Revised Idea

Whilst in the final stages of planning our shoot on Sunday, we realised that our rave scene was dependent on the weather. As a factor that we can not control, and a tight deadline, we have had to re-think our idea.

Fortunately we have come up with a new idea for a rave at the end of the music video.
Instead of being outside, with having uncontrollable weather factors, issues with setting up in the light and waiting until dark to film, set up a generator for electricity, in a location that is quite hard to get to without a car; alternatively we can film in my house, in the basement room, which is a standard sized room, so can easily be filled with people, has electricity and easily controlled lighting, can be done any time and hopefully will be easy to get to for extras in our music video.

We now have two choices:

1. Abandoned Hospital. There is a near by abandoned hospital, which could be used for the outside setting, and then the basement which we film in, we make it look like the rave is in the abandoned hospital by cut away shots of the outside and a few people around it, but have the ease of being able to film in an environment we can control. Like the previous idea, the central protagonist will go from the house party he wakes up at, on a journey and ends up at this abandoned hospital.
2. Non-linear music video. Have the music video start with the morning after the house party, and as the central protagonist wakes up, he is dazed as to how he got there... Then the music video goes into how he got to that situation, which would be the street and car scenes as previously planned, and the ending will be the house party of which he woke up from. Ending on him crashing out on the bed his wakes up from at the beginning of the music video.  

Target Audience

As part of research and planning, we are conducting some research into our target audience.
Here is the set of questions we plan to ask people between 15 - 24 in order to get some feedback.

1) Do you recognise this song? {Play 19/2000 soul child remix}
2) What kind of music video would you expect to see for this song?
3) What would you classify the genre as?
4) Any songs or remixes you consider to be similar?
5) Do you tend to prefer original records or a remixed version?
    - is there any examples you can think of?
6) Which do you prefer, the original 19/2000 or soulchild remix? {Play clips of both}

We will create a vodcast of our target audience.

Re-Drafting of Street Scene

After considering filming the scene in which the male role hands out leaflets to passers-by, giving information about the rave that night, we realised that we would need even more extras, different to those in the house, but around the same age group and we were struggling to get definite numbers.
An alternative would have been to put up posters, however with the rave being an 'illegal rave' it wouldn't be very realistic.

 {Axwell - I Found You}

So instead, we have come up with the idea that when the central protagonist gets into the car, he will send a text out to a load of people; this will be shot through over the shoulder shots and close ups.
This also gives us the opportunity to film people receiving the text, creating some shot variety.

Whilst filming on Sunday, we filmed two different ideas, firstly the original idea of our central protagonist walking around the streets, but when we saw the footage it looked very jumpy because of the snorricam, so we came up with an alternative idea on the day, of having our lead role skateboarding with the snorricam, which creates smoother footage, and also does not need to be sped up in editing unlike the walking footage, as that was one  long take in which nothing exciting really happened.

EG - Treatment

Gorillaz - '19/2000' Soulchild remix

I am keen to get involved with the direction and production of the video. I felt that these where my strongest points during the production of last years film opening production, I also took a crucial role in the editing last year whereas this year Beth Cooper has expressed and interest in being in charge of the editing process of our production, as she requires the experience. She also will take the role as director of photography, with taking control of setting up shots.This should mean that we each have our key roles within the production of our music video and the work should be shared relatively equally.

Song Choice:

The original track by The Gorillaz was released in 2001 on their self titled album 'Gorillaz'. It featured alongside the more commonly recognised remix by Soulchild, which reached no.6 in the UK charts. The song has had many appearances within other media products suggesting it would be rather well known outside of a straight forward Gorillaz fan base. For example, it featured on a channel 4 television programme '100 Greatest Kids' TV Programmes', the football themed video game FIFA 2002 and the 2008 blockbuster 'Cloverfield' which is where Beth discovered the track.

Our Video:

Our video will combine influences of television programmes such as 'Misfits' and 'Skins' which are predominately aimed at teen audiences, and also aspects of both dance, performance and 'indie rock' music videos. The overall aim is to produce a music video which includes both narrative and performance scenes which is typical of an 'indie rock' video, though the twist is that the music of a dance style and will appeal to a younger audience similar to that of programmes such as 'Skins.'

Target Audience:

As previously mentioned our key target audience will be young adults aged 13 - 24, this is because they are the target audience for the genre as well as the style of video. As well as this, this is the age range which will watch music video channels such asMTV. A secondary target audience would be possibly slightly older, fans of Gorillaz work which has been popular since the early nineties which would make an older fan base aged between 25 - 35. There is also the possibility of the parents of teenagers showing interest in their music tastes which would broaden the secondary target audience further up to perhaps 45 or 50.

Genre:

This remix of an originally HipHop track creates a sub-genre which is closer towards dance, as the new beat is faster, therefore making it suitable to dance too. This is why we chose to use a 'rave' scene in which the 'ravers' will be dancing to the remixed track.

Straightforward dance videos often feature scantily clad women who almost always perform a dance routine, some often focus on the artist or DJ, the scenes are often artificially brightly lit. This has been a popular and typical style of many dance records over the past decade, here are some examples:

KiD CuDi vs. Crookers - Day'N'Nite from Lawrence on Vimeo.

Alex Gaudino - Destination Calabria from ibrahim-sahin on Vimeo.

Another style is more similar to the style Beth and I are working toward which features scenes of clubs or raves. This has become more popular recently with current chart singles such as:

Other videos by this artist follow a similar style, which would suggest it is a typical style of video for remix producers, therefore making it applicable to our video.

One - Swedish house mafia (Your name) from ldelarosa on Vimeo.

What i like about these three videos are the scenes which feature people dancing, they really adds atmosphere which suggests to the audience these tracks are enjoyable to dance too. Also they all feature a build up which is another aspect of our video which will cover the first couple of scenes as the set up the rave. The lighting in the 'Pharrell Williams - One' track features strobe lighting which is something which we are aiming to input within our own music video production.

Locations:

We have a variety of locations in our music video. The first scene will feature numerous rooms within one house, following this there are some street shots, some shots in a car and finally the 'rave' scene which we hope to film in a car-park surrounded by woodland, this means that we can use both cars and the woodland setting. By using a variety of setting we will capture our audiences attention and keep it as the variation should stop it from becoming dull.

Mise en Scene, Props, Costume:

House Scene - Here we will need many extra’s dressed in clothing which would appear to the viewer as having been worn the night before and slept in. However our central protagonist will have slept in underwear alone, as in our rough footage, he sleeps alongside another girl. This could be interpreted as sexual activity. Other props we will require are empty alcohol bottles, cans, glasses strewn across the floors, and possibly other typical party debris. We will need some items of clothing strewn around which our central protagonist can pick up and put on. We need a mobile phone, which will need the track on in order to play it out as a ring-tone. In order to achieve verisimilitude we need to create an accurate portrayal of a house party aftermath.

Street Scene – For this scene we need our central protagonist, two other characters to play his friends, one male and one female. We would like to dress them in a typical youth style, for example jeans, t-shirt, hooded jacket and pumps. We will need some extras as we need some ‘general public’ characters for the three main characters to hand flyers out to. We have decided, as these characters will feature at the rave scene we will need to actually cast these and they will also need to be within a similar age range of ourselves and our main cast. We will need some flyers on paper, which will advertise the rave.

Car Scene – For this scene we need only the three main characters, and of course, a car. As well as this we will need a generator, as this fits within the narrative plot as they go to collect one to set up their rave. At this point we may also include a strobe lighting machine which they go to collect as well. The characters will be listening to the track on the radio so we will need an iPod to plug in which will play the record.

Rave Scene – This scene will require the most extras, we hope to put glo-paint on them which will light up in the strobe lighting, other than that we have no preference on costume as it will be dark, and to keep it realistic we would expect that everyone in the crowd were individualistic in their outfits. We will need the generator, the strobe lighting, a number of cars (between 6 -7) with their headlights on to light up the car-park and we will suggest to each extra that they bring their own alcohol such as beer bottles, cans or alco-pops etc. 

Planning our shoots

In preparation for filming our music video, we needed to get a group of people, around our age, willing to come to the rave scene and be the crowd. 

The easiest way to get people to know, and to be able to update them quickly and easily is through Facebook.

By creating an event for our shoot, we have been able to select people, and see if they are willing to help out. 

I created the event last night, and so far have 21 people confirmed, which hopefully overtime might increase to get a larger crowd of people at our rave.

DigiPak

After brainstorming ideas for our own digipak, Emma and I came up with the idea of having an animated digipak, instead of using photography. This gives us the opportunity to develop our skills with I.T. and design, as well as linking with the Gorillaz theme of animation.

We thought about having the front cover with a young looking person with a huge speaker, which incorporates the 'Soulchild' remix into the digipak design.

I have drawn out two ideas and scanned them into the computer. Using an editing program to create a graphic version of the front cover, if it looks good we will use one of them, if not we will go back and re-design or instead look at a different style for our digipak.

Here is one design, in the middle of being edited.

Slightly different but same concept, this design stands out more

Since the digipak is for an album rather than single, we have taken out the soulchild remix on the front cover, however we may incorporate that on the inside of the digipak along with other references to different songs.

This is our first draft of our front cover.

Casting

We had two people who we thought might be suitable for our music video, as the both live in Burley, the location in which we are filming, and they are both willing to give time to help us film our production.


Casting Vodcast from Beth Cooper on Vimeo.