Audience Research

Below we have created a video of some of our Audience research, in this section we asked a group of people a range of questions which related to the genre of music video we are planning on doing. We asked these questions as we wanted to get a feel of what we should have in our music video. 

From this post I have learnt that we are going to have to look at how people have reacted to the questions and cater for them as this is what they expect to see in this sort of music video. For example for the question 'What settings would you expect to see?' We had many answers saying that they would expect to see a beach or a forest and remote locations. This has always been a thought running through my mind when looking to do the music video as their are many like it. Due to the amount of people saying this we believed that It would be a good idea and will probably go ahead with it. Another example of our findings is when we ask 'What would you expect to see in a music video for a Folk/Rock genre music video?' We had a lot of the same answers in this section aswell, most people said they would expect to see guitars. When we were looking through this genre of music video we also found that the guitar has a lot of screentime in comparison to other attributes. Therefore we will also focus a lot on the use of guitar throughout the song. The final example of which I am going to talk about is when we asked the question 'Do you prefer music videos with more of the artist or the background story?' When we asked this question we had a variety of answers but the most common was to have both of them equally focused upon, this keeps people more interested as they want to see what the story ends with but also like to see the artist sing.

Permissions

Due to copyright, to do the song we wanted for our music video we had to gain permission from the artist and record company to use the song. There were many ways in which we could have tried to contact the chosen artist and we tried all of them, as to this date none of the methods of communication had worked. After conferring with our media studies teacher he said that we are allowed to use the song as long as we made recognisable effort to get the permission. After showing them all of the different types of cummunication we tried to use they accepted that we had made an acceptable amount of effort.

 Below are the different methods of communication we used to try and gain permission. The first method we used was via facebook. By liking Newton Faulkners page we were allowed to message him privately.

Another method of which we tried to use was twitter, this method wouldn't let us message him privately as he did not follow us back. Instead, we would have to tweet him. This turned out to be a bit of a pain as you are only allowed to 'tweet' up to 140 characters so we had to cut it up into separate tweets. Unfortunately we didn't get a reply.

We also tried to get in touch with his record company to allow us permissions to use his song, after trying to find an e-mail address or just an FAQ of which we could get onto there was no way of getting into contact with them. The record company of which he is signed to at the moment is Sony BMX. This label deals with a lot of famous singers and performers so they must have a way of getting into contact with them. I have spent hours of my own time trying to get into contact with the lable but can not find any way besided calling them on the site.

After all of this, me and my partner decided to choose a song of which hasn't got any copyright by a local artist called Tei Daresta who is also under the same genre as Newton Faulkner. He seems to be a very friendly and flexible young man who will be keen for us to film him whenever in need.

Conventions of a Folk/Rock music video

The conventions of a Folk/Rock genre of a music video have a lot of the same thing in a lot of the time. There is always a lot of focus on the instrument and slow paced shots of the artist throughout the video. I would say that the main convention of this type of video would be that it is usually based on a story. There is always a background story in one of these songs, I think that this is because the song is so slow that there has to be something to concentrate on during the song. Its not fast paced enough to have fast cuts in it so it has to be something that you can have long lasting shots.

There are also other conventions of this genre of music video such as the way in which people dress, in the videos of which I have watched most of them have dressed in a very casual way, this is in comparison to genres such as techno as they are usually very smartly dressed with lots of sleek looking instruments. In the Folk/Rock genre they are mainly in baggy jeans and just a casual hoodie, this gives them a sort of laid back look which goes well with the music. If you have a slow paced song with acoustic guitars in it would be weird to see someone wearing a suit.

There are also conventions to do with the instuments used in a Folk/ Rock genre music video, there is usually a guitar shown in the music video as there are a lot of pieces of these types of songs which only have the guitar being played at parts. There are also a lot of other acoustic instruments used to create a form of sound which bound together to create the same type of tune throughout a song. These woulds usually consist of instruments such as the cello, the banjo, the ukulele and a piano.

 

By looking through all of the conventions of this genre I have learnt that we should include some of these instruments when filming to make it match the conventions of the genre.

Research into Song

After deciding to do a music video we thought it would be a good idea to do some research into other music videos that had been done by A-Level students. We searched for music videos that would suit the genre of which we were interested in doing, which was more of a techno genre and found that the music videos weren't up to the standards of which we would have liked ours to be, this worried us as we thought that if these other people couldn't do the music videos to a high standard then does this mean that we couldn't either? After looking at all of the other genres and videos of A-Level products we decided to go for a Folk rock/ Pop rock type of song.

This would allow us to use different shots of guitars and the lyrics would also be easy to replicate throughout the video. Once we had looked through a lot of the music in this genre we couldnt find a lot of artisits that were making the type of songs we were looking for. We consulted our teacher about this and he came up with a solution, he took us to look at a boy in our school called Tei Daratsa, he was known to be good at performing and was good at what he does. He took us to see what he was like and If we liked his stuff and it turned out that he was good. We decided to go with him as it seemed like we would get a lot of things done with him being in the school, we could have him in the music video for a lot of the time, we would not need to worry about copyright issues and we'd be able to get in touch with him all the time.

Initial Ideas

After decididng to work in a pair with peer, Will Lane, we started thinking about what we could do. The first idea of which we thought of was to do the music video, this was our first thought as it was the most enjoyable of all of our testing tasks. To make sure that we were making the right decision we looked over the work of which we had done before the summer holidays to see how well the Music video had panned out, the results weren't as good as expected. This made us reconsider whether or not to choose this option so we carried on looking through our other tasks. The task we felt we most excelled in was the short film, we had somehow created a well put together sequence including many different effects. It was a very difficult decision to make as we didn't think that the short was a very enjoyable task, so in the end we decided that we'd have to try a lot harder and go for the music video. This decision was made because we thought that the task would not only be worth while but would also be fun to do.

After finally coming to terms about which brief to choose we started to look for the song in which we would do our music video too. We had to be careful when looking through songs as we would not be able to breach copyright laws due to the Copyrights Act in 1976. This act makes sure that we do not copy or steal any of the creators product. After fining out about this we had started to look through some non-copyright music which was just,on the whole, not very good. We then spoke to our teacher about the copyright situation in the more mainstream music of which we were looking to do our music too and he said that if you make the effort to gain the rights to use the song then you can then carry on with the song.