Personalities

In lesson we looked at personality features and what makes a good team leader. We looked at this short presentation to look at different features of our own personalities and used this as a guide into picking the roles for each member of our group. We looked at each other's strong points to find out which roles each of us would suit for this coursework. From looking at this presentation we all had a mix of features from each of the boxes so we had to put our features together. In the end we decided to go with Graeme as our team leader because overall he had the best leadership qualities and he has good time management skills. Me, Liam and Jacob all have responsibilities of getting ideas together and analysing the music and lyrics in the song. So far we have gathered a range of ideas that could potentially be used in our video and we are beginning to filter our ideas to get rid of ideas that we think the video could be better off without. Our ideas have changed a lot already and we are still in the early stages, this is because when we come up with ideas individually and then have a group discussion we tend to develop and change a lot of the ideas that we have come up with. 

Group Blog Update

In today's lesson we spent more time on our group blog to get our posts up to date. We put posts up showing our progress in our research and planning. We also changed the look of our blog so that when people view our blog it instantly relates to what we are doing for our course. We have added a background of the artist whose song we are using, this will eventually be changed to a picture of our own artist so that all of our coursework links in and makes everything stand out more. We are going to spend more time on our group blog because we need to get ready for filming which means that our research and planning needs to be completed. We have completed our research so far by looking at different songs that we could use and looking at the ideas and meanings behind lyrics to see what we can do to represent the lyrics in our video.

Music Video Research

Previous A2 Music Videos
In today's lesson I spent my time on YouTube looking through videos from the past couple of years for the course that I am doing. I looked at other videos to see how other people approached this task and so that I can become aware of the mistakes and problems that people came across when they did this task.

Carol Vernallis Music Video Analysis

• Carol Vernallis Theory
• Carol Vernallis' theory is based on the editing of a music video. She bases her theory on four key concepts of the editing, this is the narrative, editing, camera movement and framing and the deigesis. She suggests that a music video is a visual response to the narrative, therefore whatever is happening on screen is a representation of the lyrics chosen by the artist. Vernallis also says that the narrative may not be completed and the video does not always show this. This is because of the editing of videos where the video appears partial and fragmented. Artists will sometimes choose to leave the video unfinished which leads the audience to question the narrative of a song. Vernallis also says that music videos may disrupt or break the conventions of continuity editing. The editing may also become visible and obvious, again breaking the continuity convention by making the editing stand out. A few examples of this are jump cuts, breaks of the 30 degree rule, cutting with the lyrics, extreme changes in pace, juxtaposed frames and graphic matches. She also says that establishing shots are one of the main features of a music video and are used frequently throughout a music video. The style of framing of the video is quite distinctive of the video and the camera may also move with the lyrics. Extreme/master shots are also common. The actions in the video won't always be completed and may be disrupted and there will be many repetitions throughout the video and some frames will appear more important than others due to the way they have been shot/framed.
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This video represents this theory well because the video fragments the song and uses clips in between to represent the lyrics of the song and almost narrates the listener through the meaning and lyrics of the song. A lot of jump cuts are used through the video to constantly change what is going on so the video is explained to the audience.

Group Blog

This is a link to our group blog. This blog has been set up to show the research that my group are completing directly relating to the song that we have chosen. On the blog we will have a questionnaire aimed towards various audiences so that we can find out what different people are looking for from a music video from that particular genre of music. We will include group discussions and mind maps on the blog to show our progress leading up to the filming and editing of our video, we will also post pictures from our filming sessions to show the progress that we are making on this project. The song that we as a group have chosen is Justin Bieber's "As Long As You Love Me" acoustic.

Music Video Directors

Michel Gondry

In class today we were looking at the different styles of music videos based around which director it was from. We looked at two videos at the start of the lesson, one from Kylie and one from Chemical Brothers. Both videos were from a director named Michel Gondry. We compared the two videos and looked at the how the particular style of the director had been used to represent the meaning of the songs.



This is the video for Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World




This is the video for The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be


Chris Cunningham

We then looked at Madonna - Frozen which was directed by Chris Cunningham who has also directed the videos Come To Daddy and Windowlicker by Aphex Twin. Although the videos are quite different, there are similarities that can relate them. This comes in the form of in the Madonna video, a crow is used to represent the song and the video is quite dark and sinister. The video for the song Come To Daddy is also quite dark and sinister with an aggressive dog being used in the video. This is the sort of style of this director and although the videos look noticeably different, the ideas behind the videos are very similar.






This is the video for Madonna - Frozen






This is the video for Aphex Twin - Frozen

Semiotic Theory - Music Video

There are three stages of the semiotic theory:

Perception
The person becomes aware of a sign.

Manipulation
The person interprets the sign and decides how to respond to it.

Consummation
The person responds.

Album Covers

The semiotic theory can be represented in music through album covers and music videos. The connotation of an article is what the article would mean to a member of the audience, this makes music more personal whereas the denotation of an article is what it was intended to mean. This is the meaning that the musician has given a song. They often represent this through use of their music videos.

This is a Little Mix album cover, their target audience is young girls and I think that this album cover is appropriate for this target audience because it shows the artists on the cover and the fonts used are bold and clear so they stand out. The colours are also light and feminine which again relates well to the target audience. The way the cover has been put together makes it obvious who the target audience is. This is what semiotic theory is all about because it stands out to a target audience because of what they expect from this sort of artist.