Sunday 23 November 2008

Pitching your concept

13A and 13C - you will be pitching your concept to the group and the new teacher NEXT WEEK (10th - 11th December). Your pitch should be 3-4 minutes long and contain at some stage the following:

1. play extract of the track to the group - what is your BRIEF
2. initial response (images from moodboard?)
3. What did you learn from your product analysis?
4. What did you learn from your technical analyis?
5. How did your audience research inform your concept development?
6. What is your proposed idea? Style, type,
7. Ideas on costume, location, types of shot
8. What will be your biggest challenge? How will you overcome it?
9. How will this video promote the band?

The purpose of the pitch is for you to CONVINCINGLY explain your proposed idea. Would we, as record company executives think this is a suitable idea for your genre/group? Would we give you the GREEN LIGHT?

I suggest that you use PowerPoint - but not as a script - just to show us relevant images.

Development of concept

At this stage, your product, technical and audience research should be informing the development of your concept. You now need to make steps to develop this further. You should think about going on a location reccie - visiting potential locations, taking photographs and thinking about camera angles, framing, lines of action...

If you are going to have other people performing in your video, you will also need to take photos of them "in costume", whether as band members or part of your narrative.

You may also want to test out some effects or shot ideas in advance of storyboarding.

Also - keep documenting any other images/videos which are inspiring you.

Post, post and post again!

Institutional research

Using the reading material supplied, you should post an entry to show you understand how a music video is commissioned and shot.

A second post should reflect on how a video is consumed by audiences - taking in NMTs as well as niche channels. You may refer to our studies of EMAP for this post

This should be one post per group on each of these topics.

Technical analysis THIS WEEK

All three groups need to work on the technical 'shot' analysis of a music video this week. This is time consuming, but almost THE most relevant piece of product research that you do - it really does show you technically how a video is edited together and what you should be planning in your final storyboard. Tips are as follows:

1. Choose a video in the "style" (not necessarily genre) of the video that you are planning to deconstruct - in other words a narrative, or performance, or conceptual based video

2. Make the shot list on paper while watching the video online so that you can pause and make notes efficiently. This will be time consuming but better than trying to flick between packages online. DON'T post the shot list on the blog - it will take up too much space. Instead it can be submitted to us/for moderation as a paper appendix

3. Make notes on shot size, movement, elements of mise-en-scene, transition and if interesting - length of shot. E.g. CU tracking in to MCU on lead singers face grimacing fades to
MS couple on swings laughing 3 secs cuts to
...

4. Once you have completed the shot list - review and evaluate on the blog. What have you learnt from this exercise? How long are the shots? How are they cut? What shot size is predominantly used? How does the camera move? Are there any long static shots? Relationship with lyrics/music? How is the narrative constructed? Are any types of performance shots repeated? What will you now use from this when planning your own work?

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Mrs F groups: feedback

Well done - the first check shows that there are some creative and enthusiastic responses to the brief developing.

However, there are still some gaps on the blogs as well as a need for spellchecking, punctuation and a general tidy up. Remember, this is simply an electronic format for submitting planning to be marked and moderated (by external examiner) and therefore should be written to an A2 standard. Make it as easy as possible for us to find our way around your posts.

This week - your target is to tidy up and complete audience research.

Next week - technical shot analysis of a video.

Sunday 16 November 2008

Mrs Fernandez' groups - where are ...

your finished moodboards and textual analysis #2?

Have you clearly stated what your chosen track is?

This is due TOMORROW and alarmingly there are only a couple of groups that have made a start. You will lose planning marks if this deadline is not met.

Thursday 6 November 2008

Inspirational 'auteur' videos

In addition to the auteur research booklet we have given you, you might like to have a look at http://www.bugvideos.co.uk/. This event celebrates cutting edge music videos and on the home page you can view their featured videos (see programme links at the bottom). There are some very interesting examples here...

Choosing a track

You should now be choosing your track. This is a vital decision and for 13A and 13C you need to come with your final selection / chosen track on Monday 10th. It doesn't necessarily need to be from a genre that you are all "in to", but one that will fit with an accessible concept.

It shouldn't have a video already... we will check youtube.com