink SquaresBlue October: Dirt RoomJimmy Eat World: My Best TheoryI Blame Coco: Self MachineBand Of Horses: Funeral

We are going to keep searching for a while to get ourselves more choice of song.

Foals: Cassius Music Video Analysis

Lyrics

Cassius is over!
Cassius away!
Cassius these daydreams, these daydreams okay!

Cassius an accident!
Cassius an accident!
Accident!
Accident!
Accident!

Cassius its over!
Cassius away!
Cassius these daydreams, these daydreams okay!

Lighthouse (Life) is an accident!
The lighthouse (Love) is an accident!
Accident!
Accident!
Accident!

Wish you've gone-a, wish you've gone away, what you've gone-a
What you've got has always gone away
Cassius! Cassius! at best, it's all that we could do,
All that we could do

The wind is in, the wind is in my heart, the wind is in-
Now what you've got has always gone away
Cassius! Cassius! at best, it's all that we could do,
All that we could do

Cassius, is over! You're second best!
Cassius, it's over! You're second best!
It's over! You're second best!
Second best!
Second best!
Second best!

Background Research

Whilst researching this video I found a quote from the lead singer of the band explaining the meaning of the song: "It's trying to deal with somebody being two-faced or, even to the extreme, someone having a split personality. The reason for why it's called Cassius - Cassius Clay who became Mohammad Ali, it's almost like there's two people in one and Cassius, the conspirator who instigated the assas

sination of Julius Caesar, who is a very literal symbol of being two faced."

Analysis

The first shot we see is of the lead singer jumping in time to the first beat. We immediately know that he is the lead singer because he is shown first, and in every other scene that he is in he is foregrounded and in focus to signify his position in the band. This shot lasts for less than a second and the editing is immediately extremely fast, with quick shots of a heart on a string, the rest of the band singing, the lead singer lying on the floor and dancing. Cassius is a very fast paced song and it is only natural that the editing corresponds with that, so the rest of the video also continues in this way, with many fast cuts.

The whole video has themes of violence and strangeness in it, with hearts dangling on strings, destroying flowers, pills dangling on strings and guns (towards the end). This theme runs strongly with the explanation of the song as of course Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali) was a very famous boxer, not the friendliness of sports!

As the chorus starts up at 0:26, the band start to play with the hearts dangling on strings. This tallies with the increased pace of the song, and could also mean that they are 'playing with someone's heart', and 'tugging on heartstrings.'

The theme of a 'violent romance' continues at 0:41 with a shot of a member of the band holding up a bunch of flowers, with a very expressionless look on his face. You would expect a bunch of flowers to signify love and happiness, but when we next see this scene at 0:43, the flowers are being hit against the floor, shattering this thought. The expressionless look on the band member's face implies that he feels numb and is in shock. To me it feels as if he has had his heart broken by someone. The sound of the flowers being destroyed is implied by the strong drum beats as they hit the floor.

At 0:53 we see the lead singer being hit in the chest by one of the hearts on strings. He does not seem angry about this and keeps a passive expression on his face, but when it swings towards him again he pushes it away. The third time this happens, he grabs the heart and stares at it for 3 seconds before pushing it away gently, which is actually a long time in comparison to the fast editing used in the rest of the video. In this time we get the impression that although he does not want to be 'punched in the heart', he is still fascinated and interested by it. We can relate these feelings to the idea that he is in love but has been betrayed and is angry, however is still is in love.

At 1:06 we see pills suspended from a member of the band's fingers for the first time. The editing here uses very fast cuts between the pills and the band member laying out the pills.

The pose that the lead singer is striking at 1:21 is synonymous with the actions of a Roman soldier (the name Cassius is Roman, and also is the name of the two-faced Roman who organized the assassination of Julius Caesar).

When the band is singing together framed like below at 1:46, they are all making direct eye contact with the camera so it feels as if they are singing to the viewer. They even go as far as to hold their hands out towards the camera and it is as if they are appealing to you through the screen. It also could be used to be as if they are talking to the person who has caused their heartache.

At 1:57 we see the heart strings are being cut, and this is meant in the literal and figurative sense, by the physical cutting down of them and also the sense of being released from heartache (as if they have cut all ties with the person who caused it). During thus section the music goes through a slower, instrumental section, which I think signifies them letting go of the pain and doing something about it (cutting the hearts).

At 2:14 the lead singer is swinging one of the hearts on its string around his head. I feel that now he has power over the heart (his heart?) after being paralyzed and struck by it earlier in the video.

I think that this close up of one of the hearts is there to show how real it actually is, and therefore showing how important it is to the whole narrative.

As the music picks up pace again at 2:21, so does the pace of the cuts. We see each band member doing something different, one is shredding the bunch of flowers, one is pushing toy aeroplanes around a table, and the other is weighing the hearts that they have cut down.In each of these scenes, the object that they are cutting up, pushing around or weighing is foregrounded and in focus, whilst the band member is backgrounded and not in focus.

The end of the video sees the band take all of the objects we have seen throughout this video (hearts, flowers etc.) to create some sort of mobile. It is as if they ave created something strangely beautiful out of something ugly.

The very end of the video is a montage of all the important scenes we have already seen from the video, it is almost a recap of what has happened. The music during this is very strange (I think it is a trumpet) and randomly played. I think that that sort of music perfectly fits with the visuals that we have got accompanying it as it is all very surreal and weird.

The mise-en-scene in this video is very simplistic; there is not a single costume change in the video, and all the action is set against a white backdrop. The clothing that the band are wearing are t-shirts, shirts and jeans (typically what I would expect artists of this genre to be wearing). This simplicity is important because the focus of the video is not about all about the spectacle but about the deeper meanings that run underneath it. The video has not got an obvious storyline running through it, and it is open to interpretation.

The music makes use of the tempo and drives the editing; as the pace of the music quickens so does the pace of the editing. As we do not see any instruments being played in the video, any dramatic change in the music or any prominent instrument sound is emphasized through something dramatic happening in the video i.e. when the hearts are cut down, there is a loud guitar chord being played.

I think that the whole idea of the video was to show heartache, getting through the heartache and coming out the other side. I also think that the five band members could actually make up this one personality, to fit with the concept of having a multiple personality (Cassius).