Production Schedule

Production Schedule - Alice in Wonderland

Casting Requirements

This is a poster for our casting requirements

Kanye West - Bound 2

Surprisingly, Kanye West has released a controversial music video, which received mixed reviews, mostly reviews panning the video. Once again, I believe this is an effective music video as a satirizing confederate White America culture, also I believe it marks an evolution in music videos, through the video itself solely being a social commentary which bare no correlation with the lyrics of the song, but the theme of the album which Kanye has re-iterated several times over in recent interviews. The video satires music video culture and may lead to its demise - what Mr. Coppard calls the death of the music video following the death of the album. The satire is shown through choice of location and editing, of vast national landscapes depicting the great, wild, untamed and daunting elements of America, however, in terms of narrative, there is a pointlessness to the sequence as it does not correlate with the rest of the video and only serves as a pretentious and aesthetically-pleasing visuals. This is also reinforced by the brief snapshot of the logo of Confederate America, the Confederate eagle.

Audience Profile

The document below is the composition of the habits, social interests, fashion style, etc of our primary target audience:

Audience Profile by KenyaGabrielle

Audience Questionnaire

Audience Research Questionnaire

As part of market research, it was appropriate to collect some field data to analyse current trends and habits of our primary and secondary target audiences 16-17 year olds and 18-19 year olds.

We opted to use a questionnaire as part of our quantitative research. It's a cheap and quick format for collecting data. Furthermore, online questionnaires are even operate even more efficiently as we eliminate unnecessary time of travelling and physically searching for a sufficient number of participants in our sample, where time could be spent more effectively on more challenging and time-consuming tasks.

 Additionally, we get a more representative sample of teenagers, as the internet provides potential respondents from across the globe, so we can analyse what trends recur on an international scale. This provides two advantages for us:

1. We learn how to market our artist and our music video to a generalised target audience across the globe.
2. How to tailor the promotion of our media product for individual countries.

Also, it focuses on producing objective and generalised data, therefore it can be compared and contrasted with other data samples.

We wanted to quantify which media platforms, such as laptops, TV,etc dominate music video consumption for our primary target audience. This allows to delegate how much promotion should be invested on each platform.

So, it therefore informs us on platforms would be most suitable for our media product.

Please take our survey:
Click here to take survey

Results:

  Infographics

Questionnaire Analysis

Lyric Analysis

lyric analysis

How To Make A Music Video Tutorial

Tutorial:



Ensuring to sync music with the visuals in post-production, we are advised to play the music on location which makes our job easier.

To gain sufficient coverage, he filmed a member of the band performing the entire song, whilst moving around to capture different angles to make it appear he had more set-ups than he actually did. I think this is an efficient way to film, as he doesn't need to use a lot of time setting up a shot, also allows him to capture spontaneous artistic glimpses which may not have been recorded had he stuck rigidly to his storyboard set-ups and reduces the length of shooting time without jeopardising the music video in the editing process due to a lack of coverage. We will be sure to incorporate this idea into our music video.

Ryan Connolly also strategically set up light reflectors as there wasn't enough light and the shadows of the extras in the side story would have had great detrimental impact on the video. Placing light reflectors carefully will be of great importance to our video, because we are using natural light for the most part and as it is winter it is quite dark and foggy, so we need something to combat both the shadows of the actors and natural elements that may hinder our music video. We may also use string lights and set a little gazebo to both create ambience and assist us technically with the lighting in not so blatant way.


Final Video:

Mood Board

Copy of Concept Mood Board

Genre Shopping List

Vox Pops

Vox Pops 

We conducted a vox pop as a visual, first-hand account of students aged 16-18 years old (our target demographic). It also enabled us to receive more in-depth answers, detailing not only what media media products they consume or how, but also why they consume their products in a certain platform. We were able to do this by providing open questions, making it easier to finely tailor our music videos to meet the desires of the audience.

We used random sampling to generate a representative sample of our target audience with an equal number of male and female participants. We used this to try and create a true unadulterated picture of what genre of music dominates not only sales, but also attracts the biggest following.

Results:

9 Key Frames - Alternative Music Video

9 Key Frames.docx

Inspiration Post - Animation

Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know?

In this music video, the director uses animation of sound-waves and manipulates the animation to build a relationship between both the music and visuals and the lyrics and visuals. For instance, from 0:00 to 0:29, the pulsations of the sound-waves are synchronous with the rhythm and tempo of the music. 

The director chooses to conforms to the idea of Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory.  In the first screenshot below it can be seen the wheel rolling through the females spread legs has sexual connotations. The  videos uses Confederate American iconography with the wheel signifying masculinity and power, whereas the female drawn in low cut shorts symbolises promiscuity and also wildness. 

The second screenshot has clear phallic undertones, it reduces females to sexual objects of men. However, I believe the director incorporates aspects of male gaze in an ironic sense, to subvert and challenge the typical genre conventions of music videos, more specifically American music videos. This idea is re-inforced later in the visual where the images become very graphic and the disjuncture of the visuals from the lyrics. 

Inspiration Post - Alternative Genre Music Video - Biting Elbows

I was inspired by the telling of the narrative through a P-O-V camera shot; how it makes the video become very surreal and the music video plays almost like a video game. I was considering incorporating to be the primary shot type for our music video, as aforementioned, creates a very surreal and unnerving experience for the audience: they are on equal platform with the protagonist and take on the subjective perspective, which would be very effective in detailing a hallucination.


Biting Elbows - 'Bad Motherfucker' Official Music Video from Ilya Naishuller on Vimeo.

Choosing A Music Track

I was asked to select three music track to present to other members of my group as options for songs to accompany our music video. 

Choosing a Music Track.docx

We finally chose a track that wasn't on our original list because we felt there was a better suited alternative-hip hop song, whose title fits into the Alice In Wonderland theme. The song we chose if He's Coming Home by Taurean Roye. It also has a performance element that fits into the narrative.