Point 21 AKA storyboard

Here is the storyboard created by my group and I in a collaborative effort!
Enjoy!

The first shot is when the man gets home to his girlfriend and everything is all happy and lovely, this is key as it establishes the characters, the setting and the intimate relationship these two people share, which only makes the story of him cheating on her more heart-breaking.

The second shot is when the girl reaches for the phone to see who is texting her boyfriend, this establishes that they lack mutual trust in the relationship and you start to question whether or not they are as well off as you think they are.

The third shot is when the guy strikes his girlfriend, you immediately feel empathy for her and are sided with her now, and for the rest of video, making you look at the events that occur in a different light, it also enables us to see how far he would go to keep his secret.

The fourth shot is before he sneaks off to cheat on his girlfriend and this is important as it allows us to once again feel empathy toward the girl and sheer contempt toward the guy for being….well….such a  dick. It shows us that what we first perceived as a good relationship is actually an abusive relationship without trust or love.

The last shot is fairly self explanatory, you meet the girl the guy is cheating on his girlfriend with. You feel more empathy than ever, it wraps the story up nicely, and it allows us to have an ending point.

Key conepts of our media video:

There are 4 key concepts to every music video ever conceived, in fact, 4 key concepts to any VIDEO ever conceived. These are:
Mise-en-scene
Sound
Cinematography
Editing

Well, as we are making a pop-punk video, I suppose I should go over how I would use these 4 concepts of video creation!

Mise-En-Scene

Mise-En-Scene is what you see simply put, it is the lighting, the costume, the actors, the props, the set the everything visual.
In pop-punk this normally means dousing your main-roles in dark or forboeding outfits that seem to scream to the world “Anarchy” (yes I am aware how much I use this word) as well as that they have a general outline for how they feel like their life is going. Most people who listen to pop-punk tend to listen to it for escapism and so able to see other people feeling sad and down about what makes them sad and down really does help.
The lighting changes wildly depending on what kind of song is playing, however in this case I suspect very bright and flashy lighting should be used, hard-light for example, would be able to show off the emotion in both the bands face and the lead actors once again getting across their emotions to the audience.
Prop and set wise I think it is fairly safe to say that our “band-scenes” will be played in a wide open space, maybe with a spotlight on us, perhaps an empty hall or a stage. And for the story, well, we might change the plot at a later date so I am unable to confirm anything however I feel like a “club” or other place where teenagers hang out would be a good idea.

Sound

Sound is what you hear, it is very simplistic in the sense that for this music video we do not create the music but instead the visual stimulus to it. HOWEVER! it has been known in certain music videos like “complicated” from Avril Lavinge, there are spoken words at the start and perhaps even in the middle or the end of the music video, another good example is “Jesus of Suburbia” by greenday. In this case however I feel like we’ll simply stick to the music and keep anything external out of it.

Cinematography

These are the shots you see, HOW the Mise-en-scene is shown if you will. For Pop-Punk there is a number of different codes and conventions when it comes to cinematography which once again is dependent solely on the band. However for this specific video I feel like we need close up and personal shots to, once again, highlight the emotions of the characters. The band shots should be long shots and should exhibit each member of the band individually as that is what tends to happen.

Editing

This is how a shot changes, is it fast? is it slow? is there a special wavy effect? is there lens flare?
In our case I hope to use lots of short and sharp changes for the band scene, this is due to how much we want to show and how we want our audience to know that we are yet again, full of anarchy. (I think I might bold every time I say that word from now on). However for the story scenes we will use a lot of things such as long shots that take a while to see as the story will be a fairly touching one that will hit close to home for so people. However I feel like all in all, the length of the shot is solely based off of how fast the music is going at that given point in time.

 

Music Video Platforms!

There are three institutions that I plan to produce and exhibit my group’s video. Those three institutions are Music-Television (MTV), Pure Noise records themselves, and YouTube and other social media sites.

The first one I’d like to talk about is MTV, when people think about music when they watch television their thoughts are quickly shifted to MTV for being the single largest and most well-known medium to specialise in music since the radio, true ever since then the platform has been over-taken by the online presence of bands on YouTube and Facebook etc. But the entire idea of MTV is the best music shown on television, not only would a lot of our target audience watch MTV as it is centred toward teenagers more and more. But it would also allow us to spread our video to other mediums of film, whilst placing it online won’t necessarily give it a presence on the TV, placing it on the TV almost guarantees that someone will take the video and put it online, and it will spread that way as well. However, as I mentioned it is not the most popular way of exhibiting our videos, which belongs to YouTube.

YouTube and music videos are like TV and TV shows, they depend on one another. YouTube would not be nearly as big as it is today if it wasn’t for the massive amount of views generated by music videos, and music videos would not be nearly as common-place as they are if YouTube didn’t exhibit them. They need one another to continue to function the way they do now, remove YouTube and people stop making videos as they won’t get viewed as much (this relates more to indie devs than anything), and stop making videos and YouTube loses around a third of all their content and views.  Using YouTube for hosting our video might not be a new and exciting idea, but it is almost a guarantee of getting results.

Finally we have the record label themselves, Pure Noise Records, I chose them for a simple reason. They DO host the video for the song we have currently chosen, in an alternate universe where the video is simply replaced by our one I feel like it would end in the same way, with some people liking it and some people disliking it. The producer would upload it to where they see fit, Vevo, Vimeo, YouTube, TV, heck even X-videos for all they care. It would be the best way to get coverage and easier for the band themselves as the record label would take control of all the marketing and would essentially be the reason our video is seen. Whilst it is not unheard of for bands without a record label to release videos online to gain a cult following, it is very unlikely and I feel like the safest option, as well as the most profitable would be to let Pure Noise Records handle it.

OKAY! Story plot time!

This is the plot for our music video, our synopsis if you will.
This is the original idea typed by the amazing Fraiser Bishop.
And as a bonus, if you make it through the story plot, you can see my take on the story and how I would change it because Individuality saves the day!

“Our song is all about keeping secrets from people. Our side storyline within the music video is going to be about a boyfriend keeping secrets from his girlfriend. At the start of the video there will be shots of them arguing and falling out which shows they are not the best of couples. One shot in particular that we are going to use around the middle of the video is them arguing about a text message that the boyfriend gets from another girl. His girlfriend tries to read the message but she isn’t able to read it and the boyfriend storms off in anger that she doesn’t trust him. The final shot of the video is the boyfriend sneaking out and going to see this “other girl” and they run off into the sunset holding hands and showing the audience that the boyfriend is cheating on his girlfriend. What he doesn’t know is that his girlfriend knew he snuck out and followed him. We will show this by zooming out of the boyfriend with his new found lover running away until the actual girlfriend who is standing at a distance watching them run off comes into the shot.” – Fraser Bishop

I like this idea, but I wish to change it, firstly so that there is a very clear difference between this post and my group members, also because I don’t agree with the story plot put forward, and even though we are using it I would like it to be of the one described below.

I like this idea BUT, and there is a BUT I feel like I personally would make some changes. Whilst it is very common place to have a guy cheating on a girl it is almost unheard of and very niche to find a girl cheating on a guy in this sort of song, and I feel like doing so will help widen the audience tremendously, not only would the boys like the music of it but the video wouldn’t be showing them as the bad guys as the videos tend to do. This would mean that our target audience who I know is both girls and boys (but is primarily boys) wouldn’t feel like they are the bad guy and so they might enjoy it a bit more because of that. Of course we could also use it as a form of how whilst boys might like to go on about how they have been “knee-deep with seven bitches at a time” girls are much more shy about this sort of thing, we could use this to break the stereotype that has been surrounding that for ages. This would once again make the boys like it because they don’t feel like the bad guys, but the girls would also like it as whilst it is not morally sound, it does empower them and make them seem more human other than objects that the guys use for cheap laughs as in this case it would be the guy that is being used for the cheap laughs.
Feminism aside though I really like the idea and kudos to Fraiser for coming up with it.

Audience research part I (15)

Pop-punk is a genre enjoyed by many, whether it be a specific age group and gender is up for debate, however I believe I will go into point 15 in the post!
Lets start off by saying, this is a stereotype, I enjoy pop-punk and I am personally not like this, in fact I am probably the only living opposite to what is about to be said.  That being said, if you do enjoy pop-punk please do not be offended by this or the following 2 posts.

What attracts our audience to music videos is empathy, this may sound out of place but I’m not done. Empathy for itself. Yeah, sounds a bit self-indulging doesn’t it? Songs that tackle issues such as being neglected, having a bad social life, having to deal with studies or girls (or boys) and having to just put up with anything that the person has to put up with is what draws them in. This is only in the case of lyrics however and in terms of music it enjoys the almost reckless sense of anarchy that the music sends off with the loud guitar rifts and the fast paced drums. Teenagers are very, bi-polar for lack of a better word, they are calm one second before suddenly turning into the embodiment of rage itself which is why they enjoy how pop-punk can range from screaming men talking about how they want to shoot themselves to get away from it all i.e. homecoming from Green Day, but then there are songs which are much more upper-paced and seem to have much happier connotations behind them, such as Another Song about the Weekend from A Day To Remember.

However, there are a number of things that put the people off as well, namely conformity to the rules. What I mean by this is bland, easily identifiable, grey and boring statements and songs with music videos that lack energy and fun! Pop-punk punks love nothing more than to jump around to their favourite song and to throw their arms in the air like they just don’t care, but some songs lack this sort of atmosphere, lets say something like “say Something”, great song, but not for their audience.

A Moodboard

So we all know what pop-punk is I assume, do you not? WELL NEVER FEAR! I have invented a mood board to be used to gain insight as to what it is! and for only three easy instalments of $9.99 you too can own a word document containing a bunch of clip-art found on google! oh the amazingness of this will never die out!