Initial Draft Storyboard

By Jack Jolly

Ideas for Magazine Advertisment

From researching into multiple magazine adverts for various music artists, I have found that there are multiple conventions which we should include in order to ensure that our magazine advert is as effective as it can be. I have listed these below, along with examples of innovative ways which we can include them.

1. Artist and album name in the largest font - This is the most important feature of the magazine advert, as this is the information which the reader needs to take away from it the most. Whilst all the other information is important, this is the crucial part, as the rest of the information is fairly useless without this part. In order to make it stand out on our advertisement, I believe it should be white, as the background of the advertisement is most likely to be black in order to match the dark theme of our video. In order to separate the artist name from the album name, we may try having one in bold and then one in normal script, for example:

                                    SBTRKT 

                               Trials of the Past

An image such as this one would make a
good basis for the magazine advertisement.

2. A picture of the album cover should take up the majority of the advertisement - The album cover we design as part of the production of the ancillary products will match the mood of our video, and so if this takes up the most space on our poster then it will be effective. By matching the theme of the ancillary products to the music video, those who have seen the video are more likely to notice the other items when they see them.  Ideas which I have had for the album cover include a fuzzy picture of the protagonist of our music video in order to match the haunted theme, or a more scenic shot of the dark woods which the video will be shot in.

3. A website, Facebook and Twitter should all be provided - These are all essential, as they provide most people with a first port of call in order to hear some of the music which is being advertised. In order to incorporate each of these, I think placing small Twitter and Facebook logos next to the names of them is an effective way, as if the social network plugging is too overstated within the advertisement, then they will begin to effect the colour scheme and make it seem unbalanced. 

4. The small-print should be kept minimal - I have found that the most effective adverts were the ones where the pictures and large text did most of the selling of the product, with the small print used in order to tell the reader about the release date, the formats which the single/album will be released, and perhaps less essential information such as which song will be on the B-side. An idea which I had for the small print of our magazine advert was to use it to say the release date, but to direct the reader to a website in order to gain more information about it.

By George Martin

 

Films and Music Videos for Inspiration

Due to our unanimous decision to make our music video in quite a creepy way due to the lyrics and genre of the music, biggest inspirations will come from horror films and other genres like Science Fiction, Mystery and Drama.

For example, Donnie Darko will be a main intertextual reference for our music video because our plot is similar to the beginning of the film. Our character will wake up outside in the woods and not know where he is or how he got there, much like Donnie at the beginning of Donnie Darko.

The film opening shows Donnie waking up lying on the road near the forest, much like our initial ideas for our film. We are however thinking of having our main character wake up in the actual forest rather than near it.

I like this shot of the back of the characters head, showing the location and him looking into the distance. It's artistic value is something I would like to replicate for our own music video.



Radiohead's No Surprises is another influence for our music video because the fact that it only stars one character. However this isn't very relevant to our music video because this music video is completely performance based with the whole video being lip-synced. We plan to have a narrative element to our video which creates a more detailed and in-depth music video.

Another strong influence is Cosmic Love by Florence + The Machine.

The second shot on our storyboard is a close up of our main characters eyes opening. This can also be seen in Cosmic Love.

Florence's eyes open to the beat of the music while in a close up. This idea has already been planned in our storyboard and now I have witnessed it being used and worked well I will ensure we include it.

The music video also features similar ideas that we have had in mind, for example, the use of foliage and the mystery of walking through natural settings.

This post has helped us because to gain ideas for our music video we need to have inspiration from other existing music videos. As well as this, we have seen some of our ideas from our music video being used in existing music videos, validating our ideas and encouraging us to experiment with them.

By Jack Jolly

Research into music videos by our chosen artist

Hold On: From the offset of the video there is a dark theme, with the lights shining in the night time causing large shadows to be visible throughout the video. This matches the haunting mood of the song, and is a convention of SBTRKT's videos (New Dorp, New York has a similar lighting theme) which we are going to include in our video. In addition to this, the lyrics evoke a theme of a sad, failed romance, which is similar to the message within Trials of the Past. Ideas which we will take from this video also include the use of only a couple of actors, as this creates a more personal and

 

Wildfire: There is a very artistic theme to this video, due to the unapparent narrative, the video consists of a female character under a fan which is somehow sucking everything up. The video doesn't amount to much but when the fan stops the female tries to crawl to the bathroom until the video cuts to a scene of her looking rather ill in bed. The significant shot in this video is the use of the SBTRKT logo, the tribal mask, it is seen in this video as the paint from it is being sucked up by the fan. The video is an artistic representation of the songs lyrics.

 

Both videos are quite diverse in that they could be interpreted in different ways. Referencing to Reception Theory, the videos are both ambiguous, which is the plan for our own video. I like how artistic both videos are and how they could mean something different to each individual audience member.

By Jack Jolly

Lip-sync video

 

This is our lip-sync video which we made to practice our editorial skills.

 

 

Some parts of the lip syncing are out of time and the framing is off a little but overall I'm quite pleased with how this turned out. It tested what we wanted to do perfectly and it was our first chance at shooting footage. Both practicing the filming and editing aspects helped and prepared us for when we come to shoot the real music video. I used an iMovie filter so we could see what it looks like in case it is needed in the final video.  

 

By Jack Jolly  

Lip-syncing practice

Video for 5 Years Time - Noah And The Whale.

We chose to do this video because it matches the indie genre which we are doing in our own music video.

The video isn't available for embedding so I have included a link and screenshot. The outside shots in the video are something we are thinking of replicating in our own lip-sync practice. The mise en scene and characters would be too time consuming to replicate so we are primarily focusing on the shots we could create and the shots not in the video that we will experiment with. We are going to try to add a brief narrative but our main focus is trying to get the lip syncing in time.

This is the screenshot of the outside shot which has inspired our idea for a lip-syncing practice video.

 

Lip-syncing is important to being in time with the music or the whole video falls apart. It is hard to watch a video if the lip syncing is out of time and it breaks the illusion that the star is singing the song. This practice will allow us to train our skills at getting the video in time with the music we are using.

 

By Jack Jolly

25 WORD BRIEF

Teenage boy awakes in woods and doesn't know how he got there. Explores the woods and ends up in different locations, including a deserted road.

This is a summery of our music video in 25 words to display it in it's simplest form. This gives an initial idea of what our music video will entail and gives us a baseline to follow or work from if we decide to edit our ideas.

By Jack Jolly